Читать книгу The Dead Sea and the Jordan River - Barbara Kreiger - Страница 11

The drive down to the Dead Sea from Jerusalem is a plunge of more than 4,000 feet in the space of twenty miles, and the sensation it creates is that of landing in an airplane, ears stopped and voices muffled. If one can reach the bottom of the valley before the sun shows itself over the eastern Moab Mountains, one will catch the pink wash that is thrown briefly on the western side. One drives south along the shore, with the lake stretching out on the left and separated from the road by bare, rocky beach, a few scrappy bushes scattered among the stones. Immediately to the right is the line of cliffs whose contours the road will follow most of the length of the sea.

The Moab Mountains, just a few miles across the lake, are veiled by a dusty haze, and the entire southern portion of the sea is barely distinguishable from the sky. The shore is outlined by a line of froth created by little waves stirring the edge of the water. The two-lane asphalt road winds as the coast does, a black ribbon imitating the thread of white foam.

It is still early, this late winter day, yet the sun is high enough for the morning to feel full. As the road swings up, the shape of the shoreline becomes apparent, and one can also see whitecaps on the now active sea. Breezes pick up at either end of the day, with the heating or cooling of the air, and the waves may increase, then die down, only to resume in the evening. The lake seems to breathe with a life of its own, and one comes to feel its rhythms, often agitated in the morning, placid in mid-afternoon.

The haze begins to lift, but even on clear days it may hang for some hours over the sea. From lake level, one notices that it is not resting on the water but is suspended over it. Beneath it the lake is cobalt, perhaps gray, later turquoise with patches of green and purple. From earliest times, observers have remarked on the ever-changing colors of the Dead Sea. Nineteen centuries ago, the Jewish historian Josephus digressed from his account of the Jewish war against the Romans to describe the lake, saying that “thrice daily it alters its appearance and reflects the sun’s rays with varying tints.”

As the sun climbs, the blue of the water intensifies, and the surface of the lake is flecked with points of light, as though tiny crystals had been strewn and remain afloat to catch the light. It is hardly any wonder that over the centuries for every traveler who disparaged the sea, there were others who found its beauty unsurpassed. What one found “dreary and dismal,” another described as “a shining lake, whose immense and silvery surface reflects the rays of light like a mirror.” The Dead Sea, rich in historical and legendary associations, had power to impress beyond that of even more spectacular natural phenomena. Almost without exception, travelers projected their moods onto the sea, often investing it with the specters conjured up by their imaginations.

The shores of the Dead Sea are regions of contrasts. One has simultaneous impressions of disparate qualities, and at times it is difficult to draw those perceptions into line to define time and place. Coming down to the valley from the west, one is aware of extraordinary depth and fantastic height. The lakeshore itself is arid and infertile, but it is interrupted by spring-fed expanses of reeds and rushes. There is one place where pools of spring water rest next to the lake, separated only by a yard-wide stretch of beach. Where the shore is barren, the fields of a kibbutz enrich the monotone. The green expanse lies with the royal blue of the sea, with multi-toned brown cliffs behind and purplish mountains across. A visitor may squint from the sheer intensity of this multiple juxtaposition of colors.

Then there are the wadis: the dry river beds that have carved their way down to the lake with winter floods, inviting a wealth of plant and animal life. And water, the fresh, cool waterfalls of some of the gorges, splashing into clear pools not half a mile from the sea. This shore, lifeless and gloomy one has heard, is vitalized by overwhelming beauty and irrepressible life. The saltiest water in the world, and some of the sweetest; naked beach and rich canyons; plants, animals, and birds winging their way between steep walls; colors running the length of the spectrum. Opposites mingling, as they always have here, in a lasting symbiosis.

By late afternoon there is not a ripple on the sea, and soon the entire western side is in shadows. The sun is so bright that the glare turns the lake and eastern mountains into a pastel rendition of the midday landscape. The whole scene is muted, suffused in light, the brilliance of a few hours ago attenuated as the sun sinks. But once it has settled behind the mountains, the day clears again, as though having shaken off a late afternoon lethargy. The Moab Mountains are rose in the setting sun, their shade spilled into the sea in pools of pink and purple light that seem to float on the slate blue water. The hiker who has spent some time here knows that this unexpected visual delight is just one more surprise of beauty from the valley’s store.

In the days of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, given roughly as the thirteenth century BCE, the western side of the Dead Sea was in the province of Canaan. At around the same time the eastern side became settled by the kingdoms of Moab and Edom. When the Israelites entered Canaan, the tribe of Reuben and the Moabites both occupied the lake’s east bank, while the west belonged first to the tribe and then to the kingdom of Judah. Such was the status of the Dead Sea environs for the next several centuries. In the sixth century BCE, the Jews were exiled to Babylonia, and around that time the eastern shore was conquered by the Nabateans, a people from southern Arabia. The western side was divided between Judah and, to the south, Idumea, settled by the Edomites when they were pushed from the east to the west side of the valley.

