THE DEAD SEA. 09 



occurs nothing to arrest the gaze ; and when once the spring has 

 past, the cultured fields become blended with those which the 

 plough has suffered to lie fallow, the clay-built villages with the earth 

 of which their walls are constructed. In these confused landscapes 

 even a considerable town scarcely traces its blurred outline among 

 the accumulated ruins in whose centre it persists in living, and whose 

 extent attests its decadence. It is a marvel if, on arriving at the 

 limit of these monotonous plains, the traveller distinguishes them 

 from the deserts to whose threshold they have generally conducted 

 him. He only recognizes the latter by the dazzling gleam of their 

 saline efflorescence, which stretches far out of sight, and where at 

 intervals abruptly projects some mass of ebon-black rock, transformed 

 by the solar refraction, and assuming in quick succession the most 

 fantastic aspects." 



I have spoken of the inland seas and salt lakes which testify 

 to the primitive submersion of the whole region of the Great 

 Deserts. Let us pursue our route towards the west, and we 

 shall encounter the most remarkable of these vestiges of a remote 

 past. 



First, I shall speak of the Dead Sea, the Lake Asphaltes, which 

 Dean Stanley justly designates " one of the most remarkable spots 

 in the world," and which, as the reader knows, is situated in the 

 south of Palestine, at a short distance from Jerusalem. It is true 

 that " a great mass of legend and exaggeration, partly the effect, 

 partly the cause, of the old belief that the cities of Sodom and 

 Gomorrah were buried under the Dead Sea, has been gradually 

 removed in recent years. The glittering surface of the lake, with 

 the thin mist of its own evaporations floating over its surface, will 

 now no more be taken for a gloomy sea, sending forth sulphurous 

 exhalations. The birds which pass over it without injury have long 

 ago destroyed the belief that no living creature could survive the 

 baneful atmosphere which hung upon its waters." But still, for the 

 scientific no less than for the historical student, it possesses an absorb- 

 ing interest. It is the most depressed sheet of water in the world, 



