Читать книгу Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. V, No. XXIX., October, 1852 - Various - Страница 8

As our traveler and his party journeyed on toward the sea, they found the country descending continually, and as they followed the road down the valleys and ravines through which it lay, they imagined that they had reached the level of the sea, long before they came in sight of its shores. At length, however, to their astonishment, they came suddenly out upon the brow of a mountain, from which they looked down into a deep and extended valley where the broad expanse of water lay, fifteen hundred feet below them. The surprise which they experienced at finding the sea at so much lower a level than their estimate made it, illustrates the singular accuracy of Robinson's ideas in respect to the topography of the country which he was exploring; for, if the Dead Sea had been really at the same level with the Mediterranean, as was then generally supposed to be the case, it would have presented itself to the party of travelers precisely as they had expected to find it. The unlooked for depth was owing to a very extraordinary depression of the valley, the existence and the measure of which has since been ascertained.

Robinson and his companions, from the summit of a small knoll which lay on one side of their path, looked down upon the vast gulf beneath them with emotions of wonder and awe. It was the Dead Sea which they saw extended before them. There it lay, filling the bottom of its vast chasm, and shut in on both sides by ranges of precipitous mountains, whose steep acclivities seemed sometimes to rise directly from the water, though here and there they receded a little from the shore, so as to leave a narrow beach beneath the rocks below. From the point where our observers stood the whole southern half of the sea was exposed to view. The northern part was partly concealed by a precipitous promontory, called Ras Mersed, which rose abruptly from the shore a little north of their position.

The southern part of the sea, as viewed from this point, was remarkable for the numerous shoals and sand bars which appeared projecting in many places from the shore, forming long and low points and peninsulas of sandy land. There was one very large and remarkable peninsula of higher land, in the southeast part of the sea. The position and configuration of this peninsula may be seen upon the map. It is formed in some respect like a human foot, with the heel toward the sea. Of course, the ankle of the foot is the isthmus which connects the peninsula with the main land. The length of this peninsula, from north to south, is five or six miles. Our observers, from their lofty position at En-gedi, looked down upon it, and could trace almost the whole of its outline. North of it, too, there was a valley, which opened up among the mountains to the eastward, called the Valley of Kerak. At the head of this valley, several miles from the shore of the sea, lies the town of Kerak, a place sometimes visited by pilgrims and travelers, who pass that way along a road which traverses that part of the country on a line parallel to the shore of the sea. The course of the valley was such that the position of our observers on the mountain at En-gedi commanded a full view of the whole extent of it. They could even see the town of Kerak, with its ancient castle on a rock – far up near the summit of the mountain. It is in the lower part of this valley, a little to the eastward of the isthmus which has been already described, that the town of Zoar stood, as it is supposed, where Lot sought refuge at the time of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.