Simplifiying it takes away all the beauty of the description, but here goes: Beyond are low stony hills, absolutely bare now except for some blue and yellow plants; an almost empty salt lake leaving, in its basin, salt formations which resemble ice, but which smell nothing like it; then a gradual ascent to a windy ridge, and then-the Dead Sea of Urmi or Urumiya.

If I were to simplify it, it word be word for word what Rena has written. There does appear to be a misspelling of cceruleumand it should be Eryngiwn Ceruleum a blue flowering spiky thorny plant, from which is extracted a blue pigment and it is the blue colour/color used on many screen savers as in the sky of default windows screen-savers. or pictures of swimming pools etc. So I guess this would give the scene a blue icy reflective look possibly?.

(if you want to get rid of all poetic imagery ) :: " Beyond there are low stony hills with a few flowers growing on them and a salt incrusted lake that has an odor, then gradually it gets steeper as a windy ridge approaches, and then the Dead Sea of Urmi/Urumiya. "

First of all there is something grammatically incorrect here around "Eryngiwn cceruleumand." I have no idea what that is. Eryngiwn is a flower. Cceruleumand is neither an English word, nor a sequence of letters that can produce a single results in a google search[1]. Dropping the extra C mostly just gives me information for the word "cerulean" which means blue. Let's just ignore cceruleumand word. This is also a run-on sentence for rhetorical effect, and quite flowery. In the end, though, it's just a list of things in the distance: - low stony hills. They are bare except for Eryngiwn (a flowery plant) - "the showy spikes of a great yellow mullein", another plant - a salt lake. Most of it is now just a salt bed (salt incrustation). This is to say, it is dry. The salt looks like ("mimicks") ice. The effect is that it looks like the water in the lake is being drawn from beneath the ice. It also smells like ice never does (because it is not ice). This is not what is actually there, because it is just salt, not ice, but this is what it looks like to the viewer. - a windy ridge - finally, we have the Dead Sea of Urmi A lot of times writers are criticized for being overly flowery. I generally disagree with the sentiment that English should be written with short sentences in short words (which is the Hemingway style), but I do think that this passage could be better written. There's some punctuation missing in the beginning, and that weird word next to Eryngiwn. Hope this helps. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=cceruleumand&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS796US796&oq=cceruleumand&aqs=chrome..69i57.215j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Thank you very much, Michael Alan. I really appreciate your help.