I have already identified the Lower Pool of Siloam with the Pool of Solomon, and stated that it now receives the sewage of the city; but it must have been filled from the Upper Pool, and used to regulate the supplies to the gardens, and increase the volume of the stream of the Kidron.
In the neighbourhood of the city, on the north and north-west, remains of conduits are found, by which perhaps water was brought into the city, but I have not been able to discover whence the supply came; and there are, besides, some reservoirs and cisterns, none of which date from a remote period. The most important work, as regards its size, is the pool at the head of the Kidron valley, which I believe to have been constructed solely to collect and preserve the waters for the wants of those who dwelt in the neighbourhood, and to prevent the streams, flowing from the adjoining hill-sides, from being absorbed in the ground. At one time I thought that a subterranean conduit took the water from the pool into the city; but after the most careful examination of the ground in the vicinity, I am able to declare that no such conduit exists. The reasons which have led me to this conclusion will appear in the following account of my investigations. The people of the country had informed me that at night, when the city was perfectly quiet, the noise of flowing water could be heard beneath the Damascus Gate by any one who placed his ear on the ground. I made the experiment several times, and found it to be the case. When I excavated the ancient North Gate (in the foundations of the present Damascus Gate), as I have already described in the second chapter[887], I descended into the cisterns just on the north of the gate, and repeated the experiment at the bottom of them, and here I perceived more distinctly the gurgling of water, which was still more audible after Said Pasha, Commandant of the garrison of Jerusalem, had emptied these two cisterns of the rubbish that encumbered them. It must also be observed that the noise is heard louder after rain than at other times. This, therefore, led me to believe that there was a conduit which transported the water into the city, and consequently I many times made careful investigations in the tract of land between the Kidron Pool and the Damascus Gate; but these all failed in producing the desired result; and after levelling the ground, penetrating into cisterns, and removing ruins, I came to the conclusion that its existence was impossible; for, if it had been constructed, it must have run at a great depth underground, and been wholly excavated in the rock. A work of this kind, especially for such a distance, would have been too much for Jewish science; for all the other conduits in Palestine which can be assigned to an early period, if not covered with long slabs, as is common, are not much below the level of the ground, so that there are apertures at intervals to give them light. Nor is this the only reason against the existence of a conduit; for in examining the sewer in the Tyropœon valley inside the city, near the Damascus Gate, I obtained permission from the Pasha, when it was repaired, to deepen the excavation, and found no trace of a water-course in the place where it would naturally have run; unless indeed we suppose it to have been made at a greater depth in the rock itself, or to have crossed Bezetha, and come to an end either in Moriah or close to it on the north-west. Consequently I conclude that the gurgling heard at the Damascus Gate proceeds from the sewers in its neighbourhood, which descend from Gareb and Bezetha and unite in the Tyropœon valley.
I terminate the examination of the waters outside the city by observing that the Pilgrim's Pool[888], on the north (which I have already noticed), is insufficiently supplied from the little valley above it, and anciently discharged its waters into the Pool of Bethesda. I also mention again the water dropping from the rock inside the Royal Caverns, which some, who have only seen it in the rainy season and not in the summer when it is dried up, consider to be a spring. I do not think that these two sources contributed greatly in former time to augment the supply of water to the city.
Before the 12th of June, 1860, no other spring was known in Jerusalem than that which rises at the bottom of the well of the Hammam es-Shefa. With regard to this there have been many enquiries as to whence its waters come, by what way they enter Moriah, and whither they go. At the time just mentioned, I discovered the spring on the property of the Daughters of Sion, as I have already described[889]; but about two years previously, in the month of July, I had been called in to examine some water which appeared near Herod's Gate, when the foundations were dug for a large building belonging to Mustafa Bey, which now bears his name. Having premised this, I will state the conclusions at which I have arrived from my investigations at the three places just mentioned, and also give my explanation of the phenomenon of the intermittence of the water in the Fountain of the Virgin.
In the foundation, on the south side of Mustafa Bey's house, at a depth of 22 feet, a quantity of water had appeared during the night and filled the hole. The master-mason and the owner, the sole architects, believed that it had filtered through from some cistern in the neighbourhood, and therefore set to work to bale it out. When this was done they were very much surprised to see that a thin stream of water, coming from the north-west, continued to fill the place; they therefore deepened the excavation a little, and widened the opening, but they were unable to account for the abundance of the water, which hindered their work. On arriving at the spot I suggested excavating, but the fear of the increased expenditure kept them from agreeing to this; so that, under the circumstances, I had no other means of ascertaining anything, than examining a number of cisterns which were in the neighbourhood; and after tasting the water in them, and comparing it with that in the hole, I found that the latter was of the same quality as that in the Hammam es-Shefa and the Fountain of the Virgin; and then I began to believe that it came from a spring. The owner of the place consented to suspend the works in this part for eight days, but I could not prevail on him to permit me to make any excavation near the place on the north-west; and during this time the water flowed through a canal which I had constructed for it. After building two massive piers on each side of the stream and turning a strong arch over it, the works proceeded; so that the stream ran away to the south, without our having found a solution of the problem; but I have no doubt that careful investigation would have revealed the spring-head close by on the north-west.
