Dead Sea towns around the lake. These towns had drinking water from the Ein Feshcha springs and other sweetwater springs in the vicinity. Intimately connected with the Judean wilderness to its northwest and west, the Dead Sea was a place of escape and refuge. The remoteness of the region attracted Greek Orthodox monks since the Byzantine era. Their monasteries, such as Saint George in Wadi Kelt and Mar Saba in the Judaean Desert, are places of pilgrimage. In the 19th century the River Jordan and the Dead Sea were explored by boat primarily by Christopher Costigan in 1835, Thomas Howard Molyneux in
The River Flows (novel) these visits in "The River Flows". The novel traces the way a scrupulous, sensitive young intellectual, diffident but proud, highly intelligent but inexperienced, is drawn by emotion into betraying the values he believes in (loyalty, unselfishness, the importance of not causing pain), while forging new ones he only half believes in ('love' and living to the full). The "New Statesman" called the novel "a candid, delicate, though not a profound study of jealousy". "Nothing is quite so horrible as jealousy," observes Margaret Osborne. "It attacks the best as much as the meanest; and it spoils and debases them under your