THE DEAD SEA IS ABOUT AS strange a place as I have ever come across. It has a length of 47 miles and a breadth of 10, a surface area of around 360 square miles. The mean depth is 1,080 feet. It gets all its water from the River Jordan, which daily pours into it about six million tons, most of which is evaporated by the hot sun, forming a permanent low mist over the lake, a peculiar cloud, blue-white, the color of a dead fish’s belly. The Dead Sea is the saltiest in the world, consisting of around 25 percent salts, compared to the ocean’s average of around 6 percent. The water, if you swallow any, is nauseous; a tablespoonful will make you violently sick. This is because of the great amounts of chloride of magnesium in the salts. It also has an oily feel because of the calcium, of which it contains a high amount. When you wade out from the shore, you are swept off your feet as soon as the water level reaches your armpits; your shoulders are continually out of the water. When the water dries on your skin, it leaves a sticky feeling, as if you had been swimming in kerosene.
There is absolutely no life in the Dead Sea. No fish, no birds, nothing, except in the far north, where the fish brought down by the Jordan River die as soon as they enter the Dead Sea waters and are devoured by the few sea gulls. The rocky shore is littered with patches of asphalt, which float up from the bottom of the Sea. On the whole, it is one of the most arid, uninviting places on earth.
Curiously enough, geologists maintain that millions of years ago, during the Pluvial period, the Dead Sea was much bigger, stretching another 120 miles further north, with a level above that of the Mediterranean. It was capable of supporting life of every variety, but earthquakes and gradual sitting filled up the former vast inland seabed.
The Dead Sea, as we call it, has been known by many other names. To the Hebrews it was “The Sea of Arabah,” to the Arabs “The Stinking Sea,” to the modern Israeli “The Sea of Lot.” The Old Testament comes to life here—Lot and Abraham visited these shores and the sinful towns of Sodom and Gomorrah were on its edge. The ruins are still there for all to see.
During the passage from ‘En Gedi to Masada I had slight winds from the north, and in fact made the passage back to ‘En Gedi using the outboard motor, for I was anxious to pass on with Barbara to the Red Sea.
I had taken an ocean-going vessel lower than anyone else on earth. Only government regulations had prevented her from sailing on the Dead Sea. Now all I had to do was navigate the boat to Lake Titicaca, three miles up in the far off Andes of South America.
The diesel tractor hauled Barbara once more over the escarpment on the edge of the hills of Judea to Hebron, then turned south and headed for Beersheba, a modern, very Western town plonked down by Israeli ingenuity in the heart of the desert. Here we saw our last supermarket until we reached South Africa, almost a year later.
Once through Beersheba we entered the Negev Desert and barreled off down the road to Eilat on a modern highway which passes for much of its length within five miles of the Jordanian border. In those days it was much subjected to raids by guerrillas, whose favorite trick was to suspend a grenade-festooned line across the road.
With brakes squealing, the trailer cautiously crawled around hairpin bends, Barbara sometimes heeling over twenty degrees and more. As dusk fell, we would pick out here and there the glow of an Israeli army campfire and, less frequently, kibbutzim, brightly lit, like liners on the ocean sea.
Conrad and I were by now becoming accustomed to each other’s company; a difficult thing for two Britons at the best of times, especially when they hail from such disparate backgrounds. Especially when one of them has so very much to absorb from the other in a very short time. A serious undertaking, for our lives would be at stake.
“We must check over the engine before we leave Eilat,” I said to Conrad, as we bounced along in the gloaming.
“Just up my street; my van was diesel driven.”
“What van was that? You never mentioned a truck before.”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? My last job, oh, ages ago, was driving a small truck up and down the Thames valley delivering candy to tobacconists’ shops.”
“Jesus Christ!” I thought, “and this is the bloke I’m takin’ into the Red Sea—a bloody candy-truck driver. Oh, well, why not? He seems to be doing OK so far.” But I kept quiet as he continued, for on the back of the Israeli truck he was more talkative than I had ever seen him before, or since, come to that.
“And I used to do most of my own repairs,” he continued.
“Oh, did you? That’ll be handy, Conrad; all I know about a diesel is that it goes suck, squeeze, bang, blow and that’s about it; they usually clap out on me anyway; can’t stand them—noisy, smelly, and take up food and water space—I detest the blasted things!”
“My grandmother on my father’s side came from Czechoslovakia just after the First World War—”
“Oh, fuck, go on, don’t stop, tell me all about it; a real load of sailors they are.”
“What about you?” he asked.
“Well, matey, on my granny’s side I’m descended from Henry Morgan, the pirate, and on my father’s side, from an illegitimate son of the Duke of Wellington.”
“That’s impressive, Skip!”
“Yes, a right pair of bastards we are, aren’t we?”
He laughed again as he lit my cigarette.
By nine in the evening we were at the last Israeli army post before starting down a long stretch of road leading to Eilat and the sea. The convoy stopped at the checkpoint and Adir walked back to the rear, where Conrad and I sat on the trailer, warmly wrapped against the cool night air of the desert.
“Tristan, the soldier he say I tell you . . . you want to wait until morning for Army convoy with many guns, OK, but you want to go on now, OK too.”
He puffed his cigarette nervously.
“The nightclub in Eilat, she close at 2:00 A.M.; maybe we go now, eh?” He threw away his cigarette and looked me straight in the eye. “It’s a bit dangerous,” he continued, “sometimes Arabs come over the border; but staying here all night. . .” He gestured at the lonely tents and the campfire.
“Well, Adir, it’s all right with me to go on. We’ll take things as they come.”
He smiled. “You’re not afraid to die at night then?”
“What’s the difference, night or day? I once saw a man who was killed by peanuts in broad daylight.”
Francois, who had joined us by now, after relieving himself at the roadside, explained to Adir what peanuts were. They looked at me quizzically, while Conrad sat there with a big grin on his face, for by now he was becoming accustomed to my odd tales at odd times.
“True as I’m sitting here on this trailer in the Negev Desert,” I replied to their looks. “It was in Le Havre, in France, and they were unloading a cargo ship full of peanuts with one of those suction pipe things. Well, this bloke was walking under the pipe when—woosh!—it broke, busted clean open and down fell about two hundred tons of peanuts on the poor chap’s head. They had to scrape him up with a shovel.” I made a gesture of shoveling with my hand. “Now, which is better to die from, a grenade or bullet, or bloody peanuts?”
They were all laughing by now. Adir and Francois laughed all the way back to the lead car. Off we went through the barrier and out into the dark desert. Conrad was still grinning and glancing at me.
There was no sense in offering a slow target to any lurking terrorists, so we roared away at sixty miles an hour, Conrad and I holding on like grim death to the lurching, rolling trailer, straining our eyes in the darkness to watch the wedges, hoping and praying that they would not work loose. There would be no stopping on this stretch, fallen wedges or not.
So we crossed the pitch-black Negev Desert at high speed, until at last we sighted the light-loom of the Aqaba lighthouse away to the south across the rocky, moonlit plain.
Suddenly we were in the sandy streets of Eilat. We were on the shores of the Red Sea; we had actually crossed over Asia. We had passed from the sea of Ulysses and the Odyssey and we were now in the realm of the Thousand and One Nights and Sinbad himself. Later, as we watched the floor show in a shabby nightclub, I thought to myself, “Now all we have to do is run the Arab gauntlet for six thousand miles to Mombasa!” But I said nothing to Conrad. He was enjoying himself far too much for forebodings.
Early next morning we floated Barbara and said goodbye to Adir, Francois, and Jacob.