Given the long history that has been enacted on its shores by many nations, it is not surprising that the Dead Sea has had various names. Its oldest is Yam Ha-Melah, the Salt Sea, that name first appearing in the Bible in the books of Genesis, Numbers, Deuteronomy, and Joshua, where it usually serves as a geographical landmark. To the Greeks it was Lake Asphaltites because of the lumps of asphalt that were periodically thrown up from its depths, and that name persisted in the texts of medieval writers. Christians of the Middle Ages also knew it as the Devil’s Sea, and their Arab contemporaries referred occasionally to the Stinking Lake, presumably because of the smell of sulphur emitted from several places along the shore. But the names that appear most frequently in Arab texts are commemorative of the cataclysm that engulfed Sodom and Gomorrah. They called it simply The Overwhelmed, “from the cities of Lot that were overwhelmed in its depths,” or the Sea of Zughar (i.e., Zoar), after the town that had escaped destruction and flourished in the Middle Ages. Likewise the Jews, who sometimes referred to it as the East Sea, to distinguish it from the Mediterranean, or the Sea of the Aravah, referring to the valley in which it lies, but more often called it the Sea of Sodom. Except for the little used Arab name Al Buhairah al Miyyatah, the Dead Lake, the notion of lifelessness is not reflected in Arab and Jewish names, though Mare Mortuum, the Dead Sea, had appeared in early Roman texts. (In Tacitus’ History we also find it called the Jewish Sea.) Today the Arabs call it Bahr el-Lut, the Sea of Lot. To Jews it is still Yam Ha-Melah.

As early as Hellenistic times, and through the days of the Roman Empire, geographers and historians wrote about the peculiar nature of the Dead Sea. In the Middle Ages, however, religious attitudes overtook scientific curiosity, and the medieval attraction to the fantastic found a natural subject in the strange lake. Christian pilgrims sometimes stopped at the Dead Sea, either en route from Mt. Sinai to Jerusalem or as an excursion from the holy city. But many were also discouraged from undertaking the dangerous trip, warned off by tales of deadly beasts and poisonous reptiles lurking about on the shore and in the water. “In this country the serpent tyrus is found,” wrote a fourteenth-century German pilgrim. “When it is angry it puts out its tongue like a flame of fire, and one would think that it was fire indeed, save that it does not burn the creature. . . . Were it not blind, I believe that no man could escape from it, for I have heard . . . that if they bit a man’s horse, they would kill the rider.”

The Dead Sea itself had a reputation that was dreadful and frightening, its vapors thought to be fetid and noxious. “In storms it casts up many beauteous pebbles,” this pilgrim went on, “but if anyone picks them up his hand will stink for three days so foully that he will not be able to bear himself.” Those who did descend approached timidly, not taking lightly this sea that had opened to swallow the evil cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as brimstone and fire raged out of an angry heaven. As one pilgrim explained, “It is plain that here is a mouth of hell, according to us Christians, because we believe that hell is in the midst of the earth, and that the Holy City standeth on the mountains above it.”

For centuries the Dead Sea had inspired this kind of curiosity, awe, and even contempt. As they journeyed to the remote valley, travelers had absorbed the myths of the region, and if they did not add their own to the accumulation, others more sedentary did. The collection of fantastic tales was reinforced by the quite real dangers of the region, and by modern times the lake had become shrouded in superstition. In an attempt to break the intellectual quarantine which had been imposed, one of the first Dead Sea explorers, traveling in 1810, refuted, first of all, the notion “that iron swims upon it, and light bodies sink to the bottom—that birds, in their passage over it, fall dead into the sea.” And several decades later, a Frenchman approached the Dead Sea and demanded with temerity, “Where then are those poisonous vapours, which carry death to all who venture to approach them? Where? In the writings of the poets who have emphatically described what they have never seen. We are not yet five minutes treading the shores of the Dead Sea, and already, all that has been said of it appears as mere creations of fancy. Let us proceed fearlessly forward, for if anything is to be dreaded here, certainly it is not the pestilential influence of the finest and most imposing lake in the world.” A Dutch contemporary concurred: “In vain my eye sought for the terrific representations which some writers . . . have given of the Dead Sea. I expected a scene of unequalled horror, instead of which I found a lake, calm and glassy, blue and transparent, with an unclouded heaven, with a smooth beach, and surrounded by mountains whose blue tints were of rare beauty.”

Some of the many explorers who journeyed to the Dead Sea in the nineteenth century were adventurers, others were driven by religious fervor. But the largest number were scientists and geographers, and their combined efforts over the course of the century yielded important finds in the fields of Biblical geography and the natural sciences. The Dead Sea, they would come to discover, is hundreds of feet below sea level and is part of the great Syrian-African Rift. They would discover that it is nearly one third solid; that its salt-encrusted shores had been cultivated by centuries of Jews, Romans, and Byzantines. They did not know that in the caves of Qumran, on the northwest side of the lake, manuscripts were stored that twenty centuries later would be found and become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But they did identify Masada, thirty miles south, where the Jewish zealots made their last stand against the Romans in 73 CE. The puzzle would be slowly pieced together, and the image that emerged was rich in detail.

A great deal of attention has been paid to the exploration of the Nile River, where European efforts were more glamorously concentrated in the nineteenth century. The Nile was wrapped in the mystery of a region that had never been seen by westerners, and the race to locate its source was intense and at times bitter. This was not the case with the Dead Sea. There was no compulsion to be the first. No Burton-like expeditions were ever mounted to discover where its strange water came from; it had one major and well-known source, and no issue, thus containing its own mystery in a basin just forty-seven miles long and eleven wide.

Why did so many travelers—dozens in each decade of the nineteenth century—make their way down to what according to some accounts was not just a mouth of Hell, but a fair approximation of the place itself? Why are the pages of the geographic journals filled with reports and articles ranging from the most carefully analytical to the vastly speculative, all concerning this one small lake? What was the attraction? There are probably almost as many answers to these questions as there were explorers. Certainly the Dead Sea’s uniqueness and strangeness had a lot to do with it. Many travelers, especially early on, were prompted to verify for themselves the strange phenomena about which they had heard. No doubt also the Dead Sea’s connection to the Biblical Cities of the Plain served to attract. More than a few, and they not eccentrics, searched assiduously for the ruins of the ancient towns, and an occasional claim was made that Sodom or Gomorrah had been discovered.

