The Dead Sea is the lowest land on Earth, 430 metres below sea level on Jordan's western border, and its water is about ten times saltier than the ocean. Nothing lives in it and nobody sinks. Each litre carries about 340 grams of salt, making the water heavier than a human body. You wade to your waist, lean back slowly, and your feet come up on their own. People float here on their backs reading a newspaper. Much of that salt is bitter magnesium chloride rather than the kind on a table, so the water feels oily, a mouthful tastes metallic, and every small cut lights up. The bath lasts a few minutes and ends at a freshwater rinse, and the salt-crusted bed underfoot is sharp the whole way in. The black mud along the shore is scooped up, spread on the skin, left to bake grey in the sun and washed off in the lake.
People have come for that cure since antiquity. Cleopatra is said to have secured the balsam groves on this coast for herself, and Herod built retreats along the cliffs above it. The Romans called it Asphaltites, for the black bitumen that still rises from its bed. Earthquakes on the rift below shake masses of it loose, and they float ashore in slabs. The Nabataeans of Petra grew rich harvesting it, and Egyptian embalmers bought it for their dead; the word mummy goes back to a Persian name for bitumen. The lake is also going. The Jordan that feeds it has been tapped almost dry, and where the water has pulled back, evaporation has cased every branch and stone in white crust, with sinkholes opening along the bank. It drops more than a metre a year, and the white line moves out with it: the crusted branches you walk past stood at the water's edge a few years ago.