From the position of the sun Cuthbert saw that they were making their course nearly due east, and therefore that it could not be their intention to take him to Jerusalem, which was to the north of the line they were following.  A long day’s journey, which to Cuthbert seemed interminable, found them on the low spit of sand which runs along by the side of the Dead Sea.  Behind, lofty rocks rose almost precipitously, but through a cleft in these the Arabs had made their way.  Cuthbert saw at once that they belonged to some desert tribe over whom the authority of Suleiman was but nominal.  When summoned for any great effort, these children of the desert would rally to his armies and fight for a short time; but at the first disaster, or whenever they became tired of the discipline and regularity of the army, they would mount their camels and return to the desert, generally managing on the way to abstract from the farms of those on their route either a horse, cattle, or some other objects which would pay them for the labors they had undergone.

They were now near the confines of their own country, and apparently had no fear whatever of pursuit.  They soon gathered some of the dead wood cast on the shores of the sea, and with these a fire was speedily lighted, and an earthenware pot was taken down from among their baggage:  it was filled with water from a skin, and then grain having been placed in it, it was put among the wood ashes.  Cuthbert, who was weary and aching in every limb from the position in which he had been placed on the camel, asked them by signs for permission to bathe in the lake.  This was given principally apparently from curiosity, for but very few Arabs were able to swim; indeed, as a people they object so utterly to water that the idea of any one bathing for his amusement was to them a matter of ridicule.

Cuthbert, who had never heard of the properties of the Dead Sea, was perfectly astonished upon entering the water to find that instead of wading in it up to the neck before starting to swim, as he was accustomed to do at home, the water soon after he got waist-deep took him off his feet, and a cry of astonishment burst from him as he found himself on rather than in the fluid.  The position was so strange and unnatural that with a cry of alarm he scrambled over on to his feet, and made the best of his way to shore, the Arabs indulging in shouts of laughter at his astonishment and alarm.  Cuthbert was utterly unable to account for the strange sensations he had experienced; he perceived that the water was horribly salt, and that which had got into his mouth almost choked him.  He was, however, unaware that saltness adds to the weight of water, and so to the buoyancy of objects cast into it.  The saltness of the fluid he was moreover painfully conscious of by the smarting of the places on his wrists and ankles where the cords had been bound that fastened him to the camel.  Goaded, however, by the laughter of the Arabs, he determined