Page:The lives of celebrated travellers (Volume 1).djvu/322

 inundation. On the contrary, its waters ran at least two yards below the brink of its channel.

Proceeding onwards towards the Dead Sea, they passed over an undulating plain, in some places rising into hillocks, resembling those places in England where there have formerly been limekilns, and which may possibly have been the scene of the overthrow of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah recorded in Genesis. On approaching the Dead Sea, they observed that on the east and west it was hemmed in by mountains of vast height, between whose barren ridges it stretched away, like a prodigious canal, farther than the eye could reach towards the south. On the north its limpid and transparent waters rattled along a bed of black pebbles, which being held over the flame of a candle quickly kindle, and, without being consumed, emit a black smoke of intolerable stench. Immense quantities of similar stones are said to be found in the sulphureous hills bordering upon the lake. None of the bitumen which the waves of this sea occasionally disgorge was then to be found, although it was reported that both on the eastern and western shores it might be gathered in great abundance at the foot of the mountains. The structures of fable with which tradition and "superstitious idle-headed Eld" had surrounded this famous sea vanished, like the false waters of the desert, upon examination. No malignant vapours ascended from the surface of the waves, carrying death to the birds which might attempt to fly over it. On the contrary, several birds amused themselves in hovering about and over the sea, and the shells of fish were found among the pebbles on the shore. Those apples of Sodom which, "atra et inania velut in cinerem vanescunt," according to the expression of Tacitus, for a thousand years have furnished poets with comparisons and similes, were found, like many other beautiful things, to flourish only in song; there being in the neighbourhood of the lake no trees upon