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 labours 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 once
more to try the experiment of entering this strange sheet