erotic poets sang their lays, lovers whispered, fortune-tellers plied
their trade, and a throng of pilgrims walked lazily along, or sat on the
ground, breathing in the soft, moist air, feasting their eyes upon the
beauty of upspringing fountain and flowering shrub, and lofty tree,
while their ears drank in the cadences of the falling waters, the song
of the birds, and the gay music which floated lightly on the summer
breeze.

Phoenician temples had sometimes adjuncts, as cathedrals have their
chapter-houses and muniment rooms, which were at once interesting and
important. There has been discovered at Athiénau in Cyprus--the
supposed site of Golgi--a ruined edifice, which some have taken for
a temple,[636] but which appears to have been rather a repository for
votive offerings, a sort of ecclesiastical museum. A picture of the
edifice, as he conceives it to have stood in its original condition,
has been drawn by one of its earliest visitants. "The building," he
says,[637] "was constructed of sun-dried bricks, forming four walls, the
base of which rested upon a substruction of solid stone-work. The walls
were covered, as are the houses of the Cypriot peasants of to-day, with
a stucco which was either white or coloured, and which was impenetrable
by rain. Wooden pillars with stone capitals supported internally a
pointed roof, which sloped at a low angle. It formed thus a sort of
terrace, like the roofs that we see in Cyprus at the present day. This
roof was composed of a number of wooden rafters placed very near each
other, above which was spread a layer of rushes and coarse mats, covered
with a thick bed of earth well pressed together, equally effective
against the entrance of moisture and against the sun's rays. Externally
the building must have presented a very simple appearance. In the
interior, which received no light except from the wide doorways in the
walls, an immovable and silent crowd of figures in stone, with features