THE Dead Sea is, in many respects, the most wonderful body of water known to history. It is the lowest body of water on earth. Its surface is 1,300 feet lower than the surface of the Mediterranean, though the two seas are only sixty-five miles apart. It receives 6,000,000 tons, or 20,000,000 cubic feet, of water each day; and, while it has no possible outlet, it never fills up. It is no fuller now than it was a thousand years ago. This Sea of Death is wonderful for another reason. While it is forty-six miles long, thirteen miles wide, and while the water is 1,310 feet deep, I can walk across it and never get wet above my waist! I walk out into the sea for a mile or more—I walk not on the water, but in it. I fold my hands across my breast, stretch them out over the water, or lock them over my head, as I choose. I try to sink and can not. I never felt so much like a gourd in all my life. I sit down upon the water like a feather-bed. When tired I lie down. Some men lie when they stand up; but when I lie I am prostrated. I lie on the water, roll over, kick my feet in the air,—but all my attempts at sinking meet with an inglorious failure. Johnson says a man who will not sink in clear water must be of little weight in the world. Determined to make one more effort, I climb to a projecting rock from which I plunge head foremost into the sea. A moment later I am tossed into the air like a cork. Again I strike the water, and again rebound. I am, seemingly, about as heavy on the stomach of the Dead Sea as Jonah was on the stomach of a live whale. He was spewed up—so am I.

Coming up out of the water I find myself completely covered with a thin crust of salt. I hardly know who I am. Johnson suggests that I may be Lot’s wife. One thing is sure; I have a better complexion—at any rate I am whiter now than ever before. Johnson asks why it is that one can not sink in the Dead Sea. The specific gravity of the water is very great. This, of course, makes the water very buoyant, and renders it impossible for one to sink. The extra weight of the water is caused by the great amount of salt in the sea. It is a much easier matter to swim in the ocean than in a running stream, because the former is salt and, therefore, buoyant. This is true, notwithstanding the fact that only four per cent of ocean water is salt. Four per cent is enough to make the ocean very salt and buoyant. But of the Dead Sea water twenty-six to twenty-eight per cent is salt. It has, therefore, six or six and a half times as much salt as the same amount of ocean water has. Then how great its specific gravity! How buoyant its waters! How impossible to sink!

This is sometimes called the “Salt Sea,” and, while the name is quite brackish, it is not at all inappropriate; for, as has been said, “the water is a nauseous compound of bitters and Salts.” When I stiffen myself and stretch out on the waters, about half of my person remains above the surface. The water produces something of a stinging sensation; not severe enough, however, to be especially objectionable, unless you should chance to get some of it in your eyes. The buoyancy of the water makes its navigation both difficult and dangerous. Lieut. Lynch, in the following lines, gives us a vivid description of his experiences on this Sea of Death.

“A fresh northwest wind was blowing as we rounded the point. We endeavored to steer a little to the north of west, to make a true west course, and threw the patent log overboard to measure the distance; but the wind rose so rapidly that the boats could not keep head to wind, and we were obliged to haul the log in. The sea continued to rise with the increasing wind, which gradually freshened to a gale, and presented an agitated surface of foaming brine; the spray, evaporating as it fell, left incrustations of salt upon our clothes, our hands and faces; and while it conveyed a prickly sensation wherever it touched the skin, was, above all, exceedingly painful to the eyes. The boats, heavily laden, struggled sluggishly at first; but when the wind freshened in its fierceness, from the density of the water, it seemed as if their bows were encountering the sledgehammers of the Titans, instead of the opposing waves of an angry sea. The wind blew so fiercely that the boats could make no headway, and I began to fear that both boats would founder. Finding that we were losing every moment, and that, with the lapse of each succeeding one, the danger increased, kept away for the northern shore, in the hope of being yet able to reach it; our arms, our clothes and skins coated with a greasy salt; and our eyes, lips, and nostrils, smarting excessively. How different was the scene before the submerging of the plain, which was ‘even as the garden of the Lord!’

“But, although the sea had assumed a threatening aspect, and the fretted mountains, sharp and incinerated, loomed terrific on either side, and salt and ashes mingled with its sands, and foetid sulphurous springs trickled down its ravines, we did not despair: awe-struck, but not terrified; fearing the worst, yet hoping for the best, we prepared to spend a dreary night upon the dreariest waste we had ever seen.”

The foreign substance in the water gives it a peculiar appearance at night. Under the influence of a full moon, the sea has a strikingly bright and beautiful phosphorescent glow. The breakers dashing against the rocks, and beating against the shore, look like waves of consuming fire. The whole scene resembles a restless, turbulent sea of flame vainly trying to devour the very rocks that mark its limits! Going around the sea next morning, the rock-bound coast, and the bleak desolate hills around, look as though they might have been scorched with fire the night before.

In seeking for a satisfactory explanation of why this water is so salt, Johnson argues thus; “Sodom and Gomorrah once stood at the north end of this sea. From here Lot fled with his family when the cities were destroyed. On one of the surrounding hills Lot’s wife was standing, when she disobediently looked back and was immediately turned into a pillar of salt.” Johnson becomes more and more animated as he contemplates the subject and expresses his views. His face is radiant with gladness, and his soul is all aglow with emotion, as he closes with this sentence: “Now, Whittle, since Mrs. Lot was turned to a pillar of salt upon one of these hills, we may safely account for the present salty condition of the water simply by supposing that she has melted and run back into the sea.” This thought was born in Johnson’s brain, and he nurses it with all the love and passionate fondness that characterize the young mother as she tenderly caresses her new-born babe.

