The Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Barbara Kreiger

and dark like Hell’s chimney.” Passed on in a text for pilgrims, the hyperbolic expression was perhaps intended to discourage Christians from venturing too near the presumably still contagious seat of ancient sin.

      There were voices, too, which sought from the earliest stage of western encounter with the lake to dispel superstition and lift the cloud of ignorance which hung over this most strange body of water, whose peculiarity had been recognized and remarked on throughout historical times. The Dead Sea first attracted the notice of the ancient Greeks and Romans: Aristotle referred to it in his Meteorology, Pliny discussed it in his Natural History, and Strabo in his Geography—all by the end of the first century CE. Medieval reports were frequently less informed, though not because their authors were less serious. On the contrary, if seriousness is a measure, texts of the Middle Ages hold up with any. “Much has been written and said about this sea by divers [sic] people,” wrote Burchard with thirteenth-century solemnity; “you must know that I fear not to tell what I have seen with my own eyes . . . which is, that the whole of the valley which used rightly to be called the Illustrious Valley . . . is made barren by the smoke of this sea. . . . This is indeed a dreadful judgment of God, who for so many centuries so punished the sins of the Sodomites, that even the land itself pays the penalty thereof after so many thousands of years.” As the passage suggests, the works were intended not as natural history but, as stated in the introduction to a popular thirteenth-century compendium, “to explain the allusions to natural objects met with in the Scriptures.” Faithful reporting was not the foremost goal, though at times an accurate chord was struck. In this latter book, the English Franciscan Bartholomew described a lake called the Dead Sea because “it breedeth, ne receiveth, no thing that hath life.”

      Two hundred years saw virtually no alteration in approach, and we read in another pilgrims’ text about a lake known as the Dead Sea “because it does not run, but is ever motionless.” Yet another two centuries did witness a change; travelers who claimed to have seen the lake were more likely to have done so, and among those who did see it, there was a growing inclination to report soberly. The basic pedagogical approach lingered, however, nowhere more unabashedly manifested than in Thomas Fuller’s 1650 A Pisgah-sight of Palestine. This lake, he explained, is sometimes called the Dead Sea “either because the charnel-house of so many dead carcasses then destroyed therein; or because it kills all creatures coming into it; or lastly, because dull and dead, not enlivened with a tide, or quickened with any visible motion, one main cause of the offensive favor there, laziness disposing men to lewdness, and waters to putrefaction.”

      Explorers were generally familiar with the accounts of travelers who preceded them, and two early works they admired were Henry Maundrell’s 1697 A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem and Richard Pococke’s lengthy 1740 account, A Description of the East, and Some Other Countries. Given its early date, Maundrell’s book is notable for its author’s attitude: “I am sensible of two general Defects . . . running through this whole paper,” he wrote in a preface addressed to his uncle. “One is, frequent Errours; the other, Tediousness . . . But . . . I profess with a clear Conscience, that whatever Mistakes there may be, yet there are no Lies.” Maundrell’s and Pococke’s works were used by numerous later explorers for the purpose of comparison.

      Despite the currency of certain myths, there were those even before the turn of the nineteenth century who attempted to dig for truths about the lake over or on which, it was said, no living thing could pass without being affected by its vapors. The more we read, the more we realize that the achievements of those early travelers were not just quaint but truly significant. One of the lake’s greatest mysteries had to do with its level: How did the Dead Sea, which received the abundant water of the Jordan River and other smaller tributaries—and which had no apparent issue—maintain a constant level? Diodorus had observed in the first century BCE that “although great rivers of remarkable sweetness empty into it, the lake gets the better of them by reason of its evil smell.” Thirteen centuries later, the Arab geographer Dimashki summarized the various views then current about how the lake maintained its level: “The people have many opinions concerning the disappearance of the waters (of the Dead Sea). Some say that its waters have an exit into a country afar off, whose lands they irrigate and fertilize, and here the waters may be drunk. . . . Others say that the soil all round the lake being extremely hot, and having beds of sulphur beneath, there never cease to rise vapours, and there, causing the water to evaporate, keep it to a certain level. Others again say there is an exit through the earth whereby its waters join those of the Red Sea; and others again affirm it has no bottom, but that there is a passage leading down to the Behemoth (who supports the earth).” Charming, and on the whole farfetched—yet the second, for all its elaborateness in suggesting evaporation as the cause, approached the truth.

      Whether or not later western science read medieval Arab geography is unclear, but it would be six more centuries before Europe came to some agreement about the phenomenon. Thomas Fuller filled the gap. While his less pedantic successors would struggle with the question, Fuller displayed singular equanimity: this sea, he asserted, “hath but one good quality, namely, that it entertains intercourse with no other seas; which may be imputed to the providence of nature, debarring it from communion with the ocean, lest otherwise it should infect other waters with its malignity.” A century later, Pococke puzzled over the phenomenon, wondering whether so much water could indeed be lost to evaporation, and he leaned toward the theory that there must be some secret outlet: “It is very extraordinary that no outlet of this lake has been discovered, but it is supposed that there must be some subterraneous passage into the Mediterranean.” Apparently his was the prevailing view of the eighteenth century, and it took another half century or so for that view to shift. According to a book published in the first years of the 1800s, it had until recently been a prominent view that the Dead Sea “discharges its superfluous waters by subterraneous channels,” but it was by then commonly believed that evaporation was in fact the cause of the disappearance of all the excess water.

      Many early explorers regarded as untenable the notion that nothing could live in the Dead Sea—for of what use is a body of water, if not to support God’s creatures? (The famous sixth-century Madaba map depicting a startled fish turning back up the Jordan before entering the lake was not uncovered until the 1880s.) Early on, rumors of the extraordinary phenomenon were accepted with aplomb not found in later, more sophisticated, investigators. Again the inimitable Fuller: “This Salt-Sea was sullen and churlish, differing from all other in the conditions thereof. . . . [The] most sportful fish dare not jest with the edged tools of this Dead-Sea; which if unwillingly hurried therein by the force of the stream of Jordan, they presently expire.”

      Pococke, for one, found it particularly hard to accept, especially as he heard that a monk had seen fish caught in the lake, but he agreed to reserve judgment until all the evidence was gathered. Early in the 1800s the Frenchman François de Chateaubriand, camping by the Dead Sea one night, was startled by a sound upon the water and was told by his Bedouin guides that the noise was caused by “legions of small fish which come and leap about on the shore.” An editor compiling such anecdotes some twenty years later was amused by Chateaubriand’s gullibility and smirked that the fish were “doubtless seeking to be delivered from the pestilential waters.” He chuckled that this was “nothing more than a hoax upon the learned Frenchman.” Though Chateaubriand had disavowed any scientific intentions and insisted his book be read simply as memoir, he was subjected to criticism throughout the century for his impressionability. As for the editor, his smugness was made possible by a report that had come out around the same time as Chateaubriand’s book, in which a highly respected scientist, having collected the snail shells that to many had been proof of life in the sea, identified them as a land species. (Actually they were freshwater snails, either washed down by the winter floods or coming from springs.)

      There are probably few natural phenomena in the world that have so perplexed and enchanted travelers of all ages as the buoyancy of the Dead Sea. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle had mused about a fabled lake in Palestine, “such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink.” Three hundred years later, Strabo turned his attention to the same subject: “The water is exceedingly heavy, so that no person can dive into it; if anyone wades into it up to the waist, and attempts to move forward, he is immediately lifted