The Dead Sea | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 2, 1866

The Dead Sea.

THE facts ascertained by Capt. Wilson's Palestine surveying party in regard to the tremendous depression of the Dead Sea, are the topic of a remarkable article in the London Daily Telegraph.

All sorts of statements have been made from time to time about the true rule level of these dreary waters. Some geographers pronounced them to be above the Mediterranean, some on the same altitude, some 710 feet lower, some as many higher; though the best authorities agree in considering the basin of the Asphaltic Lake to be the lowest known depression of the earth, and set it down as about 1,312 feet beneath the surface of the larger sea. Capt. Wilson's party has performed the leveling between the two seas with different instruments, by independent observers, and with such nicety that the result can be relied on to within three or four inches. Meanwhile, bench marks have been cut upon rocks and buildings along the line followed; and traverse surveys have been made, so that the work done may become the basis of more extended geodesical examinations of the interesting country toward which Christendom is turning with new and serious interest. The issue of these careful observations is to show that the Dead Sea, lay on the 12th of March, 1865, 1,292 feet below the Mediterranean level; which singularly confirms the calculation by barometer of the Duc de Luynes and Lieut. Vignes, who set it at 1,286 feet on the 7th of June, 1864. At the season of the winter freshets, the waters of the strange, secluded lake stands two or three feet higher, and in the fiercest heats of summer they are again lowered six feet by evaporation. Thus the greatest depression of the Dead Sea is now fixed at 1,298 feet; and as we know that Lieut. Lynch found a depth of 1,308 feet opposite the Wady Zerka Mais, we are now sure that the bottom lies some 2,600 feet below the coast of Jaffa. This is a depression of surface beyond comparison with anything of the kind; and, undoubtedly, it is due to some tremendous natural convulsion, the memory of which is preserved in the legend of the buried cities, and in the dreadful and accursed aspect of the sea itself.

The "Dead" Sea, indeed, it is! though from the walls of Jerusalem, or the green summit of Olives,

travelers will say that it looks fair and living enough. Lying under the red hills of Moab, the summit outline of which Chateaubriand well described as "a straight line traced by a trembling hand," this vast mass of poisonous and useless water seems to redeem the landscape. Just perceived between the Hill of Evil Counsel and the fig-trees and cottages of Bethany, it shines in a long, white gleaming patch beyond the hills above Jericho; so that man, or beast, or bird, traversing the stony desert between, would think there must be rest and coolness by its shores, and the blessing of sweet waters. Every now and then, on the long sun-scorched road that "goeth down from Jerusalem to Jericho," you get a peep of the same calm and brilliant surface; and you understand how the scape-goat which our great painter depicted, would hurry along the dry torrent-beds, and over the yellow, naked hills to get to the edge of the tempting tide. Bare as the great red hills are beyond, sun-baked as the plain is over which you look when the Mountain of Temptation is reached, and Jericho lies under you, it needs an effort to believe that that vast sheet of rippling water stretching out of sight toward El-Arabah, and fed by the Jordan—which comes into it hidden in thickets of oleanders and canes—it needs a positive effort of knowledge to remember that every drop of the great lake is filth and nausea. It looks so blue, so cool and alluring, in spite—or rather in consequence—of the pitiless desert of salt-marsh, sand, and dry limestone crags framing it; it seems so like the natural reservoir of the sweet Jordan, which fills the skins and water-jars of all Palestine, that the mind at first refuses to believe any evil of it; yet we have all learned, that, throughout recorded time, men, and beasts, and birds, may perish, and have perished, of thirst, in sight of that inland lake; and that even the camels, parched with a three-day's journey in "the Ghor," know better than to turn their heads toward those accursed waves. One thing prepares you for the shores of the Sea of Death; the Jordan comes into it in a long, light line, which, for nearly two miles, refuses to mix with the poisonous water; and if the traveler is led by the Arab guide past the Ain-est Sultan and the Jordan's mouth to the lake, he will see in the last eddies of the river, the oaks and locust-trees that it has brought down, whirling round and round, and round again, as if they, too, shuddered at the fate of being soaked in the bitter tide, and cast on its silent shore, whitened and crusted with salt.

No shore so silent in the world as that, because life has no place there! A vulture, fat with rotting camel-flesh, may rise, perhaps, as the wayfarer approaches the brink. The foul bird can drink at Tiberias—a hundred miles off—when his beastly banquet is digested and his wings are plumed. Or there may be an Arab afoot from Engaddi or El-Riha, or perhaps a jackal or two, new to the country, or else sniffing sick camels in the marsh. But for these, the land would be dead as well as the sea—birds haunt it; nothing grows near it; the mountains, and then the salt marsh, and then the sand, and then the black pebbles, and then the blue poisonous water, fringed all along with white and brittle skeleton tree-trunks, brought down from green Galilee, and bleached in the sun after a Dead Sea hurricane has tossed them up steeped in the filthy brine—such is the scene! such the elements of which it is composed. It is de rigueur to bathe in the Bahr el Lut, and the traveler strips with delight at the idea of getting out of the fierce heat into the waves that sleep at his horse's feet—for the Dead Sea is generally still as death. And the first sensation of the cold buoyant wave is pleasant. The adventurer is held up breast-high, if he knows how to swim well, and his hands cleave a medium which is palpably denser than the saltest ocean in which he ever dived. But let him try experiments with the buoyancy of the lake, and take just one gulp of the nauseous compound! Colocynth, lamp-oil, and Epsom-salts combined, might give a poor idea of the flavor of the first and last sup of the Dead Sea. The odds are, that he will turn shoreward and swim as if for his life—horrified as he looks along the level of the ripples toward Edom and Egypt, at the awful mass of lying venomous liquid which simmers in that vast hollow, and calls itself "water," by its bright ripple and its cool touch. He will almost believe the lean and hungry Arabs who tell him that "Allah sends the damned to drink there when he is compassionate to them."

And afterward, at a distance from the lake, coming into the thickets of "Asclepias"—the Sodom apple—where, on the greenest imaginable branches, hang the most beautiful golden globes of fruit that can be seen, the branches being deadly poison to the goats, and the fruit full of vile pith and acrid seeds, he will think they are right when the native wanderers say, "The curse of Lot's Lake curses all." They do not hold, these lean, hungry, silent Arabs, that anybody can ever understand the curse; they point to spots in the sea, where, at low water, they assert columns of old cities may be discerned, and pavements, and the monuments of vanished life; they laugh at volcanic theories, and professors, and Royal Engineers; they only cry, as they hurry for a drink to Jordan, that "Allah is great!" And truly a spot so strange and awful may make the wisest repeat, "Allah is great."