That impulse to bring to light evidence of the Bible’s authenticity suggests another reason. One of the most striking shared traits of those who explored the Dead Sea region was their familiarity with the Bible. Having read it all their lives, they felt they knew the territory, were somehow at home there. The routes these modern explorers took had been walked by their spiritual ancestors; the places they visited had been named by them; the events they recalled as they trudged up and down the cliffsides were some of those that defined western civilization. How available it all must have seemed. And yet it wasn’t. The events and figures that made the Dead Sea and its environs familiar were two thousand years past, and the familiar had receded into shadow. Exploring in the Dead Sea valley was like cutting one’s way through thick underbrush to get to a path marked on the map. No one, not even the most coolly scientific, doubted that the path was there, or questioned that hard work would reveal it.

A well-worn copy of the Bible would be found among the gear of any serious expedition, along with the compasses, thermometers, and barometers. Early in the century one traveler observed that “the manners and customs of the natives of these countries remain unchanged since the days of the passage of the Children of Israel from Egypt into the Land of Promise,” and he went on to say that “the Bible is, beyond all comparison, the most interesting and the most instructive guide that can be consulted by the traveler in the East.” Such was the universal opinion, and so strongly felt that the author of a popular guide, having devoted years to its compilation, opened by agreeing that “the Bible is the best Handbook for Palestine; the present work is only intended to be a companion to it.” No fear of heresy prompted his modesty; all the travel accounts of his day, teeming with Biblical allusions, express the same opinion. So while nineteenth-century explorers of Africa were stepping into darkness, those of the Dead Sea region were walking in a hazy light thrown by antiquity—oblique, but nonetheless considerable.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, it required no small amount of courage to travel to Palestine, let alone to such a remote place as the Dead Sea. The Ottoman Empire was fast coming apart—Palestine was in fact seized by Mohammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, in 1831 and held for nine years—and the Bedouin tribes who lived in the desert around the lake recognized no outside ruler. The Turks had sole authority to issue firmans (a kind of visa) to those wishing to enter their territory, but Constantinople was far from the Dead Sea valley, and the Turks exercised virtually no control there. The land was divided among the Bedouin much as in Biblical days it had been divided among the tribes of Israel, and the Bedouin did as they pleased, from exacting tribute of European travelers to plundering the villages and farmlands of sedentary Arabs. From time to time the Turks would engage in a bloody show of force, in retribution or capriciously. But for the most part the Bedouin were left to themselves, and their relationships with one another, more than any external influence, determined their lot until late in the century.

Westerners were easy prey, so many studied Arabic and Moslem customs before setting out disguised as Arabs. No explorer traveled unarmed or unguarded, and no account concludes without some pages having been devoted to the skirmishes that were fought, or the care taken to avoid them. Aside from being dangerous, travel was extremely arduous. The most famous Dead Sea explorer, the American William F. Lynch, described what it was like near mid-century to convey his boats overland in order to reach the lake: “The word road means, in that country, a mule-track. Wheel carriages have never crossed it before. In their invasion of Syria [during the Napoleonic wars], the French transported their guns and gun-carriages (taken apart) on the backs of camels, over the lofty ridges, and mounted them again on the plain.” Without the help of their Bedouin guides, who knew the terrain most intimately, knew which regions were impassable, and always knew where at least a little stagnant pool of water could be found, very few Europeans would have been able to make the trip—their Bibles notwithstanding.

By the second half of the century, a trip to the northern, more accessible, end of the Dead Sea took no special courage and had in fact become standard fare for a new kind of traveler—not explorer but tourist. They came in increasing numbers—French, English, Dutch, German, American—often traveling in sizeable groups, their objective usually being a quick glimpse of the lake and a chance to scoop up a jar of water from the Jordan River to take home.

The travel guide book so familiar to modern tourists is no recent innovation; many travelers carried one for help in identifying sites. A particularly popular one was John Porter’s Handbook for Travelers in Syria and Palestine, first published in 1858. Porter’s “route 10” sent tourists on a three-day excursion which took in Jericho, the Jordan River and the Dead Sea, the monastery of Mar Saba, and Bethlehem—a journey more than enough for most. One of these tourists was Mark Twain, whose account of his trip is contained in The Innocents Abroad. He was not very appreciative of eastern life or people and evinced, at best, disappointment in what he encountered in the Holy Land. But for insight into the collective frame of mind of one of these tourist-pilgrim groups, his narrative is singular. He humorously described the reluctance with which his group, having heard rumors of tribal war in the Dead Sea valley, undertook the journey. Tempted to remain in Jerusalem, they found to their chagrin that a little caravan had already been assembled and was waiting for them. “With the horses at the door and every body aware of what they were there for, what would you have done? . . . You would have done as we did: said you were not afraid of a million Bedouins—and made your will and proposed quietly to yourself to take up an unostentatious position in the rear of the procession.

