Note 101 — Chapter X

Maundrell seems to have thought that they were calculated for places of security, for he says (page 117, Oxford, 1732, 8vo.)—“We were carried ... to see a place ... which very well deserves a traveller’s attention. At about the distance of a mile from the sea there runs along a high rocky mountain, in the side of which are hewn a multitude of grots, all very little differing from each other. They have entrances of about two feet three quarters. On the inside you find in most of them a room of about four yards square, on the one side of which is the door, on the other there are as many little cells, elevated about two feet above the floor.... The great doubt concerning them is whether they were made for the dead or for the living.”