. Wanderings in Bible lands: notes of travel in Italy, Greece, Asia-Minor, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Cush, and Palestine. Entrance to one of the Catacombs. But let us examine more minutely these vast subterra-nean abodes of the dead. Going out of the City of Romeon almost any of the great consular roads a distance offrom one to three miles we find the entrances to the Cata-combs. We go down by an artificial, modern stairway to adepth of twenty or twenty-five feet and find ourselves in adark, narrow gallery. This is the entranceway to the un-derground sleeping-places of the dead. They consist ofl
. Wanderings in Bible lands: notes of travel in Italy, Greece, Asia-Minor, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Cush, and Palestine. Entrance to one of the Catacombs. But let us examine more minutely these vast subterra-nean abodes of the dead. Going out of the City of Romeon almost any of the great consular roads a distance offrom one to three miles we find the entrances to the Cata-combs. We go down by an artificial, modern stairway to adepth of twenty or twenty-five feet and find ourselves in adark, narrow gallery. This is the entranceway to the un-derground sleeping-places of the dead. They consist oflong, narrow galleries, from two and one-half to three feetwide (and in some places even narrower), and seven oreight feet high, cut in the solid rock, from fifteen to fiftyfeet below the surface of the earth. The galleries are cutwith great regularity, so that the floor and roof are at rightangles with the sides. They run in straight lines, but are. A Gallery in one of the Catacombs, 44 WANDERINGS IN BIBLE LANDS. crossed by others, and then by others again, until a perfectnetwork of galleries is formed in a labyrinth where onemight wander in the very blackness of darkness, and neverfind his way out. The galleries are cut on different levels, so that thereare in some places as many as five series of these corridorslying below each other. In the one we visited to-day wefound five levels, each reached by a descending stairwaycut in the rocks. The walls on either side of the galleriesare honeycombed with graves cut in the rock, one abovethe other. Into these openings, just high and wide enoughto admit the body, the dead were laid, and the opening wasthen closed with a marble slab or terra cotta tiles. No cof-fins were used in the first centuries in burying the body was wrapped in linen, with some aromatic spicesand herbs, and laid in the sepulchre hewn out of the the early Christians in Rome buried their dead after
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