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Show FAMOUS "FIELD OF BLOOD" Said to Be Spot Judas Purchased With the Silver for Which He Sold His Master. Just outside the walls of Jerusalem, fn the Valley of Hinnom, Is a rocky plain known as the Acelduma or Field of Blood. It is the potter's field, purchased with the 30 pieces of sliver for which Judus sold his master. Hera for centuries visitors to the holy city, dying while on their pilgrimage found, a resting place. Gray and barren, it is a desolate spot, solitary but for the chance visitor vis-itor and a few withered gray-clad monks from a nearby monastery. For n small fee, one of these ancient recluses re-cluses will show you the sights of the place. Caves and underground passages, pas-sages, honeycombed with tombs, are cut in the rocky field. Your guide leads you down age-worn steps, cut perhaps in the sixth century, into crumbling halls. His torch casts flickering flick-ering uncanny shadows on the damp gray walls. The place seetns to re-eent re-eent your intrusion ; it is the "place of sleep," the hall of the dead. On one side Is the tomb of some warrior monk who followed the fortunes of Richard Lion Heart of England to the holy land, dying at the very gates of the city his master-had hoped to conquer. con-quer. He must have died penniless, too, as bo many of these zealots did, else his bones had not rested .in the potter's field. Near Aceldama is a ruined charnel house, said to have been built by the Crusaders for their dead. It is a tumbling tum-bling ruin, nearly thirty feet long by twenty wide, with one side of naked rock. Beneath it are two of the largest larg-est caverns, their rock sides pierced with tombs and shallow graves. In the roof of the ruin are holes through which the bodies of the dead were lowered. The Field of Blood is on the northeastern north-eastern slope of the Hill of Evil Council, Coun-cil, where tradition says the villa of Caiaphas stood, and where the chief priest and elders plotted the execution execu-tion of Jesus. |