A Few Things seen from tlie Headland.

Southland Times, Issue 19036, 2 May 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

A Few Things seen from tlie Headland.

An Interesting Mission.

The Palestine Exploration Fund is responeible for a party of enthusiasts who are now in the Holy Land endeavoring to determine the site of "The Tomb of David." The reported Tomb, which the Turks havo held einee the fifteenth century, is just outside the Zion Gate, and is held so sacred that only the most distinguished visitors are allowed access to it. Sir Moses Montefiore was the first visitor, not a Mohammedan, to be allowed inside the enclosure, and the last was the Emperor of Germany, who visited it in 1898. The picture of the tomb is from a photograph taken on the latter occasion, and the negative is the only one that has ever been permitted by the authorities. Tho wreckage in the foreground is

rendered interesting from the fact that it covers the ruins of the City of Zion, — of Mt. Zion, and the Wailing Place of tho Jews, ■where the litany may be repeated :—

Lord build, Lord build, build Thy house speedily ! In haste, in haste, even in our days, build Thy house speedily.

One of the most interesting of all the excavations in Palestine is the discovery of the cruciform inscription of Pell el Ainarua, in 1887. It shows that the City of the Jesuites on Mt. Zion, and the neighbouring hills was in existence four hundred years before tho time of David, and that it was a tributary City of Egypt, as David's Jerusalem was afterwards of Babylon andEomc. So. under the present enclosure, which marks the site of the Temple, are the ruins deep down of a city which existed before the beginning of any history except that which is now beginning to be dug up on baked bricks inscribed in the cruciform character.