The discovery of June 12th, and the identity in taste and colour between the water then found and that of which I have spoken, caused me to examine the part of the city between the two points; and though the Arab houses in this district caused many difficulties, I succeeded in ascertaining that in this direction there were cisterns, into which water found its way, similar to that at the spring, and consequently not fit for all the purposes of life. From this I concluded that the two springs must be connected, and the upper supply the lower. But still there was the question, what became of all the water which issued from the spring at the Convent of the Daughters of Sion? At the first moment I was disposed to think that it flowed into the subterranean gallery, in the direction of the north-west corner of the Haram es-Sherîf; but my observations have brought me to the conclusion that it goes into the well of the Hammam es-Shefa, as I will now shew.
The stream flowed naturally to the south, therefore I carefully probed all the western wall on the inside of the gallery to see if the water passed along by it; but I found no signs, and so perceived that the conduit from the spring had turned away in another direction. Though the gallery was almost free from water in August, and quite dry in September and October, the stream still flowed abundantly; so that had it run along the gallery, it could not have escaped my observation. Still it might have been objected, that possibly the stream was absorbed and its course concealed by the earth at the bottom of the gallery, so I dammed up the waters until a kind of pool was formed, and then set them free on a sudden; but not a drop appeared in the gallery; so that I thought that they must go into the Hammam es-Shefa. I consider the water in this well to be the same as that which supplies the Fountain of the Virgin, for the following reasons. The quality of the water is the same; and though that in the well is rather turbid and that in the Fountain is clear, I attribute this solely to the presence of rubbish in the well, the waters of which are afterwards filtered during their course. The water in the well has for a long time supplied a bath built over it, as it still does. Traditions point it out as ancient, and the Talmud[890] appears to confirm them, saying, that "the well was excavated by the children of the captivity, and the priests drew water from it by means of a pulley." We may therefore suppose that the Jews used to purify themselves here, before entering the Temple, as the Mohammedans still do on their festival days, before they go into the Haram es-Sherîf. This bath is the cause of the intermittence of the stream in the Fountain of the Virgin, for at certain periods of the day its keepers use the water for the purposes of the establishment, and consequently not only prevent it from rising high enough to reach the level of the conduit carrying it off to the Kidron Valley, but also empty the well, so that it requires some time to fill again. As this is done twice in every twenty-four hours, the phenomenon of intermittence occurs just as often. This I have proved by repeated observations and trials, and I recommend any one who seeks for a more marvellous cause to follow my example. The quantity of water in the well is hardly affected by the rains. The dirty water from the bath is carried by a conduit into the sewer in the Tyropœon valley, and aids in transporting the filth therein outside the city.
Let us now devote a few lines to the pools inside the city, which I have already mentioned. Near the Jaffa Gate, on the north, is a small pool, which many have supposed to be the one in which Bathsheba was bathing when she was seen by David[891]; but I believe the desire of assigning a legend to every spot to be the sole authority for the tradition. I have not been able to examine this reservoir, but the Greeks, to whom it belongs, and who have filled it with earth to prevent its becoming a receptacle of filth, have, with many other of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, assured me that it was very narrow, and that the workmanship in it did not correspond with that of the Jewish era, but with that of Saladin or Solyman; also that it had no connexion with the other ancient water-works.
With regard to the Pool Amygdalon, so often mentioned, I have to remark that many of the cisterns, excavated in the upper city, are filled from it, among which I may especially denote that which commonly bears S. Helena's name, near the north-east corner of the Church of the Resurrection. On this point there cannot be any doubt, since before the Coptic hospice was erected on the northern side of Amygdalon, a large conduit was visible near its north-east corner, which had been observed by several of the older masons. Besides this, the waters of the pool were certainly directed into the different sewers in the upper city in order to cleanse them; as we may still see in part, for the water which has been used for the bath, is conveyed by a conduit into the sewer in the street of David.
The Cistern of S. Helena has, as I believe, been sometimes called the Cistern of Golgotha, and it has been said that anything light cast into it appeared again in Siloam. I do not believe that this was the case, but if the identification be correct, it might occur in the following manner; that if the water in the cistern rose above a certain height it might escape by a waste pipe, on the south-east of the cistern, into the central sewer in the Tyropœon, and thus, when there was a large surplus of water, might easily descend to Siloam, bearing any floating substance along with it. There are many other cisterns in the neighbourhood of the Holy Sepulchre which I have examined, but these do not help me to an explanation of the matter, as their waste pipes are but small.