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Show FAMOUS "FIELD OF BLOOD" Said to B Spot Judas Purchased With the Silver for Which He Sold His Master. Just outside the walls of Jerusalem In the Valley of Hinnom, Is a rocky plain known as the Aceldama or Field of Blood. It Is the potter's field, purchased with the 80 pieces of silver for which Judas sold his master. Hera for centuries visitors to the holy city dying while on their pilgrimage fotmi a resting place. Gray and barren, It Is a de6olat epot, solitary but for the chance visitor vis-itor and a few withered gray-claj monks from a nearby monastery. For a small fee,' one of these ancient recluses re-cluses will show you the sights of th place. Caves and underground passages, pas-sages, honeycombed with tombs, rs cut in the rocky field. Your gulda 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 seems to resent re-sent your intrusion; it Is the "placs 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 tin 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 so 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 rumbling rum-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 Calaphas stood, and where the chiej priest and elders plotted the execu tinn of Jesus. |