Zarqa River by the King of Ammon. Eusebius places the river between Gerasa and Philadelphia. The headwaters of the Zarqa begin just northeast of Amman, rising from a spring named Ain Ghazal ("Gazelle spring"). The river flows to the north before heading west. Rising on the eastern side of the mountains of Gilead, it runs a course of about in a wild and deep ravine before flowing into the Jordan River between Gennesaret and the Dead Sea, at a point below its origin. At its higher reaches, the river banks are mostly steep and canyon-like. Near Ain Ghazal, two tributary wadis join
Dead Sea in the northern part of the Dead Sea and barely in the southern part. The Dead Sea zone's aridity is due to the rainshadow effect of the Judaean Mountains. The highlands east of the Dead Sea receive more rainfall than the Dead Sea itself. To the west of the Dead Sea, the Judaean mountains rise less steeply and are much lower than the mountains to the east. Along the southwestern side of the lake is a tall halite formation called "Mount Sodom". There are two contending hypotheses about the origin of the low elevation of the Dead Sea. The older