The morning sun cast purple, dusky shadows over the great mountains to the east, leaving patches of bright light on their level summits. The high piles of cumulus rose, in silvery brilliancy, above a long grey base of stratus cloud. The sea itself lay unruffled by a single breath of wind, blue and glossy, shining like oil, with long bands of white scum here and there stretching across it. The foreground was yet more extraordinary--fawn-coloured marl with bands of dark brown flint, in a tumbled confusion of cones and knolls, without a single tree or shrub, but streaked, on the north, with a pinkish colour, and capped with harder limestone. Part of this district still bears, among the Bedawîn, the title ’Amrîyeh, which represents the Hebrew Amorah or Gomorrah. A few scattered ruins exist on the plateau, and the Arabs have a tradition that these are remains of vineyards, which once existed, according to them, throughout this scorched and desolate solitude. The hills west of the plateau are well worthy of notice. They consist of hard brown limestone, and I discovered a feature of great geological interest, in a fault which runs north and south, at the point where the white marl commences: showing that a violent, and probably sudden subsidence has here taken place, at a period so late (geologically speaking) as to be subsequent to the chalk era. The general bearing of this observation on the history of the lake, will be noticed in a subsequent chapter. The heat was terrible. Not only was the actual temperature high, but not a blade of grass nor a breath of wind gave relief. The caves were the only places where any shade could be found, and they were even hotter than the glaring desert. There are probably few places in Asia where the sun beats down with as fierce and irresistible a power as in the Desert of Judah. The western mountains, above the plateau, form a long ridge running north and south, the highest point of which is called El Muntâr, the “watch tower,” while the rest is named El Hadeidûn. A steep slope, unbroken save by precipices, comes sheer down from the top to the plateau, and the mountain is barren and fawn-coloured like the rest of the country. Now this hill, as I afterwards found out, is a place of historical interest, and the story is as follows: According to the Law of Moses the Scapegoat was led to the wilderness and there set free. This was not, however, the practice of the later Jews. A scapegoat had once come back to Jerusalem, and the omen was thought so bad that the ordinary custom was modified, to prevent the recurrence of such a calamity. The man who led the goat arrived at a high mountain, called Sook, and there was at this place a rolling slope, down which he pushed the unhappy animal, which was shattered to atoms in the fall.