Volume One—Chapter Fourteen.

Fearful Sufferings in the Pandemonium of Bahr Assál.

In this unventilated and diabolical hollow, dreadful indeed were the sufferings in store both for man and beast. Not a drop of fresh water existed within many miles; and, notwithstanding that every human precaution had been taken to secure a supply, by means of skins carried upon camels, the very great extent of most impracticable country to be traversed, which had unavoidably led to the detention of nearly all, added to the difficulty of restraining a multitude maddened by the tortures of burning thirst, rendered the provision quite insufficient; and during the whole of this appalling day, with the mercury in the thermometer standing at 126 degrees under the shade of cloaks and umbrellas—in a suffocating Pandemonium, depressed five hundred and seventy feet below the ocean, where no zephyr fanned the fevered skin, and where the glare arising from the sea of white salt was most painful to the eyes; where the furnace-like vapour exhaled, almost choking respiration, created an indomitable thirst, and not the smallest shade or shelter existed, save such as was afforded, in cruel mockery, by the stunted boughs of the solitary leafless acacia, or, worse still, by black blocks of heated lava, it was only practicable, during twelve tedious hours, to supply to each of the party two quarts of the most mephitic brick-dust-coloured fluid, which the direst necessity could alone have forced down the parched throat, and which, after all, far from alleviating thirst, served materially to augment its insupportable horrors.

It is true that since leaving the shores of India, the party had gradually been in training towards a disregard of dirty water—a circumstance of rather fortunate occurrence. On board a ship of any description the fluid is seldom very clean, or very plentiful. At Cape Aden there was little perceptible difference betwixt the sea-water and the land water. At Tajúra the beverage obtainable was far from being improved in quality by the taint of the new skins in which it was transferred from the only well; and now, in the very heart of the scorching Teháma, when a copious draught of aqua pura seemed absolutely indispensable every five minutes, to secure further existence upon earth, the detestable mixture that was at long intervals most parsimoniously produced, was the very acmé of abomination. Fresh hides stripped from the rank he-goat, besmeared inside as well as out with old tallow and strong bark tan, filled from an impure well at Sagállo, tossed, tumbled, and shaken during two entire nights on a camel’s back, and brewed during the same number of intervening days under a strong distilling heat—poured out an amalgamation of pottage of which the individual ingredients of goat’s hair, rancid mutton fat, astringent bark, and putrid water, were not to be distinguished. It might be smelt at the distance of twenty yards, yet all, native and European, were struggling and quarrelling for a taste of the recipe. The crest-fallen mules, who had not moistened their cracked lips during two entire days, crowding around the bush, thrust their hot noses into the faces of their masters, in reproachful intimation of their desire to participate in the filthy but tantalising decoction; and deterred with difficulty from draining the last dregs, they ran frantically with open mouths to seek mitigation of their sufferings at the deceptive waters of the briny lake, which, like those of Goobut el Kharáb, were so intensely salt, as to create smarting of the lips if tasted.

Slowly flapped the leaden wings of Time on that dismal day. Each weary hour brought a grievous accession, but no alleviation, to the fearful torments endured. The stagnation of the atmosphere continued undiminished; the pangs of thirst increased, but no water arrived; and the sun’s despotic dominion on the meridian, appeared to know no termination. At four o’clock, when the heat was nothing abated, distressing intelligence was received that one of the seamen, who during the preceding night had accompanied the captain of the schooner-of-war from Goobut el Kharáb, and had unfortunately lost his way, could nowhere be found—the gunner, with six men, having long painfully searched the country side for their lost messmate, but to no purpose; Abroo, the son of whom old Aboo Bekr was justly proud, and who was indeed the flower of his tribe, immediately volunteered to go in quest of the missing sailor, and he subsequently returned with the cheering intelligence that his efforts had been crowned with success. Overwhelmed by heat and thirst, the poor fellow, unable to drag his exhausted limbs further, had crept for shelter into a fissure of the heated lava, where he had soon sunk into a state of insensibility. Water, and the use of a lancet, with which the young midshipman who heroically accompanied the exploring party had been provided, restored suspended animation sufficiently to admit of his patient being conveyed on board the “Constance” alive; but, alas! he never reached Tajúra; neither did one of the brave tars who sought their lost comrade under the fierce rays of the sun, nor indeed did any of the adventurous expedition, escape without feeling, in after severe illness, the unwholesome influence upon the human constitution of that waste and howling wilderness.

