Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/296

246 except the aloe, which I found growing in rows of three or four, ilke young fir-trees, with immense flowering-stems. There is much conglomerate rock and drift sand on the surface. Kephalas is picturesquely placed on a rocky hill, with a ruined castle, in the walls of which I noticed escutcheons of the Knights of St. John. At a few minutes' distance from the village are the ruins of a Greek Acropolis, which, as we now know from inscriptions, was called Isthmos. Here is a most interesting ruin, a fragment of a Greek temple, which now forms part of the church of Panagia Palatiani. The south wall of the cella still remains, forming a kind of vestibule to the west of the actual church. This wall is 16 feet long and 6 feet high. At its W. extremity is a doorway 2 feet 5 inches wide: the largest of the blocks of which it is composed are 4 feet 5 inches long and 2 feet 7 inches deep: the material is trachyte. Within this vestibule is a kind of table formed of ancient blocks put together by the builders of the church, which is now called. On this "table," at the annual feast of the saint, the people hold their panegris. Ross noticed a similar custom in the island of Pholegandros, and in both places it is no doubt a relic of Paganism. From a half-defaced inscription in the pavement of the church, he ascertained that the temple was dedicated to a Roman empress, perhaps Livia, in the character of Demeter. The sides of the rocky hill on which this church stands, are cultivated in terraces supported by walls, in and about which are many fragments of the temple, pieces of architrave, triglyphs, and drums