Can the Dead Sea Live Again?

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 28, 29 July 1925, Page 27

Can the Dead Sea Live Again?

RECLAMATION SCHEMES. - Pilgrims who have made the wonderful descent from Jerusalem to Jericho (the Holy City is more than 2000 feet above, and the Dead Sea 1300 feet below, the level of the Mediterranean) and who have stood on the brink of the most desolate sheet of water in the world, N its beach thickly spread with miked branches and the skeletons of dead fish, will rub their eyes on reading that this spot, forsaken by God.and man, is "before long to become a centre throbbing with life and industry." The rights to recover the immense chemical deposits lying in those unknown depths, and place them on the world's markets arc (says a writer in the Edinburgh Catholic Herald) already becoming subjects of negotiation and discussion. Perhaps, however, there are still some old-fashioned students of the Old Testament who are sceptical as to the coming reversal of the doom pronounced of old over the Cities of the Plain. It. is easy to talk of the millions of tons of potassium chloride and other valuable chemicals at present lying waste and undeveloped! in this great sterile inland sea. .But it may possibly prove to be beyond the powers of even the "British Mandate in Palestine" to transform, by a wave of its wand, the most desolate region on earth into a land flowing with milk and honey.