“I think we must all have determined upon that same line of tactics, for it did seem as if we never would get to Jericho. I had a notoriously slow horse, but somehow I could not keep him in the rear. . . . He was forever turning up in the lead. In such cases I trembled a little, and got down to fix my saddle. But it was not of any use. The others all got down to fix their saddles, too. I never saw such a time with saddles. It was the first time any of them had got out of order in three weeks, and now they had all broken down at once. I tried walking, for exercise—I had not had enough in Jerusalem searching for holy places. But it was a failure. The whole mob were suffering for exercise, and it was not fifteen minutes till they were all on foot and I had the lead again. It was very discouraging.”

Jericho was a welcome destination. It was the only town in the vicinity of the lake, it was the point from which pilgrims went to the Jordan River for immersion in the holy water, and, as an oasis, it offered year-round relief to weary travelers. Jericho is the lowest, and probably the oldest, city in the world. By virtue of its location, climate (tropical in summer and mild in winter), and fertility, it first attracted settlers some 12,000 years ago. The very beginnings of civilization are revealed in its strata, and evidence indicates it witnessed the transition early humans made from a nomadic to a sedentary way of life. As early as the eighth millennium BCE, the settlement was organized into an urban unit. Archaeologists believe that some 2,000 people lived in the town, which suggests a dependence on agriculture that brought with it advances in irrigation and the need for communal fortifications.

Josephus, writing nineteen centuries ago, referred to one section of the town as Old Jericho. According to the Bible, it was the first town conquered by Joshua and the Israelites on their entry into the Promised Land in the late Bronze Age, Joshua instructing his spies: “Go view the land, and Jericho” (Joshua 2:1). Yet archaeological evidence suggests that Jericho was destroyed in the second half of the fourteenth century BCE—a century before the Israelites appeared—and had not yet been rebuilt.

For centuries, kings and queens had their winter palaces there, and Jericho was one of the most coveted sites in all the surrounding lands in ancient days. The palm trees and sugar-cane that flourished into the Middle Ages were gone by the nineteenth century, but Mark Twain still found it “one of the very best locations for a town we have seen in all Palestine.” Of the old city he observed: “Ancient Jericho is not very picturesque as a ruin. When Joshua marched around it seven times, some three thousand years ago, and blew it down with his trumpet, he did the work so well and so completely that he hardly left enough of the city to cast a shadow.”

Starting out the next morning—very early, advised the Handbook, to the dismay of the group—they crossed the plain to the Jordan River. Again, Mark Twain described the less exalted aspect of this milestone in the lives of Christians: “With the first suspicion of dawn, every pilgrim took off his clothes and waded into the dark torrent, singing. . . . But they did not sing long. The water was so fearfully cold that they were obliged to stop singing and scamper out again. Then they stood on the bank shivering, and so chagrined and so grieved, that they merited honest compassion. . . . They had promised themselves all along that they would cross the Jordan where the Israelites crossed it when they entered Canaan from their long pilgrimage in the desert. . . . They were at the goal of their hopes at last, but the current was too swift, the water was too cold!”

From there it was an hour’s ride to the Dead Sea. “Here we feel the oppressive atmosphere of this desolate region,” notes the Handbook. “The air becomes close and hazy as the sun ascends, giving a wavy motion to the parched soil and a strange indistinctness of outline to distant objects. After an hour’s weary ride we reach the shore of the Dead Sea, with its unwholesome swamps and slimy margin, and ridges of drift wood, all incrusted with salt.” Those inclined would take a quick dip, expressing general disappointment at the dreariness of the setting while picking up bits of sulphur commonly supposed to have been left by the raining down of brimstone described in Genesis.

The Conquest of Jericho, from Yosifon, 1743, a Yiddish translation of Josippon, tenth century. Collection of the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

One can understand the determination of pilgrims to bathe in the revered water of the Jordan River, but one hardly knows why many of them agreed to go any further on a journey which, though but two days longer, was stressful and taxing by any estimation. Even Mark Twain’s humor evaporated under the midday sun: “I can not describe the hideous afternoon’s ride from the Dead Sea to Mars [sic] Saba. It oppresses me yet, to think of it. The sun so pelted us that the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice. The ghastly, treeless, grassless, breathless canons [i.e., canyons] smothered us as if we had been in an oven. The sun had positive weight to it, I think. Not a man could sit erect under it. All drooped low in the saddles.”

On their approach to Mar Saba, tourists who referred to their Handbook were warned of the rule that holds even today: “Ladies will remember that they cannot under any circumstances obtain admission” to the monastery. But the men were treated to a tour of “the most extraordinary building in Palestine.” In the fifth century, St. Saba retreated to the desert, drawing thousands of followers to the site on which they would construct the magnificent, jeweled monastery that in its prime (until plundered by the Persians in the seventh century) would be home to 5,000 Greek Orthodox monks. It was built over the course of many years, and its treasures were hauled all the way from Greece.

“By God’s grace,” wrote the twelfth-century Abbot Daniel, “the situation of the Laura of St. Sabbas is a marvelous and indescribable one. A dry torrent bed, terrible to behold, and very deep, is shut in by high walls of rock, to which the cells are fixed and kept in place by the hand of God in a surprising and fearful manner. These cells, fastened to the precipices flanking this frightful torrent, are attached to the rocks like the stars to the firmament.” The blue-domed monastery is stitched to the walls of Wadi Kidron, and today a handful of monks studiously maintains the complex while performing the same isolated devotions that St. Saba observed fifteen centuries ago.

