Note Note III — NOTES ON CHAPTER II.

The Armenians, in the various new edifices that they have built on Mount Sion, have found remains of walls, stones, reservoirs and cisterns of the most remote antiquity, generally at a depth of eighteen or even twenty feet below the surface, sometimes more. Before my arrival in Jerusalem, whilst digging for foundations they found a large quantity of small blocks of limestone of five and seven inches cube, dressed on every side, and so many in number that they employed them to build high and long unmortared walls, which to this day surround their property on the south inside the city. These stones were found collected together in one place, and were not scattered about: it is not impossible that they had been prepared to line the walls of a large pool. I say this because stones of this shape are now found in the pool of Bethesda, but in this reservoir they are wrought with more accuracy and uniformity. In my own time, in 1859, they discovered a pool, cut in the solid rock, which shewed however that the work had not been completed; it was 18 feet long, 10 broad, and 10 deep. In its neighbourhood were seen traces of conduits that they had begun to cut out in the rock.