To analyse it or to specify the causes which have produced it were an impossible task. Three things have to do with it very specially. There is the habit of the Eastern mind in dealing with matters of fact. Truth is not to the Oriental the primary moral necessity which it is to the West. Vividness and forcefulness of presentation count for at least as much. The Arab story-teller is said to close his enumeration of various legends with the sacramental formula, “God knows best where the truth lies,”--the truth being a matter of God’s responsibility, while to man is committed only responsibility for being interesting. Again, in the East, terror is a recognised force between man and man; and the great forces of nature and the more occult forces of magic are recognised and taken as part of the natural order. Religion also has had her share in the “Great Asian Mystery.” This land is, to most devout persons, altogether isolated and apart, as the place of a divine revelation such as no other part of earth has known. There is a passage in _Pseudo-Aristeas_ where, describing his supposed embassy to Jerusalem, he gazes at the constant waving of the veil in the Temple, which screened from his view the holiest things of Israel. As it rippled and swung in the wind it seemed to tantalise the gazer with the never-fulfilled promise of a glimpse into the secret place.[50] The wistful sense of mystery in that letter gives a hint which is of extraordinary significance on this subject. The geographical formation of the land and its strange colouring lend themselves to the spectral and the uncanny. The Dead Sea presents the most sinister landscape in the world. The opening paragraphs of Scott’s _Talisman_, founded upon the description of Josephus, are certainly overdrawn, yet in truth everything conspires to produce a sense of ghostliness by these unearthly shores. A ring of “scalded hills” encircles them, and a perpetual haze lies upon their waters. Their soil is nitrous and their springs sulphurous. Blocks of asphalt lie among their shingle; and fish, dead and salted, are cast up by the waves. There is little life visible about them, whether of man or beast or bird. Here and there the tempting Apple of Sodom grows, to appearance the most luscious of fruits, but so dry that its core is combustible and is used as tinder by the Arabs. A few feet above the summer level of the sea runs an unbroken line of drift-wood washed down by winter floods and left white and sparkling with crusted salt.