. Wanderings in Bible lands: notes of travel in Italy, Greece, Asia-Minor, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Cush, and Palestine. there was living beneath the visible and invisibleRome a population unheeded, unreckoned, thought ofvaguely, vaguely spoken of, and with the .familiarity andindifference that men feel who live on a volcano, yet a pop-ulation strong-hearted, of quick impulses, nerved alike tosuffer and die, and in number, resolution, and physical forcesufficient to have hurled their oppressors from the throneof the world, had they not deemed it their duty to kiss therod, to love their enemies,
. Wanderings in Bible lands: notes of travel in Italy, Greece, Asia-Minor, Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Cush, and Palestine. there was living beneath the visible and invisibleRome a population unheeded, unreckoned, thought ofvaguely, vaguely spoken of, and with the .familiarity andindifference that men feel who live on a volcano, yet a pop-ulation strong-hearted, of quick impulses, nerved alike tosuffer and die, and in number, resolution, and physical forcesufficient to have hurled their oppressors from the throneof the world, had they not deemed it their duty to kiss therod, to love their enemies, to bless those that cursed them,and to submit, for their Redeemers sake, to the powers thatbe! Here, in these dens and caves of the earth, they lived; 42 WANDERINGS IN BIBLE LANDS. here they died—a spectacle in their lifetime 4to men andangels, and in their death a triumph to mankind—a tri-umph of which the echoes still float around the walls ofRome, and over the desolate Campagna, while those thatonce thrilled the Capitol are silenced, and the wails that re-turned them have long since crumbled into the 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
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, bookidwanderingsin, bookyear1894