But the longest day must close at last, and the great luminary had at length run his fiery and tyrannical course. String after string of loaded camels, wearied with the passage of the rugged defile of Rah Eesah, were with infinite difficulty urged down the last steep declivity, and at long intervals, as the shadows lengthened, made their tardy appearance upon the desert plain; those carrying water, tents, and the greater portion of the provisions most required, being nevertheless still in the rear when the implacable orb went down, shorn of his last fierce ray. The drooping spirits of all now rose with the prospect of speedy departure from so fearful a spot. The commander of the friendly schooner, which had proved of such inestimable service, but whose protecting guns were at length to be withdrawn, shortly set out on his return to the vessel with the last despatches from the Embassy, after bidding its members a final farewell; and in order to obtain water, any further deprivation of which must have involved the dissolution of the whole party, no less than to escape from the pestilential exhalations of the desolate lake, which, as well during the night as during the day, yielded up a blast like that curling from a smith’s forge—withering to the human frame—it was resolved as an unavoidable alternative, to leave the baggage to its fate, and to the tender mercies of guides and camel-drivers, pushing forward as expeditiously as possible to Goongoonteh, a cleft in the mountains that bound the opposite shore, wherein water was known to be abundant. Pursuant to this determination, the European escort, with the servants, followers, horses, and mules, were held in readiness to march so soon as the moon should rise above the gloomy lava hills, sufficiently to admit of the path being traced which leads beyond the accursed precincts of a spot, fitly likened by the Danákil to the infernal regions.

Dismal, deadly, and forbidding, but deeply interesting in a geological point of view, its overwhelming and paralysing heat precluded all possibility of minute examination, and thus researches were of necessity confined to the general character of the place. Latitude, longitude, and level were however accurately determined (These will be found in the Appendix, Number One), and many were the theories ventured, to account for so unusual a phenomenon. Obviously the result of earthquake and volcanic eruption—a chaos vomited into existence by

“Th’ infuriate hill that shoots the pillar’d flame,”

Dame Nature must indeed have been in a most afflicting throe to have given birth to a progeny so monstrous; and there being no locality to which the most vivid fancy could assign aught that ever bore the name of wealth or human population, little doubt can exist that the sea must have been repelled far from its former boundaries. The oviform figure of the bowl, hemmed in on three sides by volcanic mountains, and on the fourth by sheets of lava, would at the first glance indicate the site of an extensive crater, whose cone having fallen into a subterranean abyss, had given rise to the singular appearance witnessed. But it is a far more probable hypothesis that the Bahr Assál, now a dead sea, formed at some very remote period a continuation of the Gulf of Tajúra, and was separated from Goobut el Kharáb by a stream of lava six miles in breadth, subsequently upheaved by subterranean action, and now forming a barrier, which, from its point of greatest elevation, where the traces of many craters still exist, gradually slopes eastward towards the deep waters of the bay, and westward into the basin of the Salt Lake. Whilst no soundings are found in the estuary of Tajúra, Goobut el Kharáb gives one hundred and fifteen fathoms, or six hundred and ninety feet; and premising the depression of the lake to have been formerly correspondent therewith, one hundred and twenty feet may be assumed as its present depth. To this it has been reduced by the great annual evaporation that must take place—an evaporation decreasing every year as the salt solution becomes more intensely concentrated, and evinced by the saline incrustation on the surface no less than by a horizontal efflorescence, in strata, at a considerable height on the face of the circumjacent rocks.

In the lapse of years, should the present order of things continue undisturbed from below, the water win probably disappear altogether, leaving a field of rock salt, which, when covered in by the débris washed down from the adjacent mountains, will form an extensive dep?t for the supply of Danákil generations yet unborn; and the shocks of earthquakes being still occasionally felt in the neighbourhood, it seems not improbable—to carry the speculation still further—that Goobut el Kharáb, divided only by a narrow channel from the Bay of Tajúra, will, under subterranean influence, be, in due process of time, converted into a salt lake, in no material respect dissimilar from the Bahr Assál—another worthy type of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.