CHAPTER I.

THE RAINLESS DESERT--THE BED OF A SEA--THE DEAD SEA.

The Sandy Deserts may with equal, nay, with greater accuracy, be entitled Salt Deserts, Rainless Deserts, Seas of Sand; for they present at one and the same time all these characters, and the three last, though less generally known than the first, are the most essential.

The soil is generally covered with a thick stratum of sand; but in several places it also exhibits great walls of rock, and in others masses of rolled or shattered pebbles. The subsoil is nearly always of a gypseous or calcareous nature, rarely clayey; wherever it is porous and permeable, it is impregnated with salt, which rises to the surface, or is held in solution in the subterranean basins of water, the thermal springs, the ponds, and the lakes. The saline efflorescences of the deserts of Persia and Oriental Asia not only suffice for the wants of the inhabitants, but supply the great Asiatic caravans with their principal article of exportation.

The atmosphere of the Deserts is not less dry than their sands and rocks. The sky wears a perennial azure, more or less veiled in haze, or rather spotted with a few clouds. Johnstone represents them, in his admirable "Physical Atlas," by two white unequal bands, characterised as "Rainless Districts." Of these the larger occupies all the northern region of Africa, and the greater portion of Arabia, Syria, Persia, and Beloochistan, embracing an area of 80° of longitude over 17° of latitude. The other extends over the table-lands of Thibet and the Gobi. It is in form an irregular ellipsis, obliquely inclined from south-west to north-east. Its length is about 1100 leagues; its width, 450. From the former it is only separated by a narrow belt. In the region marked by these two species rain is an extraordinary phenomenon; several years will pass without the clouds shedding a single drop of water. This permanent, and nearly absolute, aridity, establishes a very marked difference between the Deserts properly so called, and the Landes, Steppes, and Prairies, condemned as these are during the hot season to a deadly dryness, but in winter inundated with rain or covered with snow; and in spring converted into immense marshes, where an exuberant vegetation makes its appearance, frequently capable of resisting the action of the summer sun and the withering winds.

In the Rainless Districts vegetation is a nullity; it becomes reduced to a very small number of saline plants and dwarf bushes, nourished by the brackish waters which, the soil conceals. Finally, the desert region may not only be compared to a sea in its aspect and immensity, but it is a true sea, or at least the bed of an ancient sea, which formerly communicated, and, perhaps, was confounded with the Mediterranean, and whose drying up, though still incomplete, took place at a recent geological epoch. We may reasonably conclude that, owing to a series of gradual upheavals, this sea was at first broken up into vast lagoons; that most of these successively disappeared, but not without leaving some certain evidences of the primitive submersion of the continent. "If we might hazard a conjecture," says a recent writer,[41] "it would be that the same convulsions and upheavals which at the close of the tertiary epoch indented the southern coasts of Europe, at the same time drained the ocean which hitherto had rolled over the plains of the Sahara, and submerged the low-lying lands, which probably united the Canaries and Madeira to the mainland." To a similar cause must be attributed the existence of the subterranean waters, springs, ponds, and salt lakes, of which I have already spoken, and of the inland seas--the Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and the Dead Sea; while the Black Sea and its offshoots, the Sea of Azov and the Sea of Marmora, must have had the same origin. I shall discuss this subject further when describing the Great Sahara.

In Eastern and Central Asia, the Sandy or Salt Deserts alternate with the Steppes, and with lands susceptible of a certain amount of cultivation. The vast region which geographers designate the Great Gobi, or the Shamo, is intersected by many grassy Steppes and even by fertile fields, where the sedentary Mongols, and especially the Artons, yearly sow and gather hemp, millet, and buckwheat. The sombre picture of "a barren plain of shifting sand blown into high ridges where the summer sun is scorching, no rain falls, and when thick fog occurs it is only the precursor of fierce winds,"[42] is true only of special districts, such as the Han-hai, or "Dry Sea," or the Desert of Sarkha. There, for instance, we meet with no other vegetable than the salsolæ, or salt-worts, which flourish around the small saline pools. Of these pools, when seen from a distance, Mr. Atkinson notices a remarkable characteristic: the salt crystals which accrete upon their banks frequently reflect the orange or crimson hues of flowers, and resemble glowing rubies set in a rich mounting.

