by Mark Silva, as told by the pool.

JERUSALEM - Every journey has its tourist value.

But Masada could be among the most sobering of all sites.

President Bush flew by helicopter this morning to Masada, the fortress atop a 1,500-foot-high plateau overlooking the Dead Sea valley built by Herod as a winter palace and hideout. A century later, when the Jewish rebellion against Rome broke out, Zealots took over the then-abandoned fortress, and Masada became the last rebel stronghold in Judea - and a site of massive sacrifice.

In 73 or 74, the Romans laid siege to Masada with 8,000 troops. After a few months, the Romans succeeded in building a ramp to the fortress wall and brought forward a battering ram. The rebels had constructed a wooden inner wall, but the Romans burned it.

With Masada's hopes diminishing, the rebel leader, Eleazar Ben Yair, "gave two speeches in which he convinced the leaders of the 960 members of the community that it would be better to take their own lives and the lives of their families than to live in shame and humiliation as Roman slaves," according to a Masada brochure.

They picked ten people by lot to kill the rest, cutting their throats. Those ten then cast lots again to decide who would dispatch them.

Josephus wrote that when the Romans entered the fortress, they "were at a loss to conjecture what had happened. Here encountering the mass of slain, instead of exulting as over enemies, they admired the nobility of their resolve and the contempt of death display[ed] by so many in carrying it, unwavering, into execution."

Eitan Campbell, director of the Masad National Park, led the president on a tour.

Only one person "actually committed the technical act of suicide, probably here in this room," Campbell said in the synagogue there. "He killed the nine and set everything afire, so there was nothing the Romans could use afterward, except for one storeroom which we left intact - they left intact - to show that it was not because of food...but rather not to fall into slavery."

The message here is not the promotion of suicide, he suggested.

"It's an individual thing,'' he said. "Everyone has his own Masada."

With thanks to John McKinnon of the Wall Street Journal for his pool reporting of the president's visit to Masada.