Everything in this desert is of one colour--a tawny yellow. The rocks, the partridges, the camels, the foxes, the ibex, are all of this shade, and only the dark Bedawîn and their black tents are distinguishable in the general glare.
The convent of Mar Saba stands on the south side of the huge fissure or gorge called the Valley of Fire, by which the water from Jerusalem comes down to the Dead Sea. East of it is a plateau between mountains on the west side and precipices rising eight hundred feet from the shores of the lake on the east. This plateau is also of waterworn marl with innumerable ridges, knolls, peaks, ravines, and iron crags around it.
It was from a "Tubgâ or terrace, east of the plateau, that we first looked down on that marvellous sea (1300 feet lower than the Mediterranean), which swallows up all Jordan and all the snows of Hermon, and yet has no outlet, but yearly gives off the surplus supply in the heavy steam of evaporating water, which in summer hides it in a hot haze.
The morning sun cast purple, dusky shadows over the great mountains to the east, leaving patches of bright light on their level summits. The high piles of cumulus rose, in silvery brilliancy, above a long grey base of stratus cloud. The sea itself lay unruffled by a single breath of wind, blue and glossy, shining like oil, with long bands of white scum here and there stretching across it. The foreground was yet more extraordinary--fawn-coloured marl with bands of dark brown flint, in a tumbled confusion of cones and knolls, without a single tree or shrub, but streaked, on the north, with a pinkish colour, and capped with harder limestone. Part of this district still bears, among the Bedawîn, the title 'Amrîyeh, which represents the Hebrew Amorah or Gomorrah. A few scattered ruins exist on the plateau, and the Arabs have a tradition that these are remains of vineyards, which once existed, according to them, throughout this scorched and desolate solitude.
The hills west of the plateau are well worthy of notice. They consist of hard brown limestone, and I discovered a feature of great geological interest, in a fault which runs north and south, at the point where the white marl commences: showing that a violent, and probably sudden subsidence has here taken place, at a period so late (geologically speaking) as to be subsequent to the chalk era. The general bearing of this observation on the history of the lake, will be noticed in a subsequent chapter.