Conversation with the minister, dressed in black overcoat and white gown, opened the proceedings; lemonade, coffee, and a cigarette followed. All the congregation then rose, the minister removed his fezz, and a prayer, a chapter, and a short sermon formed the service, concluding with the Lord's Prayer, in which all joined, and the blessing; the whole in Arabic. The natives were reverential and attentive, but some of the children got tired of the sermon and set to teasing one another.
Leaving Nazareth as soon as possible, we made our new camp at the village of Sheikh Abreik, situate on a white hill, which projects as a bastion from the rest, forming one side of the narrow gorge where, under the cliffs of Carmel, the Kishon leaves the great Plain of Esdraelon to enter that of Acre. Here we spent a pleasant fortnight, but here also we had troubles with the neighbouring peasantry.
Sheikh Abreik stands on the site of an unknown town of no little importance. To the west the hillside is completely undermined by extensive excavations and systems of tombs which required many days to examine. Under the town is one called "the Cave of Gehenna,â and on the hill is another consisting of chamber within chamber, the first entered being painted with palm-branches, ivy-leaves, and other mortuary emblems in red; in one tomb the inscription "Partheneâ is written in Greek, in another we found graves unopened, and the entrances most carefully closed; but unfortunately the roof had fallen in, and all that our excavation brought us was a delicate little tear-bottle, the glass oxidised by age, and covered with a prismatic crust which scaled off easily.
Into every entrance I could find I forced a way, sometimes opening up the door with a spade just enough to force my shoulders through, and creeping into the dark chamber, where the taper revealed ghastly creeping insects, and in one case a scorpion, which stung me pretty sharply. This inspection laid the foundation of a systematic comparison of many hundred tombs throughout the country, which has led to conclusions of some value with regard to the comparative antiquity of various kinds of sepulchres. It is pretty clear, for instance, that the tomb with a loculus parallel to the side of the central chamber is a later arrangement, used by the Jews about the Christian era, instead of the Kokim tomb, in which the body was placed in a sort of pigeon-hole, with its feet nearest the chamber; and further, that the rolling stone was also a later contrivance, being found almost exclusively with the loculi or later tombs. These conclusions fully accord with the description of the Holy Sepulchre as a tomb with a rolling stone to its door, for our Lord's tomb must have been one with a loculus or grave parallel to the side of the chamber, because two angels are described as sitting, "the one at the head, the other at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lainâ (John xx. 12), which would have been clearly impossible in the more primitive form of Jewish tomb with Kokim.