The Dead Sea was as much a catalyst to the literary imagination as it had earlier been to the religious one. Half a century before Mark Twain traveled there, Sir Walter Scott had found in the Dead Sea region (which he never visited) the setting he required for his novel The Talisman, A Tale of the Crusaders. As his knight crossed the desert of the Dead Sea in the book’s opening page, he forgot all his privations as he recalled, “the fearful catastrophe which had converted into an arid waste and dismal wilderness the fair and fertile valley of Siddim, once well watered, even as the garden of the Lord, now a parched and blighted waste, condemned to eternal sterility.

Monastery of Mar Saba with view of the Dead Sea, from The Holy Land by David Roberts, vol. 2, 1843. Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

“Crossing himself as he viewed the dark mass of rolling waters, in color as in quality unlike those of every other lake, the traveler shuddered as he remembered that beneath these sluggish waves lay the once proud cities of the plain, whose grave was dug by the thunder of the heavens, or the eruption of subterraneous fire, and whose remains were hid, even by that sea which holds no living fish in its bosom, bears no skiff on its surface, and, as if its own dreadful bed were the only fit receptacle for its sullen waters, sends not, like other lakes, a tribute to the ocean.”

Benjamin Disraeli’s hero Tancred wandered in the desert east of the lake, and Gustav Flaubert made the journey himself. But in no literary imagination did the Dead Sea burn so keenly as in Herman Melville’s. The lure of the East extended as far back as his childhood. In his autobiographical Redburn, he recalled having seen a man who had just returned from Egypt and the Dead Sea: “I very well remembered staring at a man . . . who was pointed out to me by my aunt one Sunday in Church, as the person who had been in Stony Arabia, and passed through strange adventures there, all of which with my own eyes I had read in the book which he wrote, an arid-looking book in a pale yellow cover.

“‘See what big eyes he has,’ whispered my aunt, ‘they got so big, because when he was almost dead with famishing in the desert, he all at once caught sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on it.’

“. . . I never saw this wonderful Arabian traveler again. But he long haunted me.”

Melville traveled to the Holy Land some years later, in 1856, a few years after Moby Dick was published and lambasted. Suffering still from the depression brought on by his novel’s reception, he found in the East something quite different from what his boyhood fantasies had taught him to expect. His despondency found a focus in the Dead Sea, which provoked him to the melancholic reflection recorded in his journal: “Ride over mouldy plain to Dead Sea— . . . smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are those waters of Death, thought I.” But his experience provided him with the material for a major literary effort, the 18,000 line poem Clarel, large portions of which are set either in Jerusalem or at the Dead Sea. There was the holy city on high, overlooking the dry, sunken valley 4,000 feet below. The geographical arrangement could not have been better devised by Dante himself, and Melville made full use of it.

Since the Middle Ages, not a century has passed during which some European traveler, motivated by religious fervor, scientific curiosity, or personal eccentricity, hasn’t made his way to the Holy Land and descended to the lowest place on earth—its reputation established by the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah and nurtured by superstitions of later ages—and identified it as a facsimile of Hell. The accounts of those early travelers are enlightening, though the light they shed is often not so much on the nature of the Dead Sea as on the preconceptions of those who eagerly awaited the latest report on the desolate chasm from the brave ones who, it seems, did not always in fact make the descent, but fashioned their accounts to coincide with the fantastic expectations of their readers. Thus, for instance, the much-quoted thirteenth-century description of the sea as “always smoking, and dark like Hell’s chimney.” Passed on in a text for pilgrims, the hyperbolic expression was perhaps intended to discourage Christians from venturing too near the presumably still contagious seat of ancient sin.

There were voices, too, which sought from the earliest stage of western encounter with the lake to dispel superstition and lift the cloud of ignorance which hung over this most strange body of water, whose peculiarity had been recognized and remarked on throughout historical times. The Dead Sea first attracted the notice of the ancient Greeks and Romans: Aristotle referred to it in his Meteorology, Pliny discussed it in his Natural History, and Strabo in his Geography—all by the end of the first century CE. Medieval reports were frequently less informed, though not because their authors were less serious. On the contrary, if seriousness is a measure, texts of the Middle Ages hold up with any. “Much has been written and said about this sea by divers [sic] people,” wrote Burchard with thirteenth-century solemnity; “you must know that I fear not to tell what I have seen with my own eyes . . . which is, that the whole of the valley which used rightly to be called the Illustrious Valley . . . is made barren by the smoke of this sea. . . . This is indeed a dreadful judgment of God, who for so many centuries so punished the sins of the Sodomites, that even the land itself pays the penalty thereof after so many thousands of years.” As the passage suggests, the works were intended not as natural history but, as stated in the introduction to a popular thirteenth-century compendium, “to explain the allusions to natural objects met with in the Scriptures.” Faithful reporting was not the foremost goal, though at times an accurate chord was struck. In this latter book, the English Franciscan Bartholomew described a lake called the Dead Sea because “it breedeth, ne receiveth, no thing that hath life.”

Two hundred years saw virtually no alteration in approach, and we read in another pilgrims’ text about a lake known as the Dead Sea “because it does not run, but is ever motionless.” Yet another two centuries did witness a change; travelers who claimed to have seen the lake were more likely to have done so, and among those who did see it, there was a growing inclination to report soberly. The basic pedagogical approach lingered, however, nowhere more unabashedly manifested than in Thomas Fuller’s 1650 A Pisgah-sight of Palestine. This lake, he explained, is sometimes called the Dead Sea “either because the charnel-house of so many dead carcasses then destroyed therein; or because it kills all creatures coming into it; or lastly, because dull and dead, not enlivened with a tide, or quickened with any visible motion, one main cause of the offensive favor there, laziness disposing men to lewdness, and waters to putrefaction.”

