- A lake which is the source of the news frenzy-causing bacteria in 2010
- A Castle in the very north of Israel built around 1230?
The answer: Mark Twain visited them both.
This is particularly remarkable to me as I stumbled upon this little tidbit of knowledge in the same week the bacteria were making the news and I myself visited the castle in Israel.
The news coverage of the bacteria always made sure to mention that Mono Lake was a very harsh environment, and that arsenic was abundant there. It sounds like the kinda place that would kill you to dip a toe in! Interestingly, Mark Twain saw the very basic (as opposed to acidic) nature of the lake as a positive aspect of the area. He writes of how easy it was to do laundry, dragging the dirty clothes in the water for a few minutes to have them come out clean as the best wash lady could hope to render them. There's a lot more that he divulges about the wonders (and discomforts) of this strange location in his book "Roughing it," in a chapter titled "The Wonders of Mono Lake."Not surprisingly, the official site of Mono Lake also works hard to correct the idea of the lake as a toxic dump. NASA and strange bacteria are no stranger to Mono Lake; it was also in the news back in 2003 for a different crazy bacteria.
While visiting Nimrod's Fortress (really, nothing to do with Nimrod), I heard from one of those little tourist audio stations a quote that Mark Twain had called these the "most well-preserved ruins of its kind." Actually, the quote is quite varied, as I think most places it appears it has been retranslated to English after being translated to Hebrew originally. However, here is the quote in full, available here or here:
Two hours later we reached the foot of a tall isolated mountain, which is crowned by the crumbling castle of Banias, the stateliest ruin of that kind on earth, no doubt. It is a thousand feet long and two hundred wide, all of the most symmetrical, and at the same time the most ponderous masonry. The massive towers and bastions are more than thirty feet high, and have been sixty. From the mountain's peak its broken turrets rise above the groves of ancient oaks and olives, and look wonderfully picturesque. It is of such high antiquity that no man knows who built it or when it was built. It is utterly inaccessible, except in one place, where a bridle-path winds upward among the solid rocks to the old portcullis. The horses' hoofs have bored holes in these rocks to the depth of six inches during the hundreds and hundreds of years that the castle was garrisoned. We wandered for three hours among the chambers and crypts and dungeons of the fortress, and trod where the mailed heels of many a knightly Crusader had rang, and where Phenician heroes had walked ages before them.So, there it is. Mark Twain certainly got around, and his accounts of his travels are just as colorful and fun-loving as his works of fiction.
