The Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Barbara Kreiger

sites in all the surrounding lands in ancient days. The palm trees and sugar-cane that flourished into the Middle Ages were gone by the nineteenth century, but Mark Twain still found it “one of the very best locations for a town we have seen in all Palestine.” Of the old city he observed: “Ancient Jericho is not very picturesque as a ruin. When Joshua marched around it seven times, some three thousand years ago, and blew it down with his trumpet, he did the work so well and so completely that he hardly left enough of the city to cast a shadow.”

      Starting out the next morning—very early, advised the Handbook, to the dismay of the group—they crossed the plain to the Jordan River. Again, Mark Twain described the less exalted aspect of this milestone in the lives of Christians: “With the first suspicion of dawn, every pilgrim took off his clothes and waded into the dark torrent, singing. . . . But they did not sing long. The water was so fearfully cold that they were obliged to stop singing and scamper out again. Then they stood on the bank shivering, and so chagrined and so grieved, that they merited honest compassion. . . . They had promised themselves all along that they would cross the Jordan where the Israelites crossed it when they entered Canaan from their long pilgrimage in the desert. . . . They were at the goal of their hopes at last, but the current was too swift, the water was too cold!”

      From there it was an hour’s ride to the Dead Sea. “Here we feel the oppressive atmosphere of this desolate region,” notes the Handbook. “The air becomes close and hazy as the sun ascends, giving a wavy motion to the parched soil and a strange indistinctness of outline to distant objects. After an hour’s weary ride we reach the shore of the Dead Sea, with its unwholesome swamps and slimy margin, and ridges of drift wood, all incrusted with salt.” Those inclined would take a quick dip, expressing general disappointment at the dreariness of the setting while picking up bits of sulphur commonly supposed to have been left by the raining down of brimstone described in Genesis.

      The Conquest of Jericho, from Yosifon, 1743, a Yiddish translation of Josippon, tenth century. Collection of the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

      One can understand the determination of pilgrims to bathe in the revered water of the Jordan River, but one hardly knows why many of them agreed to go any further on a journey which, though but two days longer, was stressful and taxing by any estimation. Even Mark Twain’s humor evaporated under the midday sun: “I can not describe the hideous afternoon’s ride from the Dead Sea to Mars [sic] Saba. It oppresses me yet, to think of it. The sun so pelted us that the tears ran down our cheeks once or twice. The ghastly, treeless, grassless, breathless canons [i.e., canyons] smothered us as if we had been in an oven. The sun had positive weight to it, I think. Not a man could sit erect under it. All drooped low in the saddles.”

      On their approach to Mar Saba, tourists who referred to their Handbook were warned of the rule that holds even today: “Ladies will remember that they cannot under any circumstances obtain admission” to the monastery. But the men were treated to a tour of “the most extraordinary building in Palestine.” In the fifth century, St. Saba retreated to the desert, drawing thousands of followers to the site on which they would construct the magnificent, jeweled monastery that in its prime (until plundered by the Persians in the seventh century) would be home to 5,000 Greek Orthodox monks. It was built over the course of many years, and its treasures were hauled all the way from Greece.

      “By God’s grace,” wrote the twelfth-century Abbot Daniel, “the situation of the Laura of St. Sabbas is a marvelous and indescribable one. A dry torrent bed, terrible to behold, and very deep, is shut in by high walls of rock, to which the cells are fixed and kept in place by the hand of God in a surprising and fearful manner. These cells, fastened to the precipices flanking this frightful torrent, are attached to the rocks like the stars to the firmament.” The blue-domed monastery is stitched to the walls of Wadi Kidron, and today a handful of monks studiously maintains the complex while performing the same isolated devotions that St. Saba observed fifteen centuries ago.

      The Dead Sea was as much a catalyst to the literary imagination as it had earlier been to the religious one. Half a century before Mark Twain traveled there, Sir Walter Scott had found in the Dead Sea region (which he never visited) the setting he required for his novel The Talisman, A Tale of the Crusaders. As his knight crossed the desert of the Dead Sea in the book’s opening page, he forgot all his privations as he recalled, “the fearful catastrophe which had converted into an arid waste and dismal wilderness the fair and fertile valley of Siddim, once well watered, even as the garden of the Lord, now a parched and blighted waste, condemned to eternal sterility.

      Monastery of Mar Saba with view of the Dead Sea, from The Holy Land by David Roberts, vol. 2, 1843. Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, the National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

      “Crossing himself as he viewed the dark mass of rolling waters, in color as in quality unlike those of every other lake, the traveler shuddered as he remembered that beneath these sluggish waves lay the once proud cities of the plain, whose grave was dug by the thunder of the heavens, or the eruption of subterraneous fire, and whose remains were hid, even by that sea which holds no living fish in its bosom, bears no skiff on its surface, and, as if its own dreadful bed were the only fit receptacle for its sullen waters, sends not, like other lakes, a tribute to the ocean.”

      Benjamin Disraeli’s hero Tancred wandered in the desert east of the lake, and Gustav Flaubert made the journey himself. But in no literary imagination did the Dead Sea burn so keenly as in Herman Melville’s. The lure of the East extended as far back as his childhood. In his autobiographical Redburn, he recalled having seen a man who had just returned from Egypt and the Dead Sea: “I very well remembered staring at a man . . . who was pointed out to me by my aunt one Sunday in Church, as the person who had been in Stony Arabia, and passed through strange adventures there, all of which with my own eyes I had read in the book which he wrote, an arid-looking book in a pale yellow cover.

      “‘See what big eyes he has,’ whispered my aunt, ‘they got so big, because when he was almost dead with famishing in the desert, he all at once caught sight of a date tree, with the ripe fruit hanging on it.’

      “. . . I never saw this wonderful Arabian traveler again. But he long haunted me.”

      Melville traveled to the Holy Land some years later, in 1856, a few years after Moby Dick was published and lambasted. Suffering still from the depression brought on by his novel’s reception, he found in the East something quite different from what his boyhood fantasies had taught him to expect. His despondency found a focus in the Dead Sea, which provoked him to the melancholic reflection recorded in his journal: “Ride over mouldy plain to Dead Sea— . . . smarting bitter of the water,—carried the bitter in my mouth all day—bitterness of life—thought of all bitter things—Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are those waters of Death, thought I.” But his experience provided him with the material for a major literary effort, the 18,000 line poem Clarel, large portions of which are set either in Jerusalem or at the Dead Sea. There was the holy city on high, overlooking the dry, sunken valley 4,000 feet below. The geographical arrangement could not have been better devised by Dante himself, and Melville made full use of it.

      Since the Middle Ages, not a century has passed during which some European traveler, motivated by religious fervor, scientific curiosity, or personal eccentricity, hasn’t made his way to the Holy Land and descended to the lowest place on earth—its reputation established by the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah and nurtured by superstitions of later ages—and identified it as a facsimile of Hell. The accounts of those early travelers are enlightening, though the light they shed is often not so much on the nature of the Dead Sea as on the preconceptions of those who eagerly awaited the latest report on the desolate chasm from the brave ones who, it seems, did not always in fact make the descent, but fashioned their accounts to coincide with the fantastic expectations