As we advance in a south-easterly direction, we find the features of the desert region more prominently marked.

Immense plains of sand, with a bare and brackish surface, called _Bejaban_, traverse the whole of Persia, from the Caspian Sea to the Indus. They comprise the Deserts of Kerusan, Seistan, Beloochistan, and Mekran, rich in salts with a basis of soda. "The coasts of the Persian Gulf," as Mrs. Somerville remarks, "are burning hot sandy solitudes, so completely barren, that the country from Bassora to the Indus, a distance of 1200 miles, is nearly a sterile waste. Three-tenths of Persia is a desert, and the tableland is nearly a wide scene of desolation. A great salt-desert occupies 27,000 square miles between Irak and Khorasan, of which the soil is a stiff clay, covered with efflorescence of common salt and nitre, often an inch thick, varied only by a few saline plants and patches of verdure in the hollows. This dreary waste joins the large sandy and equally dreary desert of Kerman. Khelat, the capital of Beloochistan, is 7000 feet above the level of the sea; round it there is cultivation, but the greater part of that country is a lifeless plain, over which the brick-red sand is drifted by the north wind into ridges like the waves of the sea, often twelve feet high, without a vestige of vegetation. The blast of the desert, whose hot and pestilential breath is fatal to man and animals, renders these dismal sands impassable at certain seasons."

The Desert of Mekran is separated from that of Moultan by the Indus. That which lies to the east of Kom, in the centre of Persia, is more than sixty leagues in extent. Of Persia, M. Forgues observes that the actual reality differs strangely from those glowing eastern landscapes which poets and romancists love to paint. Even in those provinces where the winter rains encourage the growth of vegetation, the scene would hardly remind the traveller of

"That delightful province of the Sun. The first of Persian lands he shines upon, Where all the loveliest children of his beam. Flowerets and fruits, blush over every stream."[43]

"To bare, dry mountain-ridges," says M. Forgues, "succeed plains, sometimes incrusted with hard clay, sometimes clothed with thick sand. At the outset of spring, in the months of April and May, the country is coloured with some softer tints, the grass breaks here and there through the granite and the gravel; but in the first summer heats everything grows dry, and the soil resumes its monotonously brown or gray livery. Water fails for cultivation, which in the best districts is confined to a few scattered oases. In these vast spaces, when the eye surveys them from some mountain-crest, there occurs nothing to arrest the gaze; and when once the spring has past, the cultured fields become blended with those which the plough has suffered to lie fallow, the clay-built villages with the earth of which their walls are constructed. In these confused landscapes even a considerable town scarcely traces its blurred outline among the accumulated ruins in whose centre it persists in living, and whose extent attests its decadence. It is a marvel if, on arriving at the limit of these monotonous plains, the traveller distinguishes them from the deserts to whose threshold they have generally conducted him. He only recognizes the latter by the dazzling gleam of their saline efflorescence, which stretches far out of sight, and where at intervals abruptly projects some mass of ebon-black rock, transformed by the solar refraction, and assuming in quick succession the most fantastic aspects."

I have spoken of the inland seas and salt lakes which testify to the primitive submersion of the whole region of the Great Deserts. Let us pursue our route towards the west, and we shall encounter the most remarkable of these vestiges of a remote past.

