In this plain they saw the fountain of Elisha, shaded by a broad-spreading tree. Jericho itself had dwindled into a small wretched village, inhabited by Arabs; and the plain beyond it, extending to the Jordan, appeared to be blasted by the breath of sterility, producing nothing but a species of samphire, and similar stunted marine plants. Here and there, where thin sheets of water, now evaporated by the rays of the sun, had formerly spread themselves over the marshy soil, a saline efflorescence, white and glittering like a crust of snow, met the eye; and the whole valley of the Jordan, all the way to the Dead Sea, appeared to be impregnated with that mineral. They found this celebrated river, which in old times overflowed its banks, to be a small stream not above twenty yards in breadth, which, to borrow the words of the traveller, seemed to have forgotten its former greatness, there being no sign or probability of its rising, though the time, the 30th of March, was the proper season of the inundation. On the contrary, its waters ran at least two yards below the brink of its channel. Proceeding onwards towards the Dead Sea, they passed over an undulating plain, in some places rising into hillocks, resembling those places in England where there have formerly been limekilns, and which may possibly have been the scene of the overthrow of the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah recorded in Genesis. On approaching the Dead Sea, they observed that on the east and west it was hemmed in by mountains of vast height, between whose barren ridges it stretched away, like a prodigious canal, farther than the eye could reach towards the south. On the north its limpid and transparent waters rattled along a bed of black pebbles, which being held over the flame of a candle quickly kindle, and, without being consumed, emit a black smoke of intolerable stench. Immense quantities of similar stones are said to be found in the sulphureous hills bordering upon the lake. None of the bitumen which the waves of this sea occasionally disgorge was then to be found, although it was reported that both on the eastern and western shores it might be gathered in great abundance at the foot of the mountains. The structures of fable with which tradition and “superstitious idle-headed Eld” had surrounded this famous sea vanished, like the false waters of the desert, upon examination. No malignant vapours ascended from the surface of the waves, carrying death to the birds which might attempt to fly over it. On the contrary, several birds amused themselves in hovering about and over the sea, and the shells of fish were found among the pebbles on the shore. Those apples of Sodom which, “atra et inania velut in cinerem vanescunt,” according to the expression of Tacitus, for a thousand years have furnished poets with comparisons and similes, were found, like many other beautiful things, to flourish only in song; there being in the neighbourhood of the lake no trees upon which they could grow.