Green scene

Chasing memories in a return to the Dead Sea

Posted

Many years ago, we decided to take a few days vacation at a Dead Sea hotel. Despite craving quiet and a good rest, time begins to hang heavy after a few days — particularly if spa treatments are not your vice.

To counter impending boredom, we signed up for a Jeep tour of Harei S’dom — otherwise known as the Mountains of Sodom, that infamous city of the Bible. They lie parallel to the Dead Sea, running for eight miles southwest from hotel cluster to the southern end of the Dead Sea, where the Dead Sea Works are located.

The tour itself lasted only four hours, but it left an indelible impression.

The tour route had seemed perfectly straightforward. Drive south along the Dead Sea and turn into the first road heading west and just keep going. I remember sinuous white chalk cliffs with stone so soft that it powders under your fingernails. I remember a fantastic white stone crater shaped by an ancient inland sea and smoothed stone corridors inviting you to explore corridors of amazing beauty.

Despite once or twice trying to recreate the route and return by ourselves, we were never able to hit all the high spots. And eventually, over the years, we have had trouble finding our way at all. Then, out of the blue, I was offered the opportunity to try retracing our route with a professional guide, and I jumped at it.

Yes, we could have engaged a guide ourselves, but somehow we never seemed able to find the time. A word of advice however: Do not go to the Dead Sea in the height of the summer. The temperature hit 110 degrees the day of our trip.

We met our guide, Amit, at the only gas station in the hotel complex of the Dead Sea, and I took meticulous notes about how and where we were driving, particularly where we entered the wild preserve. Let me say the following: You cannot do this tour, except by Jeep. And frankly, the sign that clearly says “do not enter” would have certainly deterred me as well.

However, Amit’s contention was that these signs are meant to protect the public from wandering into a stark and unforgiving landscape without adequate preparation and knowledge.

You cannot discuss the Dead Sea area without discussing salt. In English, we are aware that the words “sailor,” “soldier” and “salary” are derived from the Latin sal. In Hebrew, the word for salt is melach, and the Hebrew name for the Dead Sea is Yam HaMelach, which actually translates into the “Salt(y) Sea.”

From melach we get malach for sailor. The Romans also mined salt from the area and they exported it through the ancient Philistine city of Aza (the source of the name “Gaza” today).

The whole area we entered was intertwined with salt. During the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods — which spanned 201 and 66 million years ago — much of Israel and Syria were covered by an enlarged Mediterranean Sea.

There is a hiking trail at Mt. Sodom known as the “Fish Trail” because fossilized fish skeletons can be found there, proving the existence of an ancient ocean.

Over time, water became relegated to a low-lying area valley called the Sodom Lagoon, running essentially from the Sea of Galilee almost to the Gulf of Aqaba. This lagoon had only a single northern outlet to the Mediterranean, and salt deposits 1.5 miles thick gradually formed at the bottom of this huge inland lake.

Then about two million years ago, the land on the west began to rise — as it continues to rise today at a rate of 0.14 inches per year, The salt was squeezed together with thick sediments of shale, clay, sand, gravel and gypsum.

The concept of salinity must come up whenever discussing ocean or seawater. This is a measure of the amount of salt — usually our basic table salt, sodium chloride — per liter of water. This generally measures about 7 teaspoons (35g) of salt per liter, giving a rate of 35 parts per thousand, or 3.5 percent salinity.

The Dead Sea — whose waters feel oily, although it can be rinsed off with clean water — is listed at 34 percent. However, as I was working on this column, I kept finding that the Mediterranean had 38 percent salinity, which was simply impossible.

It was apparently a typo, and the real figure for the Mediterranean should be 3.8 percent — and I found that it has been corrected, meanwhile, online. For a visual demonstration of the Dead Sea’s properties, see a Hasidic wedding gown submerged in the Dead Sea by artist Sigalit Landau for two months at tinyurl.com/SaltGown.

To be continued next week.

Comments