Schwartz - Mesmerized in the Mitbar Yehudia

"idh andhara qauma-hu bil Ahqaf-i"
--The Quran 46.21

"H'kol min jah הכל מן ג'ה"
--Shotei Hanevua שוטי הנבואה

This past Wednesday, the hotel crew took a day off to drive to the southeast of Israel-Palestine, the Mitbar Yehudia, Sahar Yehudi, the Judean Desert, and the Dead Sea, the lowest geographic area in all the earth's surface: the region is 1300 meters below the Mediterranean and the global water level, and the lowest depth inside the sea itself is 2300 meters!

It's called the Dead Sea because, being almost six times as salty as an ocean, nothing lives in it--shundava, not a thing. The Dead Sea is completely landlocked and it gets saltier with the deeper you descend. The surface, fed by the River Jordan, is the least saline. Down to about 130 feet (40 meters), the seawater comprises about 300 grams of salt per kilogram of seawater. That's about ten times the salinity of the oceans. Below 300 feet, though, the sea has 332 grams of salt per kilogram of seawater and is saturated. Salt precipitates out and piles up on the bottom of the sea.

There's no seaweed or plants of any kind in or around the water. There are no fish or any kind of swimming, squirming creatures living in or near the water. As a matter of fact, what you'll see on the shores of the Sea is white, crystals of salt covering everything. Nor is it ordinary table salt, but mineral salts, the extremely concentrated run-off from the spine of mountains which begin up near the Caucasus and snake down to the 'Asr region of Saudi Arabia. Fish accidentally swimming into the waters from one of the several freshwater streams that feed the sea are killed instantly, their bodies quickly coated with a preserving layer of salt crystals and then tossed onto shore by the wind and waves.

Fantastically, mindbonglingly, the sea, or rather its water, is actually sinking lower, but not due to tectonic whim; rather, it is the victim, like the Aral Sea, of human stupidity: see this Ananova article and this BBC Online article, this BBC Online article about a Israeli-Jordanina pipeline plan to "save" the sea, and this BBC Online article about the world's dying inland seas.

Also:
-Map of Water Conflicts
-Index of related BBC Online articles
-Ben's background entries on Caspian sea political boundaries and water levels (includes an insightful map showing the difference between the 1960 and present sea levels.)
-And keep your eyes on Thinking-East.net for an article by Aidar Amnuzhulov about the status of the Central Asian water conflict.

Click on "continue reading" for photographs

An Israeli soldier on camelback patrol.

The Judean mountains, through which we drove our Citroen jalopy, our only company for many miles being military checkpoints, Israeli tractor trailers and Bedouin villages hidden along dried-up or nearly-dried-up wadis.

The Ein Gedi nature reserve, refuge for all the Judean Desert's bizaare flora, fauna and animal life.

See these websites:
-http://www.jafi.org.il/education/noar/sites/eingedi.htm <-lots of information
-http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Archaeology/eingedi.html <-archeological information
-http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/archaeology/eingedi/ <-archeological website with photographs

The Ein Gedi waterfall.

Strange rock formations and (blue!) fauna. The last photograph is particularly gruesome. Either the man-like subject is the world's ugliest fungus, or nature's best artistic interpretation, in the form of a rock sculpture, of the whale devouring Jonah.

The view of the Dead Sea and beyond from the Ein Gedi hiking trail.

The Dead Sea

Looking out across the Dead Sea to the Biblical mountains of Moab (in Hebrew, Harim Moav, in Arabic, Shumsia) located today in the country of Jordan. The sea itself is normally a shade fluctuating between sapphire and jade, but sadly in this photograph it just comes out bland gray.

The unmerciful salt, encasing all it touches. Believe it or not, the last photograph is not a closeup of microscopic bacteria: it's actually a shot of two stones the size of my skull, the salt flaking off.

Mountains of Yehudia
by Christopher Schwartz

To my right the craggy heaps of crumbling dust rise majestically. The wind howls, or is it the static of the car radio, no signal daring to venture here? I tune my dreadfilled soul to the secret frequency, and the lyric which slips out from no-when fills me with fear: "Fuck with us and we shall devour you. Do you see how all the others drive by? Gods in their petrol chariots, too blind to see that the sun singed the earth here of all its hue eons before that ape Adam learned how to lie. Mine us, fence us, irrigate us, lay tar over us and drive, lounge in your spas, tanning like burnt offerings on the dolmen of Modernity. Yes, bath in the mud of the world's oldest cemetery, and lick the salt of eons. Can you hear us laugh? Soon, very soon, you shall all feel the sulphrous breath scratching your cheeks."

I look to my left: the Dead Sea expands before me, a fissure in the world, an astral cleft. The waves hesitate eternally with the stillness of death. Beyond stands Moab, waiting--waiting beyond the grave. The whisper is still in my ears, still on my lips, still slithering in the nerves in my fingers caressing my mesbahah. Even though I despise the sound of the demiurge dirge, I cannot help but feel its voiceless rhythm: "God created us to remind you. God created us to remind you..."

---

Other photographs

Toafic, a hard-working, talkative and stubborn Christian Palestinian from Ramle, the hotel's Voltaire. I like to call him "Super Mario." He and I spent a month together repairing the hotel roofs and painting apartments, so I was his "Super Luigi," the sidekick.

The hotel girls: Haddass is driving, and Ya'el is looking.

Posted by Schwartz at December 10, 2004 10:40 PM