Not far from the Wailing-place, 39 ft. from the south-eastern corner, is the celebrated beginning of the bridge which united the temple to the city, crossing over the Tyropœon; it belongs to the first system of the substructure, and forms part of it. The English excavations have brought one of the piers to light; they have shown that the roadway of the bridge is 295 ft. long, and that the breadth of each arch amounts to 16 yards. While digging at the foot of the pier a pavement was discovered which no doubt represents the street which passed along there before Herod’s epoch, or rather even before the destruction of the Temple by the Chaldæans. Some foundation is formed for this conjecture by the fact that when the English broke up this pavement and dug lower still they found the extrados of a vault: this was nothing less than the arch of another bridge of colossal masonry, which in the course of centuries had been buried under masses of rubbish: Herod, and perhaps Zerubbabel before him, built over the ruins without even trying to clear away the bridge. Who knows whether this arch, called _Robinson’s arch_, from the excavator’s name, is not the remains of a bridge erected by Solomon? In the mass of substructure beneath the Haram, the existence of vaults and of a network of corridors of drafted masonry has been proved, and these must, from the character of the work, be contemporary with Herod. On the platform, two cisterns are seen which probably date from Solomon’s time, if they are not even earlier, though it must be admitted that they have been subjected to successive restorations. One is under the rock Sakhra, the other in front of the mosque of El Aksa: the latter, especially, which is the largest, is a superb artificial grotto, upheld by pilasters contrived in the side of the rock. The descent into that under the rock Sakhra is by a flight of fifteen steps; in the centre is a well which by means of a subterranean canal opens into the valley of Kedron, and was perhaps used by Araunah the Jebusite. [Illustration: Fig. 171.--The western door. Present state (after M. de Vogüé).] The outer enclosure built by Herod was pierced by several gates giving access to the terrace, which are still partly preserved. They are subterranean with regard to the platform; their threshold was of course on a level with the ground outside, and they opened on the staircases formed in the thickness of the terrace. At the present day, as the ground outside has been raised by rubbish of all kinds, Herod’s doorways are filled up either entirely or partly. The _Western Gate_ (fig. 171), near the Wailing-place, is at the present day buried to the extent of two-thirds. It is surmounted by a great monolithic lintel 16 ft. long, and its structure belongs to the Herodian system of masonry, but it has undergone subsequent alterations within.