It is therefore with sincere regret that I raise the golden hammer of truth to break the young child’s head, but the false theory must die. I say, “Johnson, come with me.” Going around on the east side, not far from the north end, of the Dead Sea, we come to a broad shelf of rock, probably 1,000 feet above the water. Arriving at the edge of this stone table, and pointing to a colossal statue of salt-rock standing on its centre, I say, “Johnson, your theory is not true. Mrs. Lot has not melted; for, behold, she still stands!” This famous pillar is a slender, isolated needle of salt-rock, thirty or thirty-five feet high. This, we are told, is actually Lot’s wife. And I readily see how a man with a diseased imagination could fancy this a woman; for, as Professor Palmer remarks, “It does really bear a curious resemblance to an Arab woman with a child upon her shoulders.” The rock lifts itself up solitary and alone, something like a giantess, wearing tattered garments and disheveled hair, while her furrowed face is slightly turned over her left shoulder, as though she were still looking back on the desolate plain where the ill-fated cities once stood.

The Arabs point to this pillar as Lot’s wife. M. de Saulcy has written very ingeniously to prove that it really and truly is Lot’s wife. And, to do the Frenchman justice, I should add that he really did prove it—to his own satisfaction. I dare say, however, that he utterly failed to convince any of his readers. There have been men in all the ages who found in this pillar, or some other one like it, the veritable Mrs. Lot. Josephus relates the Scriptural incident of Lot’s wife being turned into salt, and then says of the pillar of salt: “I have seen it, and it remains to this day.” Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, and Leland all speak of Lot’s wife still standing as a pillar of salt. One says she still “retains her members entire,” and another says that as fast as any part of this pillar is washed away, it is supernaturally restored. That Lot’s wife disobeyed God, and was forthwith turned into a pillar of salt, I do not doubt. That this pillar of salt will ever be located and identified, I have no hope.

Let us again recur to the question, “Why is this sea so salt?” Around the east side and southern end of the sea, the whole country seems to be composed largely of salt. “The salt hills run round for several miles nearly east and west, at a height of from three hundred to four hundred feet, level atop, and not very broad; the mass being a body of rock-salt, capped with a bed of gypsum and chalk. Dislocated, shattered, furrowed into deep clefts by the rains, or standing out in narrow, ragged buttresses, they add to the weird associations of all around. Here and there, harder portions of the salt, withstanding the weather while all around them melts and wears off, rise up as isolated pillars. In front of the ridge, the ground is strewn with lumps and masses of salt, through which streamlets of brine run across the long muddy flat towards the beach, which itself sparkles in the sun with a crust of salt, shining as if the earth had been sown with diamonds.”

A sea whose bed and beach are salt would naturally be brackish, even if it had an outlet. During the rainy season this sea has probably a thousand tributaries, all of which bring in more or less salt. It is always receiving salt. Bear in mind the fact that this Sea of Death has no outlet. All of the water is taken up by evaporation. In midsummer the heat around it is fearful to contemplate. The rays from the noon-day’s sun are almost like streams of fire. The heat is simply intense. The water vaporizes, is taken up into the air, and is there condensed and poured out in showers of rain on the parched hills around, to revive the vigor of vegetation. As Thompson would say, “The clouds pour their garnered fullness down.” Of course the sun takes up only the oxygen and hydrogen, leaving all salt and other impurities behind. Hence the sea never fills up; hence also the water that is left behind is becoming more and more salt as the years pass by.

Just a word about the origin of the Dead Sea. It is currently believed, and I think with good reason, that at one time there was an unbroken body of water, not very deep, extending from the southern end of the Dead Sea, up through what is now known as the Ghor or valley of the Jordan, to the base of Mount Hermon, a distance of some two hundred miles. The volcanic fires, which were then raging, and the effects of which are still to be seen, consumed the material underlying the southern end of what was then the vast sea. All at once, during the fierce rumblings of an earthquake, and the sudden outburst of a volcano, there was a tremendous cleaving and lowering of the crust of the earth. Thus was formed, it is supposed, the great rock-hewn basin, or deep depression, which we now call the Dead Sea, and whose bottom is 4,000 feet lower than the surface of the Mediterranean.

This great natural cavity, forty-six miles long, and thirteen miles wide, was so very deep, and had such an enormous capacity, that it drank up or drained off most of the water that formerly extended to the foot of Hermon. So instead of one vast sea, two hundred miles in length, as it then was, we now have Lake Huleh, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, lying in a straight line, directly north and south, the three joined to each other by the river Jordan. There are many evidences to show that the Jordan valley was once covered with water—that it was once the bed of a great sea.

Yes, the Dead Sea was evidently caused by some fearful convulsion of nature. It is, indeed, a bitter Sea of Death. It is a perpetual emblem of God’s avenging wrath! No living thing inhabits these waters. Not a tree, not a shrub, not even a blade of grass, grows on, or near, the beach. Here and there crystal rivulets attempt to bring life down to the water’s edge, but a few hundred yards from the sea Death meets Vegetation and says: “Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther.” The thing that grows nearest to the water’s edge is what is known as the Sodom apple, or Dead Sea apple. The bush is about as high as my head, the apples grow in clusters. When ripe, they are red, and about the size of an apricot or a peach. The apple has nothing in it but seed and air. It pops when crushed. Hence the old saying that it turns to ashes on the lips.

Again I say this sea is a fit emblem of Death. Its water is bitter, and destitute of life. It is locked in by fire-scorched and storm-beaten rocks. Above it are a fierce sun and a brazen sky. Silence reigns supreme. As the traveler walks around the sea, his shadow is the only moving thing he sees. If he chances to be attracted by the song of a bird, or by a crow flying over the water, it is only that the contrast may make death and silence all the more impressive. Here is a sea whose hollow fruit is ashes, whose miasmatic breath is poison, whose moonlit waves are fire, and whose significant name is Death!