Many people fill a bottle with some of the muddy water and take it home to use as “holy water,” orin order to baptize their children with water from the same river in which Christ was baptized. TheJordan is very muddy, because it flows very swiftly and washes the mud from the banks and bottom. It empties its yellow water into the Dead Sea, but the Dead Sea, strange to say, is as blue as the Mediterranean.

The Dead Sea is in the bottom of a very deep valley, so low that no water can run out of it, as water cannot run uphill. You might think the Dead Sea would fill up and overflow, but it does not, forthe air is so hot and dry that the water in the Dead Sea evaporates as fast as it runs into it.But the river is always bringing in salt, and as salt does not evaporate, the Dead Sea, like Great SaltLake, is getting saltier all the time. It is saltier than Great Salt Lake, it is ten times saltier than the ocean, and of course no one Could drown in it. People don’t bathe in the Dead Sea, however, because the water is so salty that if it splashes into one’s eyes or touches any scratches or broken skin it stings like iodine put on a cut. There is so much salt around the Dead Sea that nothingwill grow there, and even salt-water fish cannot live in the water. We think that the two most wicked cities in the World, Sodom and Gomorrah, were by the Dead Sea. The Bible says they were so wicked that the Lord destroyed them. There is nothing now left of them but desert, with a crust of saltover all. You remember, the Lord told Lot to take his family and flee from Sodom before he destroyed it, and ordered him and his family not to look back. Lot’s wife disobeyed and she was turned to apillar of salt. And a guide will point out a mound of salt that he says is Lot’s wife!