First, I shall speak of the Dead Sea, the Lake Asphaltes, which Dean Stanley justly designates "one of the most remarkable spots in the world," and which, as the reader knows, is situated in the south of Palestine, at a short distance from Jerusalem. It is true that "a great mass of legend and exaggeration, partly the effect, partly the cause, of the old belief that the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were buried under the Dead Sea, has been gradually removed in recent years. The glittering surface of the lake, with the thin mist of its own evaporations floating over its surface, will now no more be taken for a gloomy sea, sending forth sulphurous exhalations. The birds which pass over it without injury have long ago destroyed the belief that no living creature could survive the baneful atmosphere which hung upon its waters." But still, for the scientific no less than for the historical student, it possesses an absorbing interest. It is the most depressed sheet of water in the world, lying fully thirteen hundred feet below the level of the Mediterranean: as the Lake Sir-i-Kol, where the Oxus rises

"In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere,"

is the most elevated.[44] "Its basin," to quote Dean Stanley's graphic description, "is a steaming caldron--a bowl which, from the peculiar temperature and deep cavity in which it is situated, can never be filled to overflowing. The river Jordan, itself exposed to the same withering influences, is not copious enough to furnish a supply equal to the demand made by the rapid evaporation. Its excessive saltness is even more remarkable than its deep depression. This peculiarity is, it is believed, mainly occasioned by the huge barrier of fossil-salt at its south-west corner, and heightened by the rapid evaporation of the fresh water poured into it. Other like phenomena, though in a less striking form, exist elsewhere. But, without entering into its wider relations, this aspect is important, as that which most forcibly impressed the sacred writers. To them it was 'the salt sea,' and nothing more. They exhibit hardly a trace of the exaggerations of later times. And so it is in fact. It is not gloom, but desolation, which is the prevailing characteristic of the Sea of Death. Follow the course of the Jordan to its end. How different from the first burst of its waters in Mount Hermon, amongst the groves of Dan and Paneas! How different from the 'riotous prodigality of life' which has marked its downward course, almost to the very termination of its existence! Gradually, within the last mile from the Dead Sea, its verdure dies away, and the river melts into its grave in a tame and sluggish stream; still, however, of sufficient force to carry its brown waters far into the bright green sea. Along the desert shore the white crust of salt indicates the cause of sterility. Thus the few living creatures which the Jordan washes down into the waters of the sea are destroyed. Hence arises the unnatural buoyancy and the intolerable nausea to taste and touch, which raise to the highest pitch the contrast between its clear, bitter waves, and the soft, fresh, turbid stream of its parent river. Strewn along its desolate margin lie the most striking memorials of this last conflict of life and death: trunks and branches of trees, torn down from the thickets of the river-jungle by the violence of the Jordan, thrust out into the sea, and thrown up again by its waves, dead and barren as itself. The dead beach shelves gradually into the calm waters. A deep haze--that which to earlier ages gave the appearance of the 'smoke going up for ever and ever'--veils its southern extremity, and almost gives it the dim horizon of a real sea. In the nearer view rises the low island close to its northern end, and the long promontory projecting from the eastern side, which divides it into its two unequal parts. This is all that I saw, and all that most pilgrims and travellers have seen, of the Dead Sea."[45]

The sinister aspect of the valley of the Jordan, especially at the embouchure of the river, impresses itself on the mind of every spectator. There the traveller finds the path narrowed between two abrupt gigantic walls. On the right rises the Arabian chain, black and perpendicular; on the left, the Judæan range, less elevated, more irregular, and resembling a dismantled ruin. "The valley comprised between these two chains," says the Père Laorty-Hadji, "exhibits a soil closely resembling the bed of a sea which has long been dry. You can discern but a few stunted trees. Ruined towns and castles appear in the distance. At the moment of flinging itself into the Dead Sea, the Jordan itself, traversing a muddy soil, changes its physiognomy and colour. It seems to drag reluctantly, towards the motionless lake, a burden of slow and tawny waters. The shores of the Dead Sea are low on the east and west; to the north and south high mountains enclose it." "These mountains, separated by a formidable cleft, exhibit their beds of red sandstone, overlain by a thick stratum of compact chalk, interrupted by silicious fragments. One is surprised not to see a volcanic crater, when all about, in this convulsed site, the action of fire is visible--the violent, bitter struggle of the two Neptunian and Plutonian principles, which, during the geological eras, contended for the empire of the world. One might say that here the two antagonistic forces exhausted themselves, that they have equally lost their potency; so much so, that at the close of the combat all has sunk into the silence and immobility of death. And who knows if the volcanic crater, whose absence at first astonishes the observer, is not the Dead Sea itself? Is it unreasonable to admit that after the upheaval of the mountains which inclose it, and which a terrible explosion of subterranean fire will have separated, the neighbouring waters were precipitated into and swallowed up in the yawning gulf which they still fill to-day?... This hypothesis is so much the more probable, because in this fire-scathed region the lake affords manifest indications of an igneous travail even now accomplishing itself sullenly in the bowels of the globe. We know that its name of Lake Asphaltites is due to the semi-fluid bituminous matter which constantly rises to its surface and accumulates on its shores. With the vapours exhaled by this bitumen under the influence of heat, mingle sulphurous and ammoniacal exhalations, which render the atmosphere of the Dead Sea dangerous to breathe."[46]

