If it
had been more, we could hardly have accomplished the feat, for the strong
current would have swept us down the stream, and we would have been
exhausted and drowned before reaching a place where we could make a
landing. The main object compassed, the drooping, miserable party sat
down to wait for the sun again, for all wanted to see the water as well
as feel it. But it was too cold a pastime. Some cans were filled from
the holy river, some canes cut from its banks, and then we mounted and
rode reluctantly away to keep from freezing to death. So we saw the
Jordan very dimly. The thickets of bushes that bordered its banks threw
their shadows across its shallow, turbulent waters ("stormy," the hymn
makes them, which is rather a complimentary stretch of fancy,) and we
could not judge of the width of the stream by the eye. We knew by our
wading experience, however, that many streets in America are double as
wide as the Jordan.

Daylight came, soon after we got under way, and in the course of an hour
or two we reached the Dead Sea. Nothing grows in the flat, burning
desert around it but weeds and the Dead Sea apple the poets say is
beautiful to the eye, but crumbles to ashes and dust when you break it.
Such as we found were not handsome, but they were bitter to the taste.
They yielded no dust. It was because they were not ripe, perhaps.

The desert and the barren hills gleam painfully in the sun, around the
Dead Sea, and there is no pleasant thing or living creature upon it or
about its borders to cheer the eye. It is a scorching, arid, repulsive
solitude. A silence broods over the scene that is depressing to the
spirits. It makes one think of funerals and death.

The Dead Sea is small. Its waters are very clear, and it has a pebbly
bottom and is shallow for some distance out from the shores. It yields
quantities of asphaltum; fragments of it lie all about its banks; this
stuff gives the place something of an unpleasant smell.

All our reading had taught us to expect that the first plunge into the
Dead Sea would be attended with distressing results--our bodies would
feel as if they were suddenly pierced by millions of red-hot needles; the
dreadful smarting would continue for hours; we might even look to be
blistered from head to foot, and suffer miserably for many days. We were
disappointed. Our eight sprang in at the same time that another party of
pilgrims did, and nobody screamed once. None of the