The lower valley teemed with wild life along the stony bed of the Kelt; the desert partridges marched in a file of eight or ten, and the blunt noses of the jerboas peeped out of their holes. A large black water-bird was slowly flying up stream, and a flock of wild pigeons hovered over the opposite cliff.
Just where the Kelt falls into the Jordan there is a great bend westward, and an open shingly shore to the river. The opposite bank, some twenty yards off, is a flat expanse of mud, with a perpendicular marl-cliff above, some fifty feet high. North of this ford is a group of magnificent tamarisks, apparently of great antiquity; on the south the thick jungle again hides the stream.
From the Pilgrim's Bathing-place we rode down by the beautiful blue pool of 'Ain Hajlah, and over the desolate expanse of grey, salt mud, to the mouth of Jordan, where a delta of soft marsh and vegetable debris is formed, and so along the open pebbly beach of the Dead Sea.
The scenery round the sea is very fine. It is compared, by those who have seen both, to that of the Lake of Geneva. The appearance of the shore is desolate in the extreme, in consequence of the long line of white driftwood--dry trunks of tamarisks and willows, brought down by the winter floods, and now bleaching fifteen feet above the summer level of the water, crusted over with white and bitter salt.
The present chapter is too short to allow of an account of the sea itself, of its nauseous taste, its high specific gravity, or of the peculiar sensations of bathing in its waters. On my first visit I had to swim out to the curious island, called Rujm el Bahr (the Cairn of the Sea), covered with stones, and connected by a stony causeway with the land--a place which seems to me to be the ruin of an artificial pier or jetty. When I got back, very sore and with smarting eyes, I soon became coated with white salt. On this day also I noticed flocks of wild-fowl swimming about half a mile from shore--a practical contradiction of the old fable that birds flying over the Dead Sea fall into it dead. I have never, however, found any living animal in the water, though many fish, brought down by the Jordan current, lie salted and pickled along the shores.