Explorers were generally familiar with the accounts of travelers who preceded them, and two early works they admired were Henry Maundrell’s 1697 A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem and Richard Pococke’s lengthy 1740 account, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries. Given its early date, Maundrell’s book is notable for its author’s attitude: “I am sensible of two general Defects . . . running through this whole paper,” he wrote in a preface addressed to his uncle. “One is, frequent Errours; the other, Tediousness . . . But . . . I profess with a clear Conscience, that whatever Mistakes there may be, yet there are no Lies.” Maundrell’s and Pococke’s works were used by numerous later explorers for the purpose of comparison.

Despite the currency of certain myths, there were those even before the turn of the nineteenth century who attempted to dig for truths about the lake over or on which, it was said, no living thing could pass without being affected by its vapors. The more we read, the more we realize that the achievements of those early travelers were not just quaint but truly significant. One of the lake’s greatest mysteries had to do with its level: How did the Dead Sea, which received the abundant water of the Jordan River and other smaller tributaries—and which had no apparent issue—maintain a constant level? Diodorus had observed in the first century BCE that “although great rivers of remarkable sweetness empty into it, the lake gets the better of them by reason of its evil smell.” Thirteen centuries later, the Arab geographer Dimashki summarized the various views then current about how the lake maintained its level: “The people have many opinions concerning the disappearance of the waters (of the Dead Sea). Some say that its waters have an exit into a country afar off, whose lands they irrigate and fertilize, and here the waters may be drunk. . . . Others say that the soil all round the lake being extremely hot, and having beds of sulphur beneath, there never cease to rise vapours, and there, causing the water to evaporate, keep it to a certain level. Others again say there is an exit through the earth whereby its waters join those of the Red Sea; and others again affirm it has no bottom, but that there is a passage leading down to the Behemoth (who supports the earth).” Charming, and on the whole farfetched—yet the second, for all its elaborateness in suggesting evaporation as the cause, approached the truth.

Whether or not later western science read medieval Arab geography is unclear, but it would be six more centuries before Europe came to some agreement about the phenomenon. Thomas Fuller filled the gap. While his less pedantic successors would struggle with the question, Fuller displayed singular equanimity: this sea, he asserted, “hath but one good quality, namely, that it entertains intercourse with no other seas; which may be imputed to the providence of nature, debarring it from communion with the ocean, lest otherwise it should infect other waters with its malignity.” A century later, Pococke puzzled over the phenomenon, wondering whether so much water could indeed be lost to evaporation, and he leaned toward the theory that there must be some secret outlet: “It is very extraordinary that no outlet of this lake has been discovered, but it is supposed that there must be some subterraneous passage into the Mediterranean.” Apparently his was the prevailing view of the eighteenth century, and it took another half century or so for that view to shift. According to a book published in the first years of the 1800s, it had until recently been a prominent view that the Dead Sea “discharges its superfluous waters by subterraneous channels,” but it was by then commonly believed that evaporation was in fact the cause of the disappearance of all the excess water.

Many early explorers regarded as untenable the notion that nothing could live in the Dead Sea—for of what use is a body of water, if not to support God’s creatures? (The famous sixth-century Madaba map depicting a startled fish turning back up the Jordan before entering the lake was not uncovered until the 1880s.) Early on, rumors of the extraordinary phenomenon were accepted with aplomb not found in later, more sophisticated, investigators. Again the inimitable Fuller: “This Salt-Sea was sullen and churlish, differing from all other in the conditions thereof. . . . [The] most sportful fish dare not jest with the edged tools of this Dead-Sea; which if unwillingly hurried therein by the force of the stream of Jordan, they presently expire.”

Pococke, for one, found it particularly hard to accept, especially as he heard that a monk had seen fish caught in the lake, but he agreed to reserve judgment until all the evidence was gathered. Early in the 1800s the Frenchman François de Chateaubriand, camping by the Dead Sea one night, was startled by a sound upon the water and was told by his Bedouin guides that the noise was caused by “legions of small fish which come and leap about on the shore.” An editor compiling such anecdotes some twenty years later was amused by Chateaubriand’s gullibility and smirked that the fish were “doubtless seeking to be delivered from the pestilential waters.” He chuckled that this was “nothing more than a hoax upon the learned Frenchman.” Though Chateaubriand had disavowed any scientific intentions and insisted his book be read simply as memoir, he was subjected to criticism throughout the century for his impressionability. As for the editor, his smugness was made possible by a report that had come out around the same time as Chateaubriand’s book, in which a highly respected scientist, having collected the snail shells that to many had been proof of life in the sea, identified them as a land species. (Actually they were freshwater snails, either washed down by the winter floods or coming from springs.)

There are probably few natural phenomena in the world that have so perplexed and enchanted travelers of all ages as the buoyancy of the Dead Sea. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle had mused about a fabled lake in Palestine, “such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink.” Three hundred years later, Strabo turned his attention to the same subject: “The water is exceedingly heavy, so that no person can dive into it; if anyone wades into it up to the waist, and attempts to move forward, he is immediately lifted out of the water.” Diodorus explained that “this liquid by its nature supports heavy bodies that have the power of growth or of breathing,” and Tacitus wrote that “its sluggish waters support their freight as if on solid ground, and trained swimmers as well as those ignorant of the art are equally buoyant upon its surface.”

