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The burning sun of Syria had not yet attained its highest point in the horizon, when aknight of the Red Cross, who had left his distant northern home and joined the host of theCrusaders in Palestine, was pacing slowly along the sandy deserts which lie in the vicinityof the Dead Sea, or, as it is called, the Lake Asphaltites, where the waves of the Jordan pourthemselves into an inland sea, from which there is no discharge of waters.The warlike pilgrim had toiled among cliffs and precipices during the earlier part of themorning. More lately, issuing from those rocky and dangerous defiles, he had entered uponthat great plain, where the accursed cities provoked, in ancient days, the direct anddreadful vengeance of the Omnipotent.The toil, the thirst, the dangers of the way, were forgotten, as the traveller recalled thefearful catastrophe which had converted into an arid and dismal wilderness the fair andfertile valley of Siddim, once well watered, even as the Garden of the Lord, now a parchedand blighted waste, condemned to eternal sterility.Crossing himself, as he viewed the dark mass of rolling waters, in colour as in dualityunlike those of any other lake, the traveller shuddered as he remembered that beneaththese sluggish waves lay the once proud cities of the plain, whose grave was dug by thethunder of the heavens, or the eruption of subterraneous fire, and whose remains were hid, even by that sea which holds no living fish in its bosom, bears no skiff on its surface, and, asif its own dreadful bed were the only fit receptacle for its sullen waters, sends not, likeother lakes, a tribute to the ocean. The whole land around, as in the days of Moses, was brimstone and salt; it is not sown, nor beareth, nor any grass groweth thereon. The landas well as the lake might be termed dead, as producing nothing having resemblance tovegetation, and even the very air was entirely devoid of its ordinary winged inhabitants, deterred probably by the odour of bitumen and sulphur which the burning sun exhaledfrom the waters of the lake in steaming clouds, frequently assuming the appearance ofwaterspouts. Masses of the slimy and sulphureous substance called naphtha, which floatedidly on the sluggish and sullen waves, supplied those rolling clouds with new vapours, andafforded awful testimony to the truth of the Mosaic history.

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