is the most elevated.[44] "Its basin," to quote Dean Stanley's graphic description, "is a steaming caldron--a bowl which, from the peculiar temperature and deep cavity in which it is situated, can never be filled to overflowing. The river Jordan, itself exposed to the same withering influences, is not copious enough to furnish a supply equal to the demand made by the rapid evaporation. Its excessive saltness is even more remarkable than its deep depression. This peculiarity is, it is believed, mainly occasioned by the huge barrier of fossil-salt at its south-west corner, and heightened by the rapid evaporation of the fresh water poured into it. Other like phenomena, though in a less striking form, exist elsewhere. But, without entering into its wider relations, this aspect is important, as that which most forcibly impressed the sacred writers. To them it was 'the salt sea,' and nothing more. They exhibit hardly a trace of the exaggerations of later times. And so it is in fact. It is not gloom, but desolation, which is the prevailing characteristic of the Sea of Death. Follow the course of the Jordan to its end. How different from the first burst of its waters in Mount Hermon, amongst the groves of Dan and Paneas! How different from the 'riotous prodigality of life' which has marked its downward course, almost to the very termination of its existence! Gradually, within the last mile from the Dead Sea, its verdure dies away, and the river melts into its grave in a tame and sluggish stream; still, however, of sufficient force to carry its brown waters far into the bright green sea. Along the desert shore the white crust of salt indicates the cause of sterility. Thus the few living creatures which the Jordan washes down into the waters of the sea are destroyed. Hence arises the unnatural buoyancy and the intolerable nausea to taste and touch, which raise to the highest pitch the contrast between its clear, bitter waves, and the soft, fresh, turbid stream of its parent river. Strewn along its desolate margin lie the most striking memorials of this last conflict of life and death: trunks and branches of trees, torn down from the thickets of the river-jungle by the violence of the Jordan, thrust out into the sea, and thrown up again by its waves, dead and barren as itself. The dead beach shelves gradually into the calm waters. A deep haze--that which to earlier ages gave the appearance of the 'smoke going up for ever and ever'--veils its southern extremity, and almost gives it the dim horizon of a real sea. In the nearer view rises the low island close to its northern end, and the long promontory projecting from the eastern side, which divides it into its two unequal parts. This is all that I saw, and all that most pilgrims and travellers have seen, of the Dead Sea."[45]