Josephus observed that it “is not easy to go down into the depths even by deliberate effort,” and he recounted that Vespasian, later to become Roman emperor, came to examine the water. Ordering some slaves to be thrown in with their hands tied behind them, he “found that they all came to the surface as if blown upwards by a strong wind.” Finally among the ancient writers, Pliny described how “the bodies of animals will not sink in its waters, and even those of bulls and camels float there,” but a nineteenth-century editor of his work assures us he exaggerated, that error itself an illustration of the uneven progress of Dead Sea investigation even in modern times.

In the thirteenth century, Bartholomew wrote that “whensoever thou wouldst have drowned therein anything that hath life with any craft or gin, then anon it plungeth and cometh again up; though it be strongly thrust downward, it is anon smitten upward.” His Arab contemporary, the geographer Yakût, wrote that anyone who falls into the lake “cannot sink, but remains floating about til he dies.” A century later, an Englishman known as Maundeville—about whom there is doubt he ever lived, let alone traveled to the Dead Sea—disagreed: “Neither man, beast, or anything that hath life, may die in that sea; and that hath been proved many times by men that have been condemned to death, who have been cast therein, and left therein for three or four days, and they might never die therein, for it receiveth nothing within him that breatheth life. . . . And if a man cast iron therein, it will float on the surface; but if men cast a feather therein, it will sink to the bottom; and these are things contrary to nature.” Recent geographers believe Maundeville’s book to have been plagiarized from various sources, but consider it important anyway, as George H. T. Kimble noted, as an illustration of the layman’s idea of the world in the fourteenth century. If the appeal of the fantastic was as great as Kimble explains it was in that age of supreme faith, one need have no fear that the medieval imagination went unexercised. With regard to the lake’s buoyancy, the opportunities for invention were endless. A burning lantern will float, but an extinguished one will sink; try to immerse a living creature, and it will immediately leap out; no ship may sail on it, “for all things that hath no life sinketh down to the ground.”

The attraction of the Dead Sea by virtue of this singular phenomenon did not end when it was explained. Early in the nineteenth century one explorer observed that “those of our party who could not swim, floated on its surface like corks,” and a contemporary complained of the embarrassing posture forced on the would-be swimmer, whose stroke was rendered useless as his behind bobbed high out of the water. Another was positive he could have slept, “and it would have been a much easier bed than the bushes at Jericho.”

Less pleased was the traveler who evidently had not taken to heart what he had heard about the effects of the water: “I think we were all good swimmers, but when I dashed in and threw myself forward to get out of my depth, there was enough to do without observing my friends. The unusual degree of buoyancy in the briny liquid threw me off balance, the salt stung my eyes, ears, and every abrasion of my skin, and I could scarcely tell in what direction I was striking out.” Yet another put it most succinctly, saying simply that “the trial of skill is not to swim, but to sink.” Finally we have Mark Twain’s account, whose encounter with the waters of the lake occupies a full two pages in The Innocents Abroad: “No, the water did not blister us; it did not cover us with a slimy ooze and confer upon us an atrocious fragrance. . . . It was a funny bath. We could not sink. . . . No position can be retained long; you lose your balance and whirl over. . . . If you swim on your face, you kick up the water like a stern-wheel boat. . . . A horse is so top-heavy that he can neither swim nor stand up in the Dead Sea. He turns over on his side at once. Some of us bathed for more than an hour, and then came out coated with salt till we shone like icicles.”

This strange water is as capable of supporting life on it as it is incapable of supporting life in it—both attributable to its chemical make-up. The Dead Sea is close to one third solid—more than Utah’s Great Salt Lake (which is one quarter) and ten times more saline than the Mediterranean. While the salt content of most seas and lakes is largely sodium chloride, the Dead Sea’s largest concentration is magnesium chloride, which accounts for approximately one half its mineral content. Sodium chloride makes up another quarter; the last fourth consists primarily of calcium chloride, with potassium chloride, magnesium bromide, and several other minerals in relatively small concentrations. Roughly accurate analyses had been done since the end of the eighteenth century, and so confident was one traveler that he announced (prematurely) in 1837 that “modern science has solved all the mystery of this water.”

As noted, one of the major attractions of the Dead Sea was its connection to the Cities of the Plain, whose arrogance and evil ways were dealt with by God in the days of Abraham and Lot, and whose fate is recorded in the Book of Genesis: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” Many hundreds of years later, Josephus reflected on the conflagration when describing the region: “The country of Sodom borders upon . . . [the lake], which was of old a happy land, both for the fruits it bore and the riches of its cities, although it is now all burnt up by lightning for the impiety of its inhabitants.”

The possibility that the remains of the punished cities might be found was enough to prod on certain travelers who might otherwise have lacked the courage to descend to the mysterious valley. One such was Maundrell, who badly wanted to see the remains of those ancient towns “made so dreadful an example of the divine vengeance,” and he looked hard for some sign. “But neither could I discern any heaps of ruins, nor any smoak [sic] ascending above the surface of the water; as is usually described in the writings and maps of geographers.” (It has been suggested that Maundrell was possibly encouraged by a map such as the fifteenth-century one which illustrated William Wey’s Itineraries, in which one can distinguish the outlines of the Cities of the Plain lying beneath the transparent blue water of the Dead Sea.)

