Dead Sea

a celebrated lake of Palestine. It occupies a sunken valley at the eastern foot of the Lebanon Mountains. It is the deepest known inland depression in the earth's surface. The lake is forty-six miles in length and from five to nine miles in length and from five to nine miles wide. Its surface is 1,292 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean. The depth of the water varies from three feet to thirteen hundred feet at the center of the northern section. The River Jordan is the chief tributary. There is no outlet. The waters are charmingly blue, but bitter to the taste, and fetid. It is several times as salt as the ocean. People who go in bathing cannot sink. They require to use care, or else the body assumes an inconvenient position-feet up and head down. The only life in the water consists of a certain low animalcule. The east and the west shores are steep limestone cliffs. The northern shore is a brackish, muddy flat, with here and there a dead tree incrusted with salt. The southern shore is equally dreary and desolate. It is marked by a long ridge of rock salt, 300 feet high, called by the Arabs the ridge of Sodom. There are no present indications that the valley ever was inhabited; there is little life of any sort in the vicinity, though a few bird-inhabited thickets of oleander are found on the shore and in the valleys of tributaries. Twenty-five per cent of the water consists of solid matter; seven percent is salt. Divers bring up salt from the bottom of the sea, dry it in the sun, and carry it on camels to market at Jerusalem. This lake has been called also the Sea of Sodom and the Salt Sea. See Caspian; Death Valley; Altitude