Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. V, No. XXIX., October, 1852. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ from the Jordan was nearly exhausted. Their stock of provisions, too, was well-nigh spent, and Lieutenant Lynch felt a considerable degree of uneasiness in respect to the means of sufficiently replenishing it. He sent off detachments from his party to Hebron and to Jerusalem, to procure supplies, directing them to bring whatever they could procure to En-gedi. He also sent an Arab chieftain, named Akil, round to the eastern side of the sea, to Kerak, to purchase provisions there. The Arab, if successful, was to bring down his stores to the sea, at the peninsula, and at the proper time, Lieutenant Lynch was to send one of the boats across from En-gedi to receive them.

      Things being thus arranged, the tents were struck, the boats pushed off from the land, while a train of Arabs attended by the loaded camel, took up their line of march along the beach. As they proceeded, the boats stopped from time to time, to note and to record every thing worthy of notice that appeared along the shore. They passed the mouth of the brook Kedron, a deep gorge, narrow at the base, and yawning wide at the summit. The sides of this frightful ravine were twelve hundred feet high. The bed of it was perfectly dry; the waters of the stream at this season of the year being wholly absorbed by the sands long before reaching the sea. They passed many caves, some opening into the face of the rock, far up the mountain sides, in positions wholly inaccessible. The shores were generally barren and desolate, consisting of dark brown mountains, which looked as if they had been scorched by fire, with a narrow beach equally dreary and desolate below. Here and there, however, little valleys opened, which sustained a scanty vegetation, and birds and other animals were occasionally seen. There seemed to be no vegetation, except at points where streams or springs of fresh water flowed down from the land.

      The boats proceeded onward in this manner till night, and then rounding a point which was covered sparsely with bushes and trees, and with tufts of cane and grass, they came into a little bay which opened to a dell, fertilized by a fountain. The name of the fountain was Turabeh. Flowers were growing here, and certain fruits, the sight of which gladdened the eyes of our voyagers, though in any other situation they would have attracted little attention. The stream which sustained this vegetation was extremely small. The water trickled down from the spring so scantily that the Arabs were forced to dig holes in the sand, and wait for them to fill, in order to procure enough for drink. Still its influence was sufficient to clothe its narrow dell with something like verdure and fruitfulness. The little oasis had its inhabitants, too, as well as its plants and flowers. One of the party saw a duck at a little distance from the shore, and fired at her; though it might have been thought that no one could have had the heart to disturb even a duck in the possession of so solitary and humble a domain. In fact, it seems the sportsman must have had some misgivings, and was accordingly not very careful in his aim, for the bird was not harmed by the shot. She flew out to sea a little way, alarmed by the report, and then alighting on the glassy surface of the water, began to swim back again toward the shore, as if thinking it not possible that the strange intruders into her lonely home, whoever and whatever they might be, could really intend to do her any harm.

      Soon after the party in the boats had landed, the camel with his attendants arrived, and they all encamped on this spot for the night. The scene which presented itself when the arrangements had been made for the night was, as usual in such cases, very solemn and impressive. The tents stood among the trees. The Arab watch-fires were burning. The boats were drawn up upon the shore. The dark and sombre mountains rose like a wall behind the encampment; while the smooth and placid sea was spread out before it, reflecting with a sort of metallic lustre the silver radiance of the moon. The stillness, too, which reigned around seemed strange and fearful, it was so absolute and profound.

      In the morning, the party, after breakfasting under the trees on the shore, resumed their voyage. After proceeding a few miles along the coast, they saw an Arab on the beach. The Arab hailed the party, and they attempted to communicate with him, but could not understand what he said. At one place they stopped to examine a mass of ruins which they saw standing a short distance up the mountain side. The ruins proved to be the remains of a wall, built to defend the entrances to several caves which opened in the face of the precipice directly behind them. The caves were perfectly dry, and one of them was large enough to contain twenty or thirty men. There were openings cut from them through the rock to the air above, intended apparently to serve the purpose of chimneys. These caves were in the wilderness of En-gedi.

      In fact, the boats were now drawing near to their place of destination. At noon they arrived at the spot, and the party landing, unloaded the boats and hauled them up upon the shore. They selected a spot for their encampment on the little plain at the foot of the cliffs, not far from the place where the stream descends to it from the mountain above. They found that the gardens and other marks of vegetation which Robinson had observed at the time of his visit, had disappeared; in other respects, every thing corresponded with his description. The water was gushing from the fountain as copiously as ever, and was disappearing as rapidly in the sands of its thirsty bed, after running its short and foaming course along its little dell. After a brief survey of the scene, the ground was marked out, the tents were pitched, and the stores deposited within them; the boats were hauled up and examined for repairs, and all the arrangements made for a permanent encampment; for this was to be the head-quarters of the expedition during all the remaining time that they were to spend upon the sea. They named it "Camp Washington."

      EXPLORINGS

      The encampment thus established at En-gedi continued to be occupied as the head-quarters of our party for two or three weeks, during which time many expeditions were fitted out from it, for exploring the whole southern portion of the sea, and the country around. The engineer of the party measured a base line on the beach, and from the two stations at the extremities of it took the bearings of all the important points on the shores of the sea. He made the necessary astronomical observations also for determining the exact latitude and longitude of the camp. Parties were sent out, too, sometimes along the shores and up the mountains to collect plants and specimens, and at other times across to the eastern shore to measure the breadth of the sea, and to make soundings for determining the depth of it in every part. They preserved specimens and memorials of every thing. Even the mud and sand, and the cubical crystals of salt which their sounding apparatus brought up from the bottom of the sea, were put up in airtight vessels to be brought home for the inspection of naturalists and philosophers in America. Thus the whole party were constantly employed in the various labors incident to such an undertaking, meeting from time to time with strange and romantic adventures, and suffering on many occasions most excessively from exposure and fatigue.

      One of the most remarkable of the expeditions which they made from their camp at En-gedi, was a cruise of four days in the southern portion of the sea, in the course of which they circumnavigated the whole southern shore. In following down the western coast in first commencing their voyage, they found the scenery much the same as it had been in the northern part of the sea, the coast being formed of bald and barren mountains, desolate and gloomy, with a low, flat beach below, and sometimes a broad peninsula, or delta, formed, at the mouths of the ravines, by the detritus brought down from above. Farther south, however, the water became very shoal, so much so, that at last they could not approach the shore near enough to land, without wading for a great distance through water and mire. In fact, the line of demarkation between the land and the sea was often scarcely perceptible, the land consisting of low flats and slimy mud, coated with incrustations of salt, and sometimes with masses of drift-wood lying upon it, while the water was covered with a frothy scum, formed of salt and bitumen. Sometimes for miles the water was only one or two feet deep, and the men in such cases, leaving the boats, waded often to a great distance from them. Every night, of course, they stopped and encamped on the land.

      THE SIROCCO

      The party suffered on some occasions most intensely from heat and thirst. Their supply of water was not abundant, and one of the principal sources of solicitude which the officers of the expedition felt throughout the cruise, was to find fountains where they could replenish their stores. One night they were reduced to the greatest extreme of misery from the influence of an intolerably hot and suffocating wind, which blew upon them from off the desert to the southward. It СКАЧАТЬ