The Emigrants

4th December: Last night dreamt that Cosmo and I crossed the glaring emptiness of the Jordan valley. A blind guide walks ahead of us. He points his staff to a dark spot on the horizon and cries out, several times, er-Riha, er-Riha. As we approach, er-Riha proves to be a dirty village with sand and dust swirling about it. The entire population has gathered on the edge of the village in the shade of a tumbledown sugar mill. One has the impression that they are nothing but beggars and footpads. A noticeable number are gouty, hunchbacked or disfigured. Others are lepers or have immense goitres. Now I see that all these people are from Gopprechts. Our Arab escorts fire their long rifles into the air. We ride past, and the people cast malevolent looks after us. At the foot of a low hill we pitch the black tents. The Arabs light a small fire and cook a dark green broth of Jew's mallow and mint leaves, and bring some of it over to us in tin bowls, with slices of lemon and crushed grain. Night falls rapidly. Cosmo lights the lamp and spreads out his map on the colourful carpet. He points to one of the many white spaces and says: We are now in Jericho. The oasis is a four-hour walk in length and a one-hour walk in breadth, and of a rare beauty per matched only by the paradisal orchard of Damascus merveilleux verger de Damas. The people here have all want. Whatever they sow grows immediately in this fertile soil. The glorious gardens flower forever. The gree corn sways in the bright palm groves. The fiery hea summer is made bearable by the many watercourses pastures, the crowns of the trees and the vine leaves ovej pathways. The winters are so mild that the people of blessèd land wear no more than a linen shirt, even wher mountains of Judaea, not far off, are white with sno¹ Several blank pages follow the account of the drean er-Riha. During this time, Ambros must have been ch occupied with recruiting a small troop of Arabs and acqui the equipment and provisions needed for an expedition tc Dead Sea, for on the 16th of December he writes: Left c crowded Jerusalem with its hordes of pilgrims three days and rode down the Kidron Valley into the lowest regioi earth. Then, at the foot of the Yeshimon Mountains, a the Sea as far as Ain Jidy. One wrongly imagines these sb as destroyed by fire and brimstone, a thing of salt and a for thousands of years. I myself have heard the Dead which is about the size of Lac Leman, described as beir motionless as molten lead, though the surface is ruffle times into a phosphorescent foam. Birds cannot fly aero: they say, without suffocating in the air, and others report on moonlit nights an aura of the grave, the colour of absinthe, rises from its depths. None of all this have we found fc true. In fact, the Sea's waters are wonderfully clear, and b on the shore with scarcely a sound. On the high ground tc tight there are green clefts from which streams come forth. There is also to be seen a mysterious white line that is visible early in the morning. It runs the length of the Sea, and vanishes an hour or so later. No one, thus Ibrahim Hishmeh, our Arab guide, can explain it or give a reason. Ain Jidy itself is a blessèd spot with pure spring water and rich vegetation. We made our camp by some bushes on the shore where snipe stalk and the bulbul bird, brown and blue of plumage and red of beak, sings. Yesterday I thought I saw a large dark hare, and a butterfly with gold-speckled wings. In the evening, when we were sitting on the shore, Cosmo said that once the whole of the land of Zoar on the south bank was like this. Where now mere traces remained of the five overthrown cities of Gomorrha, Ruma, Sodom, Seadeh and Seboah, the oleanders once grew thirty feet high beside rivers that never ran dry, and there were acacia forests and oshac trees as in Florida. There were irrigated orchards and melon fields far and wide, and he had read a passage where Lynch, the explorer, claimed that down from the gorge of Wadi Kerek a forest torrent fell with a fearful roar that could only be compared with the Niagara Falls. - In the third night of our stay at Ain Jidy a stiff wind rose out on the Sea and stirred the heavy waters. On land it was calmer. The Arabs had long been asleep beside the horses. I was still sitting up in our bed, which was open to the heavens, in the light of the swaying lantern. Cosmo, curled up slightly, was sleeping at my side. Suddenly a quail, perhaps frightened by the storm on the Sea, took refuge in his lap and remained there, calm now, as if it were its rightful place. But at daybreak, when Cosmo stirred, it ran away quickly across the level ground, as quail do, lifted off into the air, beat its wings tremendously fast for a moment, then extended them rigid and motionless and glided by a little thicket in an utterly beautiful curve, and was gone. It was shortly before sunrise. Across the water, about twelve miles away, the blue-black ridge-line of the Moab Mountains of Araby ran level along the horizon, merely rising or dipping slightly at points, so that one might have thought the watercolourist's hand had trembled a little.