Other churches which may have been rebuilt by Modestus include the “double church” of the Virgin’s Tomb (a subterranean chapel with a round roofless building over it), and the remarkable round church on the summit of Olivet. These, like the four churches above described, were rebuilt by the Franks in the twelfth century. The Armenian account (already noticed[447]) speaks of the Virgin’s Tomb as reached by two hundred and fifty steps, having above it a cupola on four marble columns covered with copper crosses. It also mentions St. Sion apparently as having a crypt, and a wooden cupola on which the Last Supper was painted. The Church of the Ascension was also roofless, and had apparently a central drum, supported on pillars and pierced by eight windows on the west side: these were glazed, and lamps were hung in them which could be seen shining by night from the city. A circular double cloister surrounded the drum, and in the centre was a bronze cylinder,[448] with a glazed door through which could be seen the rock marked by the two footprints of Christ. The pilgrims used to be admitted within, and carried away with them the dust lying on the rock. A strange superstition was also connected, in the eighth century, with two pillars which apparently stood in the east gate of the outer cloister; for St. Willibald says that “the man who can squeeze between the pillars and the wall becomes free from his sins.” The same superstition still clung to two pillars in the Aḳṣa Mosque as late as 1881 A. D.; for it was said by Moslems that any one who squeezed between them would go to heaven. In consequence, perhaps, of my having passed through them, an iron bar was placed across by order of the pasha to prevent this old custom being followed any more. It is a survival of the widespread peasant belief in the virtue of “passing through” holed stones, creeping under dolmens, or altars, or arches, which we find all over the world, from Ireland to China and Japan. The works of Modestus had only been completed about a dozen years before the Moslem Conquest, and were the last carried out under Christian domination until the time of the first Crusade, though other churches were built in 1028 A. D., as will appear later. The gradual growth of Christian buildings in Jerusalem, down to the era of the downfall of Christian power in Palestine, has been described in the historical sequence of their construction to the time immediately preceding the triumph of Islâm. FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER X [410] “Apologeticus,” i. 37. [411] “Catech. Lect.,” xix. 8, delivered in the new Church of the Anastasis in 348 A. D. Cyril was a semi-Arian. [412] “Life of Constant.” (in Greek), iii. 25. [413] “Demonstr. Evang.,” vi. 18. [414] “Life of Constant.,” iii. 30. [415] “Life of Constant.,” iii. 28. [416] “Catech. Lect.,” xiii. 9. [417] “Mem. West Pal. Survey,” vol. , pp. 316, 330; “Mem. East Pal. Survey,” p. 244. In the latter instance there are several groups of rock-sunk graves.