Neither of us who took it will ever forget that ride through the Wilderness. There was no road. Two deep ruts here and there marked our way. We wound through soft ooze turning now into the rut, now out again. On every side were hillocks of soft gray sand. “This is a good place to ride the donkey’s back,” said Jamil as we bounced up and down in the car, but he smiled. We told him we had motored to Germany over the shell-torn roads fording the bridgeless streams and this seemed very simple. Three miles of it and we were on a rough road close by the Dead Sea. It lay still and calm, a blue gray thing crossed here and there by ribbons of silver where the sun glistened upon it. I should have said it had no motion but for the tiny little ripples that broke on the pebbly beach made frosty with salt deposit. A thousand feet and more below the Mediterranean it lay there. Sitting beside it we were lower than any submarine has ever been. The city of Jerusalem is two thousand five hundred feet above the level of the sea so our descent had been over thirty-five hundred feet since morning. It was very warm. Though the great body of water lay there now so still, Jamil told us that when the Turks were using it to transport supplies, fierce storms swept over it, thunder roared in the hills and over the plains, and giant waves dashed upon the smooth shore. We looked across the fourteen miles of sea to the plateau in the hills of Moab and knew that there was no living thing in it nor on its whole great stretch of fifty miles! Hungrily it swallows up the rivers and the tiny streams, the Jordan alone pouring millions of gallons into it every day, but never, never does it send out even a tiny streamlet. It grants no answer to the plea of the thirsty land that seems to reach down into it hopefully. We put our hands into the water four times as heavy as the Atlantic and they were covered with an oily salty deposit that would not come off until we had scrubbed with hot water. Suddenly we heard a sound—the bleating of a sheep. It was so welcome in that dead silence! Beyond the bend in the shoreline was a tiny house with children and the sheep! We walked slowly along over the smooth gaily colored little pebbles to the spot, half a mile beyond, where the car was waiting. But we turned to look back again and again. The great silent sea held for us the awful fascination of _death_. There was a road of a sort across the plain to the Jordan. When the river is in flood this plain is covered inches deep with ooze, rank vegetable growths spring up, the brown bushes are green, clouds of mosquitoes, scorpions, vipers and all manner of crawling things make their home here for a season; but now there were only long cracks that crossed and recrossed in the dried mud. Twice our wheels spun round in pockets of soft gray clay, but small thick boards, a spade and dry sand helped us out. A turn and we could see the river!