It was like going down into a very deep cellar, only it was a cellar which had no end to it.

The narrow passages are roughly hewn in the rock, and on each hand as you pass along, the hollowed shelves are carved out, from three to fourteen deep; each held a corpse once.

There are names, and Christian symbols, and prayers, or sentences expressive of Christian hopes, carved upon nearly every sarcophagus.

The dates belong away back in the dawn of the Christian era, of course.

Here, in these holes in the ground, the first Christians sometimes burrowed to escape persecution.