They came through the four western gates into the _Mountain of the House_, and [450] went up from the _Mountain of the House_, to the gates of the _People's Court_ by seven steps, and from the _People's Court_ to the gates of the _Priest's Court_ by eight steps: [451] and the arches in the sides of the gates of both courts led into cloysters [452] under a double building, supported by three rows of marble pillars, which butted directly upon the middles of the square posts, ran along from thence upon the pavements towards the corners of the Courts: the axes of the pillars in the middle row being eleven cubits distant from the axes of the pillars in the other two rows on either hand; and the building joining to the sides of the gates: the pillars were three cubits in diameter below, and their bases four cubits and an half square. The gates and buildings of both Courts were alike, and [453] faced their Courts: the cloysters of all the buildings, and the porches of all the gates looking towards the _Altar_. The row of pillars on the backsides of the cloysters adhered to marble walls, which bounded the cloysters and supported the buildings: [454] these buildings were three stories high above the cloysters, and [455] were supported in each of those stories by a row of cedar beams, or pillars of cedar, standing above the middle row of the marble pillars: the buildings on either side of every gate of the _People's Court_, being 187½ cubits long, were distinguished into five chambers on a floor, running in length from the gates to the corners or the Courts: there [456] being in all thirty chambers in a story, where the People ate the Sacrifices, or thirty exhedras, each of which contained three chambers, a lower, a middle, and an upper: every exhedra was 37½ cubits long, being supported by four pillars in each row, [457] whose bases were 4½ cubits square, and the distances between their bases 6½ cubits, and the distances between the axes of the pillars eleven cubits: and where two [458] exhedras joyned, there the bases of their pillars joyned; the axes of those two pillars being only 4½ cubits distant from one another: and perhaps for strengthning the building, the space between the axes of these two pillars in the front was filled up with a marble column 4½ cubits square, the two pillars standing half out on either side of the square column. At the ends of these buildings [459] in the four corners of the _Peoples Court_, were little Courts fifty cubits square on the outside of their walls, and forty on the inside thereof, for stair-cases to the buildings, and kitchins to bake and boil the Sacrifices for the People, the kitchin being thirty cubits broad, and the stair-case ten. The buildings on either side of the gates of the _Priests Court_ were also 37½ cubits long, and contained each of them one great chamber in a story, subdivided into smaller rooms, for the Great Officers of the Temple,