As our traveler and his party journeyed on toward the sea, they found the country descending continually, and as they followed the road down the valleys and ravines through which it lay, they imagined that they had reached the level of the sea, long before they came in sight of its shores. At length, however, to their astonishment, they came suddenly out upon the brow of a mountain, from which they looked down into a deep and extended valley where the broad expanse of water lay, fifteen hundred feet below them. The surprise which they experienced at finding the sea at so much lower a level than their estimate made it, illustrates the singular accuracy of Robinson's ideas in respect to the topography of the country which he was exploring; for, if the Dead Sea had been really at the same level with the Mediterranean, as was then generally supposed to be the case, it would have presented itself to the party of travelers precisely as they had expected to find it. The unlooked for depth was owing to a very extraordinary depression of the valley, the existence and the measure of which has since been ascertained. Robinson and his companions, from the summit of a small knoll which lay on one side of their path, looked down upon the vast gulf beneath them with emotions of wonder and awe. It was the Dead Sea which they saw extended before them. There it lay, filling the bottom of its vast chasm, and shut in on both sides by ranges of precipitous mountains, whose steep acclivities seemed sometimes to rise directly from the water, though here and there they receded a little from the shore, so as to leave a narrow beach beneath the rocks below. From the point where our observers stood the whole southern half of the sea was exposed to view. The northern part was partly concealed by a precipitous promontory, called Ras Mersed, which rose abruptly from the shore a little north of their position.