In the nineteenth century, numerous travelers eagerly sought the ruins commonly thought to be located in the lake’s depths. “Lying between the barren mountains of Arabia and Judea,” considered one, “was that mysterious sea which rolled its dark waters over the guilty cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Another referred to the damned Cities of the Plain “seething below the [Dead Sea’s] waters,” and a third observed that “to the north was the calm and motionless sea . . . while many fathoms deep in the slimy mud beneath it lay embedded the ruins of the ill-fated cities.” At mid-century, the Dutchman C. W. M. Van de Velde described most evocatively the feeling that was shared by many who walked on the Dead Sea’s shores in those days of greater spiritual certainty: “Solemn ride along this briny strand! . . . The burning and vanishing ground, with its doomed cities, comes up vividly before the mind. What a tract of country! What a terrible witness to the righteous vengeance of God’s justice!”

Map of the Dead Sea showing the Cities of the Plain submerged beneath its waters, from The Itineraries of William Wey, 1458 and 1462 (from an 1867 facsimile of the original in the Bodleian Library). Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

Jewish, Moslem, and Christian tradition all placed the Cities of the Plain at the southern end of the Dead Sea, though some nineteenth-century investigators were convinced that a combination of geographical and Biblical evidence proved that they had been situated on the northern shore. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Arab town of Zughar flourished at the southern part of the lake. But whether the site it occupied was indeed the one that had been occupied by the ancient town of Zoar was a matter for the most tentative conjecture. (In the early 1920s, the eminent archaeologist William Foxwell Albright determined that it was not.)

Theories about the cataclysm—some based on observable, if wrongly interpreted, evidence, others just fantasy—were frequently put forth, and debate was widespread. One speculator departed from the widely held theory of volcanic destruction, suggesting instead that the cities had unfortunately been built upon a mine of bitumen that was kindled by lightning, causing them to sink “in the subterraneous conflagration.” Another collected lumps of nitrate and small bits of sulphur, hypothesizing that they could have been left from the raining down of brimstone. The Frenchman Louis Félicien de Saulcy caused a commotion in 1850 by announcing that he had identified as Sodom the remains of a small stone building. His precipitous claim provoked indignation in one Reverend Albert Isaacs, who devoted an entire book to disproving it and discrediting de Saulcy in a caustic reprimand. The matter was put into perspective by someone less excitable, who simply responded that de Saulcy had gotten the answers he wanted from the local Arabs by asking them leading questions.

But de Saulcy was not alone in hoping, even believing, that the ruins of the cities might be unearthed. “It is not perhaps impossible,” wrote one, “that the wrecks of the guilty cities may still be found: we have even heard it asserted with confidence, that broken columns and other architectural ruins are visible at certain seasons, when the water is much retired below its usual level.” And an American traveler named John Lloyd Stephens, usually modest in his expectations, was bent on searching in the deadly waters of the lake “for the ruins of the doomed and blasted cities.” Stephens was the most vocal—and the most persuasive—of them all: “I had a longing desire to . . . search for the ruins of the guilty cities. And why not? If we believe our Bible . . . [the Dead Sea] covers the once fertile Vale of Siddim and the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah; and why may we not see them? The ruins of Thebes still cover for miles the banks of the Nile; the pyramids stand towering as when they were built. . . . Besides, that water [of the Dead Sea] does not destroy; it preserves all that it touches . . . and I can see no good reason why it should hide forever from man’s eyes the monuments of that fearful anger which the crimes of the guilty had so righteously provoked.”

By 1831, so much information had been gathered about the Dead Sea that one Josiah Conder compiled a summary of the West’s geographical knowledge of “this celebrated lake, which the prevailing passion for the marvelous long invested with imaginary horrors, and of which the natives themselves still speak with a degree of terror.” In The Modern Traveler—Palestine, Conder entered the Sodom and Gomorrah fray, though on the other side. He directed his respectful skepticism toward Strabo, who in the first century had even given the dimensions of the ruins of Sodom. Conder concluded with some regret that such a legend must be classed “with the dreams of imagination.” Reluctant but dutiful, he cited travelers who had observed that the sea itself can throw up heaps of stones, and that many have mistaken them for the ruins of the ancient cities.

Still, all the speculation stirred him: “The bare possibility, that any wreck of the guilty cities should be brought to light, is sufficient to excite an intense curiosity to explore this mysterious flood, which, so far as appears from any records, no bark has ever ploughed, no plummet ever sounded.” Actually, as Conder’s book was being read, preparations were already being made to sound the lake’s depths. And though for centuries the only barks to plow its waters were Arab rafts, there were times in Roman days, in the Byzantine period, and during the Middle Ages, when navigation was common. Vespasian’s ships had pursued Jews who were fleeing by way of the sea during the Jewish war from 66 to 73 CE, and documents from the time of the second Jewish rebellion against the Romans sixty-five years later suggest that Ein Gedi, on the western shore, was a major supply port. Part of the mosaic floor discovered in the Byzantine church at Madaba, on the east side of the Dead Sea, depicts a map of the lake (the earliest known) and shows two ships, one carrying salt, the other laden, it appears, with wheat or corn. And the Arab geographer Idrisi, writing in the twelfth century, described trade on the Dead Sea: “There ply on the lake small ships which make the voyage of these parts, and carry over corn and various sorts of dates from Zughar [at the southern end] . . . to Ariha [Jericho, at the north].” Before the nineteenth century was half over, navigation on the sea would resume, as science began to probe the lake’s depths.

Section of the sixth century mosaic Madaba map, the earliest known map of the Dead Sea, showing two boats and two fish, one fleeing back up the Jordan River to warn the other. Reproduced by the Survey of Israel and the Israel Exploration Society from Palmer and Guthe’s reproduction, 1906. Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.