Day 18 – Jerusalem

We are staying at the excellent Lutheran Guest House in the Christian Quarter of the Old City. We spend the morning exploiting the free internet connection and then visit the New City, stopping for a good lunch at a vegetarian cafe. on a quiet square just off Jaffa Road.

After lunch and in to the evening we wander the narrow souqs and streets of the Old City before returning to the New City for Israeli beer and wine, followed by bagels.

Although Jerusalem was naturally defensible its major fresh water source ,the Gihon spring, lay beyond the city walls. Hezekiah’s Tunnel, or the Siloam Tunnel , was dug in about when the city came under siege from the Assyrians. It leads from the spring to the Pool of Siloam, curving through 533 m at a gradient of 0.6 %.

According to the Siloam inscription found within the tunnel, it was excavated by two teams, one starting at each end of the tunnel and then meeting in the middle, though it is apparent from that several directional errors were made during its construction. Recent discoveries concerning a related tunnel, Warren’s Shaft, have suggested that the tunnel may have been formed by substantially widening a pre-existing natural karst (dissolution of layer(s) of bedrock).