best pastoral areas of all Syria. Blanketed with deposits of recent alluvium and loam, it also provides the most favourable soil for agriculture. Large irrigation works are planned for the Litani, but the Orontes' bed is so low that its water cannot readily be utilized. Therefore water wheels, for raising water to the level of the land, fill Hamah with their perpetual monotonous wailing.
The valley of the Jordan is some sixty-five miles in length and three to fourteen in width. This singular crevasse receives considerable streams from the west watershed—which makes Palestine the overdrained land that it is—and ultimately spreads its water into the bitterest lake in the world. The Dead Sea is unusually saline, with high concentrations of bromine, potash and magnesium chloride. Bituminous limestone and asphalt of excellent quality are found in and around the Dead Sea as well as south-west of Mount Hermon.
The faulted mountains of Lebanon and the long rift valley culminating in the Jordan-Dead Sea depression mark a zone of intense earthquake activity, which has not, however, been limited to the great fracture area. Part of the plateau east of Mount Hermon and south of Damascus is crossed by lines of extinct volcanoes and splotched by old lava fields, while thermal springs are scattered from Palmyra to the Dead Sea.
The history of Syria is more punctuated with earthquakes than its geography with volcanoes. At the northern extremity Antioch was scourged by earthquakes through the ages. In the first six centuries after Christ, they damaged it no less than ten times. The walls of the world-renowned temple of the sun at Baalbek bear scars of seismic disturbances, as do the extant Crusader castles. The sudden collapse of Jericho's walls on the occasion of the Israelite invasion as well as the spectacular destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, at the south-western extremity of the Dead Sea, point to earthquakes, coupled in the latter instance
