ither stay thou in
all the plain; escape to the mountain lest thou be consumed.

"And Lot said unto them, Oh, not so, my Lord, behold now, thy servant
hath found grace in thy sight, and thou hast magnified thy mercy,
which thou hast shewed unto me in saving my life; and I cannot escape
to the mountain, lest some evil take me, and I die. Behold now, this
city is near to flee unto, and it is a little one: Oh, let me escape
thither, (is it not a little one?) and my soul shall live.

"And he said unto him, See, I have accepted thee concerning this thing
also, that I will not overthrow this city, for which thou hast spoken.
Haste thee, escape thither; for I cannot do anything until thou be
come thither.

"Therefore the name of the city was called Zoar. The sun was risen
upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

"Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire
from the Lord out of heaven. And he overthrew those cities, and all
the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew
upon the ground.

"But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of
salt.

"And Abraham got up early in the morning to the place where he stood
before the Lord, and he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward
all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the city
went up as the smoke of a furnace."

Nothing could be more succinct or terse than this description of the
catastrophe. This was a sudden volcanic eruption like that which
destroyed in one night the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. At the
time of the convulsion in Palestine while clouds of ashes were emitted
from the yawning abyss and fell in fiery showers upon the ground, a
vast tract of country, comprising the five cities and some land to the
south of them, was violently shaken and overturned.

Of the valleys watered by the Jordan, that of Siddim was the largest
and the most populous. All the southern part of this valley, with its
woods, its cultivated fields, and its broad river, was upheaved. While
upon the other side the plain subsided, and for a distance of a
hundred leagues was transformed into a vast cavern of unknown depth.
Upon that day the waters of the Jordan, suddenly arrested by the
upheaval of the soil lower down the stream, must have flowed rapidly
back toward their source, again to flow not less impetuously along
their accustomed incline, and to fall into the abyss created by the
subside