...When I arrived at the marketplace it was already teeming with traqffic, pedestrians, and idlers as taxis, trucks, and other traffic from Amman and Jerusalem passed through. Trucks were arriving with scrap lumber, metal, pipes, and assorted machinery from the direction of the Dead Sea. I decided to investigate.

In an Armenian barbershop on Jericho's main street, I met a young refugee from Jerusalem named Torkom. Together we got into a bus going in the direction of the Dead Seam then walked the remaining distance over the semi-arid backed earth. Vast brine evaporation-beds, dazzling white under the sun, met the eye in all directions, connected by miles of pipelines. Beyond them was the huge plant of Palestine Potash, Ltd. (a once highly profitable British corporation owned jointly by English and Jewish capital), which converted the fabulous mineral wealth of the Dead Sea into common salt, bromides, and chlorides of magnesium, potassium, and calcium.

Photographing as I went along, I saw, with Torkom, a sight that sickened me. The huge plant, stretching over many acres, with its generators, transformers, pumps, and a thousand and one irreplaceable items of machinery -- transported at tremendous cost from England and the United States was systematically being looted and destroyed: building by building, machine by machine, board by board. Hundreds of Arab scavengers, working with teams of donkeys, mules, and trucks, had already stripped away most of the vital working parts, and were now tearing at the corrugated tin, pipes, wire, boards, and small machines. What they could not take apart they smashed with sledge hammers. Instead of utilizing the giant plant, or at least expropriating some of the equipment for constructive purposes -- in a land so desperately in need of lumber, glass, ironwork and all else that was in such abundance here -- they were destroying everything, ruthlessly, cold-bloodedly, insanely.

The plant already looked like a miniature Hiroshima, minus the ravages of fire. And this wanton destruction was more or less officially sanctioned by the Trans-Jordan officials. A dozen Arab Legion guards were on hand to keep law and order among the looters.

Further on, I saw the remains of Hotel Kallia, a noted winter resort on the shores of the Dead Sea. Near by were the ruins of the cottages built by the Palestine Potash Corporation to house not only officials, engineers and laborers, but scientists and achaeologists. About a mile away I saw what was left of Beth Harava, a settlement founded by the Jews, who had brought water there to make the desert bloom, so that trees and flowers grew 1,300 feet below sea level.

When the war broke out the isolated colonists packed away their belongings, automobiles and all, and set sail during the night for the southern shore, site of a smaller potash concession. I found their homes stripped to the ground, with only the framework of a few houses remaining. I walked through one ruined home, where sash, doors, and flooring were all gone. Unable to rip off the toilet bowl, the Arabs had broken it in half. Overwhelmed by this destruction all about us, Torkom and I walked on to the shores of the Dead Sea itself. It was a silent lake, forty-seven miles long and ten miles wide. For thousands of years the Jordan had poured mineral sediment into it. I found wrecked boats; pilfered wreckage dotted the shore as far as the eye could reach.

Torkom and I silently hitch-hiked back to Jericho on a huge truck laden with plunder. Our scavenger friends drove straight to the bazaar and began to sell their loot as junk -- which was what they had made out of the once valuable machinery and equipment.