LAKES AND LEGENDS 



this the Dead Sea and Jordan valley continue the same type of 

 geographical structure, till it ends on the plains of northern 

 Syria. 



From the Lebanons, therefore, almost to the Cape there 

 runs a valley, unique both on account of the persistence with 

 which it maintains its trough-like form, throughout the whole 

 of its course of 4000 miles, and also on account of the fact 

 that scattered along its floor is a series of over thirty lakes, of 

 which only one has an outlet to the sea. 



This valley and its lake-chain are so different from any- 

 thing else on the surface of the earth, that it is natural to ask 

 whether different portions of it have been formed independently, 

 or whether it was all formed at the same time and by the same 

 process. The final answer to this question must be given by 

 geology, but history affords us some useful hints. All along 

 the line the natives have traditions of great changes in the 

 structure of the country. The Arabs tell us that the Red Sea 

 is simply water that did not dry up after Noah's deluge. The 

 Somali say that when their ancestors crossed from Arabia to 

 Africa there was a land connection between the two, across the 

 straits of Bab el Mandeb. The natives of Ujiji, at the southern 

 end of the line, have a folklore that goes back to the time 

 when Lake Tanganyika was formed by the flooding of a 

 fertile plain, rich in cattle and plantations. And at the 

 northern end of the valley we have the accounts of the 

 destruction of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. 



There is geological evidence to show that great earth- 

 movements have happened along this Rift Valley, as it may be 

 termed, at a recent date, which makes it distinctly probable 

 that these traditions are recollections of the geographical 

 changes. 



The structure of the Rift Valley has, therefore, very varied 

 interests — geological and geographical, on account of its con- 

 nection with the history of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, 

 and ethnographical, on account of its explanation of some of 

 the best-known stories in our folklore. But it comes in con- 

 tact with the problems of science on yet another side. Fig. 

 2 illustrates the structure of part of the surface of the moon, 

 showing, in addition to the well-known " ring-systems " (usually 

 called volcanoes), a series of long narrow clefts known as 



