Needless to say that, if Rome was full of relics, there was no want of them in Jerusalem. All the places named in the Gospel, and some others, had been identified with precision: “Item, continuing to go up towards this mountain on the right hand side, there is a house where the sweet Virgin Mary learnt at school.” Near the church of the Holy Sepulchre is a large square “with two big stones on the one of which our Lord used to sit when He preached to His disciples, and our Lady sat opposite on the other.” The place is shown “where St. John the Evangelist sang mass every day in the presence of our Lady after the Ascension of our Lord.” You may see, too, the spot where was roasted the paschal lamb; “even here was warmed the water with which our Lord washed the feet of His apostles.” There is also a cave or well “where King Herod had the Innocents {416} thrown, out of spite.” At Bethlehem is a church of St. Nicholas, “in which place the sweet Virgin Mary hid herself to draw her milk from her worthy breasts when she would fly to Egypt. In this same church is a marble column against which she leaned when she drew her worthy milk, and this pillar continues moist since the time she leaned against it, and when it is wiped, at once it sweats again; and in all places where her worthy milk fell, the earth is still soft and white and has the appearance of curded milk, and whoever likes takes of it, out of devotion.”—Hence the milk at Walsingham? In Egypt, too, the wonders are numerous, but many are of a different order. Besides the churches and hermitages there are the “granaries of Pharaoh,” namely the pyramids, which seem to the lord of Anglure and his companions “the most marvellous thing they had yet seen in all their travels.” They are cut “in the shape of a fine diamond,” but inside they are full of animals, who stink horribly. Mandeville, who had seen them some years before, gives them the same origin, and utterly discards the belief that they might have been tombs of high personages. He mentions the hieroglyphics, about the only thing in all his book that he does not try to explain; he also has a word for the grim inhabitants of the pyramids: “Thei ben alle fulle of serpentes. And aboven the gernerers with outen ben many scriptures of dyverse languages. And sum men seyn that they ben sepultures of grete Lordes, that weren somtyme; but that is not trewe; for all the comoun rymour and speche is of alle the peple there, bothe far and nere, that thei ben the garneres of Joseph. And so fynden thei in here scriptures and in here cronycles. On that other partie, yif thei werein sepultures, thei scholden not ben voyd with inne. For yee may well knowe that tombes and sepultures ne ben not made of suche gretnesse ne of suche highnesse. Wherfore it is not to beleve that thei {417} ben tombes or sepultures.”[595] This powerful mode of reasoning did not, however, convince such sceptics as Mariette and Maspéro.