Dame Nature must indeed have been in a most afflicting throe to have given birth to a progeny so monstrous; and there being no locality to which the most vivid fancy could assign aught that ever bore the name of wealth or human population, little doubt can exist that the sea must have been repelled far from its former boundaries. The oviform figure of the bowl, hemmed in on three sides by volcanic mountains, and on the fourth by sheets of lava, would at the first glance indicate the site of an extensive crater, whose cone having fallen into a subterranean abyss, had given rise to the singular appearance witnessed. But it is a far more probable hypothesis that the Bahr Assal, now a dead sea, formed at some very remote period a continuation of the Gulf of Tajura, and was separated from Goobut el Kharab by a stream of lava six miles in breadth, subsequently upheaved by subterranean action, and now forming a barrier, which, from its point of greatest elevation, where the traces of many craters still exist, gradually slopes eastward towards the deep waters of the bay, and westward into the basin of the Salt Lake. Whilst no soundings are found in the estuary of Tajura, Goobut el Kharab gives one hundred and fifteen fathoms, or six hundred and ninety feet; and premising the depression of the lake to have been formerly correspondent therewith, one hundred and twenty feet may be assumed as its present depth. To this it has been reduced by the great annual evaporation that must take place--an evaporation decreasing every year as the salt solution becomes more intensely concentrated, and evinced by the saline incrustation on the surface no less than by a horizontal efflorescence, in strata, at a considerable height on the face of the circumjacent rocks. In the lapse of years, should the present order of things continue undisturbed from below, the water win probably disappear altogether, leaving a field of rock salt, which, when covered in by the debris washed down from the adjacent mountains, will form an extensive depot for the supply of Danakil generations yet unborn; and the shocks of earthquakes being still occasionally felt in the neighbourhood, it seems not improbable--to carry the speculation still further--that Goobut el Kharab, divided only by a narrow channel from the Bay of Tajura, will, under subterranean influence, be, in due process of time, converted into a salt lake, in no material respect dissimilar from the Bahr Assal-- another worthy type of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Volume One, Chapter XV. DISMAL NIGHT-MARCH ALONG THE INHOSPITABLE SHORES OF THE GREAT SALT LAKE.