ABSTRACT
The landscape of the Dead Sea wilderness is monotonous, subduing and dreadful This country is completely impersonal. It is a landscape without physiognomy: no faces of gods or men, no bodies of recumbent animals, are suggested by the shapes of the hills. "Nothing but monotheism could possibly come out of this," said one of my companions, who knew Palestine. "There's not a crevice for a nymph anywhere." The already fading grass of spring—my visit was in early April—had the look of greenish mold on enormous loaves. Tawny without warmth, of a dun not enriched by shadow, these mounds also somewhat resembled—it was the only living image one could think of—the humps of the camels that grazed them, dull yellow and gawkily bending, with their dusty white calves beside them. One hillside was flecked by a herd of black goats. Here and there, all alone in the emptiness, squats motionless a Bedouin woman, who, though she seems as unperceptive as a boulder, is keeping an eye on a camel or goat; and we pass a few torn and black Bedouin shelters that might be the old tents of Abraham. A watchtower, now deserted, is still standing at a spot where, before the war, a plant run by Jews made potash, and there are ruins of a little inn that was fought over and wrecked by the Jews and Arabs, and finally plundered by Bedouins. As the road begins to drop below sea-level—at the bottom, almost 153thirteen hundred feet—you feel pressure increasing on your eardrums, as you do coming down in a plane.
