This took place in 433-34; and though, for concession’ sake, I may admit,--_what yet is far from being my conviction_,--that _some_ of our Round Towers may have been erected _subsequently_ to the Christian era, yet positive I must be that _no one_ of them _was after the successful mission_ of the Apostle of Ireland; and the explosion of the doctrines with which even the _most modern of them_ may happen to be associated,--while the majority, and the _real ones_, I shall prove, belong to an infinitely earlier date. As a further inducement to explore for cavities beneath, and connected with, our Round Towers, I beg leave to bring under review what Maundrel relates of two Round Pillars, which he met with in his journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem, on the sea-coast, a little to the south of Aradus, in the neighbourhood of Tripoli. He describes one of them as thirty-three feet high, composed of a pedestal, ten high and fifteen square, surmounted with a tall cylindrical stone, and capped with another in the form of a _pyramid_. The second was not quite so high--thirty feet two inches--its pedestal, which was supported by four lions, rudely carved at each corner, was in height six feet, being sixteen feet six inches square; the superstructure upon which was one single stone cut in the shape of a _hemisphere_. Each of these pillars, of which he gives accurate drawings, has under it several catacombs or sepulchral chambers, the entrances to which lie on the south side. He pronounces a third which he met with, as “a very ancient structure, and probably a place of sepulchre.”[194] With the opinion of this judicious traveller I altogether concur, provided only, as said before, in reference to the pyramids, that the application be extended to the sacred bulls and crocodiles, serpents, dragons, and heifers, with the whole train of _bestial_ divinities, which both Indians and Egyptians, and all the other polished nations of antiquity, thought proper to adopt as objects of their regard, and treat with the homage--though only _commemorative_, as they will tell you--of the One Great Supreme.[195] This extension of the use will at once afford a solution of the otherwise unaccountable and unnecessary _size_ of those cavities, and is further supported by Savary’s remark, made on occasion of his searching for the Egyptian Labyrinth, viz. that “amidst the ruins of the towns of Caroun, the attention is particularly fixed by several narrow, low, and very long cells, which seem to have had no other use than that of containing the bodies of the sacred crocodiles; these remains can only correspond with the labyrinth.” While Herodotus’s declaration, of his not being allowed to enter its vaults, on the score of their “containing within them the bodies of the fifteen kings, together with the _sacred crocodiles_,” should afford it a determination no longer liable to doubt.