The mountains on the western side of the Dead Sea, like the hills of Judea, are limestone, of a white, red, and yellow hue, and, rising from 1000 to 2000 feet high, their sides are barren and rugged, and broken into wild ravines. At intervals the hills recede, forming on the shore semicircular plains, which, being watered by brackish fountains, are converted into salt marshes. Along the western coast large quantities of pure sulphur, asphalt, and pumice-stone abound. In the southwest corner of the vale, extending five miles to the northwest, is a rugged ridge of hills composed entirely of mineral salt. From a marshy delta, coated with salt and bitumen, a grand ravine leads up to this saline ridge, called by the Arabs Jebel Usdum. The winter torrents have cut deep furrows in its sides from summit to base, and the combined action of the rains, and the burning siroccos that sweep over mountain and plain, have rounded the faces of the cliffs. The peaks rise in tiers, while their roots, in lesser hills, project toward the sea. Far up the ravine, between two higher cliffs, is a lower ridge, not unlike a pedestal, on which is a singular pillar of pure solid salt, round in front and angular behind. Resting on a pedestal sixty feet high, the solitary column rises forty feet higher, connected with the hill behind by an immense bar of salt. This is the only resemblance to “Lot’s wife” in the vale, but can not be her, as its position is in the wrong direction from Zoar. But the presence of such a mountain of salt, whose base beneath the surface is washed by the waves, and from whose summit large blocks of salt are carried down by the rains into the water, sufficiently accounts for the extreme saltness of the sea. On the marshy flats at its base is the “Valley of Salt,” where David slew “eighteen thousand Syrians,”[314] and where Amaziah, at a later period, slew “ten thousand Edomites.”[315]