The possibility that we were looking at the remains of King David's palace was intriguing. 
But the single best experience for me on this trip so far was going through Hezekiah's tunnel.
The tunnel is 533 meters long (1/2 a kilometer) and carries water from the Gibbon spring to the pool of Siloam.
Hezekiah built it to bring water into the city so as to be able to withstand the inevitable seige of the advancing Assyrian army.
It took us about half an hour to walk through the tunnel without a guide in the pitch black (if it weren't for our head lamps). At its deepest the water was up to my thigh; at it's shallowest, my ankle.
A few in our group confessed to feeling rather claustrophobic on occasion. At times we had to stoop. Most of the the time we couldn't turn around.
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| The Siloam Inscription found in the Tunnel |
The Siloam Inscription (the earliest, long ancient Hebrew inscription found in Jersualem):
the piercing. . . . And this is the history of the digging. When . . .the pickaxes one against the other. And when there were only three cubits more to cut through, the men were heard calling from one side to the other; [for] there was zedah in the rock, on the right and on the left. And on the day of piercing the workmen struck each to meet the other, pickax against pickax. And there flowed the waters from the spring to the pool for a space of 200 cubits. And [100] cubits was the height over the head of the workmen.
