May have conduced to the forbearance of the cave-holders. We saw a scraggy-looking fellow nearly black, and wearing nothing but a cloth round the loins; he was tending flocks. Afterwards I came up with another of these goatherds, whose helpmate was with him. They gave us some goat's milk, a welcome present. I pitied the poor devil of a goatherd for having such a very plain wife. I spend an enormous quantity of pity upon that particular form of human misery.
About midday I began to examine my map and to question my guide, who at last fell on his knees and confessed that he knew nothing of the country in which we were. I was thus thrown upon my own door bell intercom resources, and calculating that on the preceding day we had nearly performed a two days journey, I concluded that the Dead Sea must be near. In this I was right, for at about three or four o'clock in the afternoon I caught a first sight of its dismal face.
I went on and came near to those waters of death. They stretched deeply into the southern desert, and before me, and all around, as far away as the eye could follow, blank hills piled high over hills, pale, yellow, and naked, walled up in her tomb for ever the dead and damned Gomorrah. There was no fly that hummed in the forbidden air, but instead a deep stillness; no grass grew from the earth, no video door monitor