Before 1835 no one had ventured upon its waters. An Irish traveller, named Cottingham, was their first navigator; but after a five days' voyage he returned to Jerusalem, and died of exhaustion. Two years later Messrs. Moore and Beke made a new attempt. For several days they withstood the pestilential exhalations of the lake, and succeeded in proving the deep depression of its basin; but at length, both of them being taken ill, they were compelled to cut short their explorations. In 1847 the enterprise was undertaken by a Frenchman--Lieutenant Molyneux--who sounded it in many places, but was speedily carried off by fever. The following year Lieutenant Lynch, of the American navy, embarked on the lake in iron boats, with competent crews. He navigated its waters for three weeks; but all who composed the expedition were more or less severely attacked, and one of them, Lieutenant Deane, succumbed.

Though, as we have said, geographical research has dissipated most of the wild stories formerly accepted in reference to the peculiarly fatal concomitants of the Dead Sea, it well deserves its expressive name. It _is_ a _dead_ sea: it has neither the ocean's living movement nor deep-sounding roar; the surf and the spray never sparkle on its rocks; that "multitudinous laughter" which Homer ascribes to the sea is wholly wanting; the wind never wakes a smile on its passive and sombre countenance. By its shores one might realize Shelley's mournful wish, and feel

"In the warm air His cheek grow cold, and hear the sea Breathe o'er his dying brain its last monotony."[47]

It is lifeless, untenanted; the fish found there, and brought down by the Jordan, are dead. Unlike the Caspian, it is never stirred by the whirr of wings--by the flight of gulls, or pelicans, or sea-mews. The migratory birds sweep across it without even a pause, without seeking the prey which they could not find. Its waters are denser than those of other seas: their constituents are different, and mingled in different proportions.

Laorty-Hadji is mistaken in his idea that they repose on a bed of rock salt. Rock salt is the chloride of sodium in a nearly pure condition. But the Dead Sea holds in solution a comparatively small portion of this salt, mixed with large proportions of other salts. Its water was analyzed for the first time in 1778 by Lavoiser, Macquer, and Sage. Experiments have also been made by Arcet, Klaproth, Gmelin, Gay-Lussac, and, more recently, by Boussingault. According to the latter, it contains:--

Chloride of magnesium, 10.7288 Chloride of sodium, 6.4964 Chloride of calcium, 3.5592 Chloride of potassium, 1.6110 Bromide of magnesium, 0.3306 Sulphate of lime, 0.0424 Sal-ammoniac, .0013 Water, 77.2303 -------- 100.0000

It will be seen that it possesses neither chloride of manganese nor chloride of aluminium, no nitrates, and no iodines; that it is, therefore, not _sea water_, properly so called, but a mineral water _sui generis_.

The enormous proportion of saline matter accounts for its exceptional density, and justifies the assertion of travellers that a man floats upon its surface like a log of wood; though we can hardly credit the statement of Pococke that it is impossible to sink to the bottom. Its gravity undoubtedly endows it with extraordinary buoyancy, and to dive to any considerable depth is a matter of difficulty; but in the Dead Sea, as in other seas, man must employ his strength and skill to keep his body afloat.