quabbling and arrangement, they agreed to share our supper with us in
peace. Had the case been otherwise, our position was not an enviable
one; for we were shut in between their hills and the sea, they were more
numerous than our Arabs, and they had entire command of our spring of
water. Our camels, too, were all unloaded, and the packages scattered on
the ground.

The scenery was desolate and gloomy in the extreme, undoubtedly blasted
by the wrath of Almighty God, although a place which had at one time been
"well watered everywhere . . . even as the garden of the Lord, like the
land of Egypt," (Gen. xiii. 10;) and it required strong faith to expect
the possibility of this "wilderness" (_'Arabah_) being again made "like
Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord," (Isa. li. 3.) Indeed,
that promise does not seem to apply to this peculiar locality, by
comparing it with Ezek. xlvii. 10, 11, although these unwholesome waters
are to be healed, and are to have fish of various kinds in them, with
fishermen's nets employed there.

It deserves observation, that now the sea is so utterly lifeless that the
American explorers there were unable, by the most powerful microscopes,
to find any animalculae in its water. Yet Lynch was of opinion that the
atmosphere or vapour there was not in any way prejudicial to human
health; and since then, Mr Holman Hunt spent a considerable time near the
brink without injury derived from it.

The air was very warm all night, with no freshening dew, and the sound of
slow, rippling water on the strand, during the still starlight hours, was
one to which our ears had not been of late accustomed.

The Arab figures and conversation round the watch-fire were romantic
enough. Thermometer at eight P.M., 90.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

_April_ 10_th_.--Sunrise, Fahrenheit 70.25 degrees. In taking this last
note of the thermometer at sunrise, I may observe that the marking of it
at that moment gives but a feeble idea of the heat that we experienced
during the days' marches throughout this excursion,--the temperature
rapidly increased after sunrise, and at later hours within the confined
hollows, such as Petra and the basin of the Dead Sea, rose to that of (I
suppose) an Indian climate--but above all the effects of heat was that
produced by the weight of atmospheric pressure at probably the lowest
position in the whole surface of the globe: about 1300 feet below the
Mediterranean.

Before six o'clo