

Lieut. Lynch 's Expedition to the Jordan and Dead Sea. 323 



proached the Dead Sea, the river was forty yards wide and twelve 

 feet deep, the bottom blue mud. A little further on, it was fifty- 

 yards wide and eleven feet deep, with muddy bottom, and low 

 sedgy banks. The high mountains of the Dead Sea were in 



W. A heron, a bulbul, a snipe, and many 

 wild ducks were seen. The river now became seventy to eighty 

 yards wide ; and the water was still sweet : it was seven feet 

 deep with a current of three knots. The Dead Sea was in 

 view to the southward, with mountains beyond. A snipe, a 



heron, and a white gull were the only visible inhabitants of the 

 region. 



The mouth of the river is 180 yards wide and three feet deep ; 

 as they entered the sea a gale of wind compelled them to stand for 

 the north shore, which they reached incrusted over with a greasy 

 salt, and their eyes, lips, and nostrils smarting excessively* The 

 sea subsided as quickly as it rose — its heavy waves in twenty min- 

 utes were stilled, and they went on^ gliding over a placid sheet of 

 water hardly disturbed by a ripple. A rain cloud which had en- 

 veloped the sterile Arabian mountains, now opened and disclosed 

 their rugged outlines gilded by the setting sun ; but above the still 

 more sterile mountains of Moab, all was gloomy and obscure. 

 The northern shore is an extensive mud flat with a sandy plain 

 beyond, and is the very type of desolation. The line of high 

 water was designated by trees, having their branches blackened or 

 whitened by salt. The northwestern shore is a bed of gravel 

 sloping from the mountains to the sea; the eastern is a rugged 

 line of mountains bare of all vegetation. 



The land party and the navigators were mutually embarrassed 

 in their efforts to find each other. They pitched their camp "in 

 acanebrake near a brackish spring, and wet, weary and hungry, 

 reposed upon a bed of dust beside a fetid marsh — the dark moun- 

 tains being behind and the sea like a huge caldron before, its 

 surface covered with a lead colored mist." This solitude was 

 relieved by the sound of the convent bell of Mar Saba, on the 

 western side, informing them that Christian sympathies were near. 



The shore party after leaving the Jordan, passed a sandy tract 

 of damp ravines and slippery to the feet of the camels, succeeded 

 Jjy a plain incrusted with salt. The upper terrace of the Jor- 

 dan, on which the party travelled, was generally about 5(10 feet 

 above the plain, and the latter was mostly covered with trees 

 and grass. 



°ne of their encampments was under a cliff of crumbling lime- 

 stone and conglomerate 1U00 feet high, and near it was a spring 

 °f clear water at 84° ; it was soft but brackish, and smelt of 

 sulphur. Pebbles of bituminous limestone were very abundant. 

 The vegetation being saline and acrid, the camels could not be 



sustained, and they and the Arabs who had attended the party 



