Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/327

 loch which is invested with the same charm of superstition. Moore has introduced the legend in a little poem, beginning

 "By that lake whose gloomy shore Skylark never warbles o'er."

An Irish peasant gravely assured me that no skylark had flown over it in thirteen hundred years! He spoke with as much assurance as if his memory extended over the whole of that period. It is a pity that such poetic fancies have to disappear before the prose of fact. But the legend is just as true in regard to the Irish lake as to the Dead Sea. If I had had the faith of a true believer, it would have been unfortunate that just as we rode down to the shore, birds, startled at our approach, took wing and flew directly over these deadly waters; and that a puff of wind, that came down from the hills, should have set the lake in motion, so that the waves came rippling up the beach, as if they had been the clear waters of our own Lake George. But when we came to bathe in the Dead Sea, we found it indeed of very unusual weight and density, though not exactly lead; and when, to make a final test of its quality, we took a swallow into our mouths, ugh! it tasted of Sodom and Gomorrah!

Mounting our horses after our bath, we rode along the beach around the head of the lake, to the mouth of the Jordan, which here flows through a long and level stretch of sand, which it has thrown up in its annual floods, till at last the impetuous stream checks its swift current as if folding its robes to die with dignity, before it is quite swallowed up and lost. This sandy shore is not hard like a pebbled beach, and the horses' hoofs began to sink under us, so that we had to dismount and make our way on foot, but we kept on, not content till we stood at the very point of junction, where the rapid river, whose every motion has been full of life, at last dies in the Dead Sea.