“Though I had no small experience in exploring catacombs and tombs, these were so different from any I had seen that I found it difficult to distinguish the habitations of the living from the chambers of the dead. The façades or architectural decorations of the front were everywhere handsome; and in this they differed materially from the tombs in Egypt. In the latter the doors were simply an opening in the rock, and all the grandeur and beauty of the work within; while here the door was always imposing in its appearance, and the interior was generally a simple chamber, unpainted and unsculptured.[52] I say that I could not distinguish the dwellings from the tombs; but this was not invariably the case. Some were clearly tombs, for there were pits in which the dead had been laid, and others were as clearly dwellings, being without a place for the deposit of the dead. One of these last particularly attracted my attention. It consisted of one large chamber, having on one side, at the foot of the wall, a stone bench about one foot high and two or three broad, in form like the divans in the East at the present day; at the other end were several small apartments, hewn out of the rock, with partition-wall left between them, like stalls in a stable, and these had probably been the sleeping apartments of the family. “There were no paintings or decorations of any kind within the chamber; but the rock out of which it was hewn, like the old stony rampart that encircled the city, was of a peculiarity and beauty that I never saw elsewhere, being a dark ground, with veins of white, blue, red, purple, and sometimes scarlet and light orange, running through it in rainbow streaks; and within the chambers, where there had been no exposure to the action of the elements, the freshness and beauty of the colours in which these waving lines were drawn gave an effect hardly inferior to that of the paintings in the tombs of the Kings at Thebes. “Farther on, in the same range—though, in consequence of the steps of the streets being broken, we were obliged to go down and ascend again before we could reach it—was another temple, like the first, cut out of the solid rock, and, like the first, too, having for its principal ornament a large urn, shattered and bruised by musket-balls; for the ignorant Arab, believing that gold is concealed in it, day after day, as he passes by, levels at it his murderous gun, in the vain hope to break the vessel and scatter a golden shower on the ground.”