Bitter Waters by David Haward Bain

Author:David Haward Bain [BAIN, DAVID HAWARD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036040, HIS019000, HIS027150
ISBN: 9781590209974
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2011-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Western Shore to Engedi

THEY WERE SWEPT OUT ONTO A RISING SEA, THEIR MOMENTUM FROM the Jordan’s outflow doubled by a stiff wind from the northwest. The river emptied at the northwestern shore, where a gravelly beach gave way to extensive mudflats with a sandy plain behind—it was “the very type of desolation,” Lynch would write. On the high water mark, “branches and trunks of trees … scattered in every direction, some charred and blackened as by fire, others white with an incrustation of salt.”

Eastward and toward the south along the lake’s abrupt margin, bare and rugged mountains rose into the sky, mirrored by the even higher mountains marching down the western shore. “The water of the Jordan is whiter and more of a milky colour than any other water,” wrote the pious Anglo-Saxon merchant Saewulf in 1102, traveling in the path of the Crusaders, “and it may be distinguished by its colour a long distance into the Dead Sea.”1

This the Americans could not verify, and the wind freshened alarmingly, slamming them into increasing waves, the foamy water so densely laden with minerals that as the waves struck the boats, “it seemed as if their bows were encountering the sledge-hammers of the Titans, instead of the opposing waves of an angry sea.” Spray struck their hands and faces, causing skin to prickle; cuts, raw calluses, and sunburn to smart; and lips, nostrils, and eyes to sting most painfully. As the wind howled, the boats were in danger of foundering, and as they were swept leeward the sailors emptied their casks of fresh water to lighten the heavily laden craft. Lynch’s guest on the copper boat, the hitchhiking sheikh of Huteim, was wide-eyed with terror and clinging to the gunwales, moaning that it was death to go out on the surface of the Sea of Lot. “It seemed,” said Lynch, “as if the Dread Almighty frowned upon our efforts to navigate a sea, the creation of his wrath.”2

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