The queen’s megaron is especially luxurious; it is decorated on a principle which, as Sir Arthur Evans says, was used later by the Romans of the Empire. The wall paintings, done in perspective, included a scene of the sea with fishes playing, another of forest life, and a dado of dancing girls. It was in this part of the building, too, that the drainage and water supply put the engineers on their mettle. This was the lowest part of the sloping hillside on which the palace stood, and the water supply, which came from the neighbourhood of the North Gate, had to be so organized as to prevent flooding--a stiff enough problem for engineers of 4,000 years ago. They solved it by a system of parabolic curves which subjected the flow to friction. Sinks, lavatories, underground pipes suggest modern drainage. They, nevertheless, were in use at Knossos. The rooms of the building in this south-east part were arranged in terraces at different levels on the hillside. The fact of the grand staircase having five flights does not mean that there were five storeys one on top of the other. As a result of the final restoration of this staircase by Sir Arthur Evans and Dr. Mackenzie in 1910, it appears that “the upper landing of the fifth flight does not lead on to the ground floor of the central court, but answers in height to what must have been the first floor of the rooms on the other or western side. It must itself, therefore, have led on to some raised building, probably a terrace, that ran along the eastern side of the court” (_Britannia Yearbook_, 1913, “Crete,” p. 269. Dr. R. M. Burrows). There remains the north-east section. This was occupied by the artists and workmen of the palace. In one room olives were pressed, the oil being carried away by a conduit which turns twice at right angles till it reaches a spout set in the wall lower down the hill, more than fifty feet away. There the oil-jars were filled, and oil-jars are still standing in an adjoining room. Another room has been identified by the imagination of Sir Arthur Evans as the schoolroom. In other rooms pots were “thrown” and painted; stone vases carved; gold, silver, and bronze work moulded; sculptures were chiselled; seal stones and gems cut; and the favourite miniatures in ivory were carved which, in a compass of ten or eleven inches, reproduced a human form to the minutest detail of veins and finger-nails. It will be seen, then, that the palace of Knossos was something more than the seat of King Minos. It contained a community completely organized within its walls, and independent of any outside connexion, after the manner of a mediæval castle. Chapter 6: _Internal Politics: the Relations of Knossos and Phæstos_