Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

MEDIAEVAL GROWTH OF THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS. 225
ing ;
. . . and each traveller might have a new pillar of salt
to wonder over at intervals of a few *
years."
Few things could be more certain than that, in the indo-
lent dream-life of the East, myths and legends would grow
up to account for this as for other strange appearances in all
that region. The question which a religious Oriental put
to himself in ancient times at Usdum was substantially that
which his descendant to-day puts to himself at Kosseir:
"
Why is this region thus blasted ? " " Whence these pillars
of salt?" or " Whence these blocks of granite?" "What
aroused the vengeance of Jehovah or of Allah to work these
miracles of desolation ? "
And, just as Maxime Du Camp recorded the answer of
the modern Shemite at Kosseir, so the compilers of the Jewish
sacred books recorded the answer of the ancient Shemite
at the Dead Sea ; just as Allah at Kosseir blasted the land
and transformed the melons into boulders which are seen to
this day, so Jehovah at Usdum blasted the land and transformed
Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, which is seen to this
day.
No more difficulty was encountered in the formation of
the Lot legend, to account for that rock resembling the human
form, than in the formation of the Niobe legend, which
accounted for a supposed resemblance in the rock at Sipylos
: it grew up just as we have seen thousands of similar
myths and legends grow up about striking natural appearances
in every early home of the human race. Being thus
consonant with the universal view regarding the relation of
* As to the substance of
" " " " " "
the pillars or statues or needles of salt at Us-
in their
dum, many travellers speak of it as " marl and salt." Irby and Mangles,
Travels in Egypt, Nubia, Syria, and the Holy Land, chap, vii, call it " salt and
"
is from
hardened sand." The citation as to frequent carving out of new " pillars
the Travels in Palestine of the Rev. H. F. Osbom, D. D. ; see also Palmer, Desert
of the Exodus, vol. ii, pp. 478, 479. For engravings of the salt pillar at different
times, compare that given by Lynch in 1848, when it appeared as a column forty
feet high, with that given by Palmer as the frontispiece to his Desert of the Exodus,
Cambridge, England, 1871, when it was small and "does really bear a curious resemblance
to an Arab woman with a child upon her shoulders " ; and this again
with the picture of the salt formation at Usdum given by Canon Tristram, at whose
visit there was neither "pillar" nor "statue." See The Land of Israel, by H. B.
Tristram, D. D., F. R. S., London, 1882, p. 324. For similar pillars of salt washed
out from the marl in Catalonia, see Lyell.
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