The surface of this road is 7 feet wide, and rises gently so that rain-water will quickly run off and not fill the trench. At its end an opening is broken into the wall of the cistern and built round with masonry and furnished with a door and lock, inside which a flight of steps leads down to its bottom. Along the north wall I found also new masonry of white hewn or squared stones, forming a row of eight loculi or places into which the coffins of deceased brethren may be put, and then walled up. One of the brethren is already lying there, and his place walled up. These loculi are about 3 feet above the ground, 2 feet 8 inches high and wide, and 8 feet 6 inches deep, so that there will be left room enough before the head of the coffin for a closing wall to be made flush with the building. The man who opened the place for me said there will be a second, and perhaps a third, row of such loculi built when the time comes that they are wanted. The large opening in the roof gives light to the place below. The annexed plan and sections will explain all this. About 100 feet north of this place, and nearly in the same line, excavations were also made, and old masonry and a cistern found, but they were so far covered up that I cannot describe them separately or give drawings of them, but, if God will, I will do this at some future time when more is cleared up.
No. 7. Higher up the hill, and nearer the city, a piece of ground has been cleared away at a place about 180 feet east of the western road, 50 feet north of the new boundary wall, and about 400 feet south of the city wall. It was found to be a rock scarp extending north and south. It has been laid bare for a length of 18 feet and to a depth of 10 feet. As it is not cleared to the bottom I cannot say how high the scarp may be, but it reminds one of the scarp at the Bishop Gobat School and the Protestant Burial Ground. A little more north, and only 712 feet more west, a similar scarp rises out of the ground, not so high but in the same direction. Along the latter are the remains of former rooms, consisting of walls cut out from the rock to a height from 4 to 8 feet. There are three rooms of different sizes; the partition walls were left here rather stronger than those in No. 1. The northern room is the largest, and had, towards the east, two openings with a piece of rock between them. In the wall of the southern room is the mouth of a cistern which seems to be of large extent. In front of the rooms (east) is a nice pavement, partly of rock and partly of flagstones, which at the first view appears to be the flooring of a church, or of some similar large building, as it is of equal width (of about 20 feet) for a length of about 50 feet. But on closer examination it seems rather to have been a street of the ancient city, for no bases of pillars, or marks of such, or of other supports, are recognisable, and then the surface, although from west to east horizontal, slopes from south to north to the extent of about 18 inches.[1] At first I thought it might in later time have sunk, but as everywhere the rock is visible, that cannot have been the case, and as no steps were applied to
- ↑ I had no levelling instruments with me, hence I cannot state the exact decline, but simply estimate it as it appeared to my eye.
