zone of paintings in fresco--shrines with scenes of religion,
conventional decorations, and lifelike representations of the great
bulls which played so conspicuous, and sometimes so tragic, a part
in the Minoan economy.

But the main discoveries of the season were to lie on the opposite
side of the building from the Western Court. The Central Court,
instead of being, as it had seemed at first, the boundary of the
building on the eastern side, was now found to have been the focus
of the inner life of the palace. For on its eastern margin, as the
excavations progressed, there came to light a mass of building,
fully equal in importance to that on the western side, and perhaps
of even greater interest. Here the slope of the ground had been
such that storey had been piled above storey, even before the level
of the Central Court had been reached, so that on this side it was
not only the basement of the building that had been preserved, but
a whole complex of rooms going down from the central area to different
levels, and connected with one another by a great staircase, which,
in the course of this and subsequent seasons' excavations, was found
to have had no fewer than five flights of steps. Of this staircase,
thirty-eight steps are still preserved, and good fortune had so
brought it about that at the destruction of the palace some of
the upper chambers had fallen in such a manner that their debris
actually propped up the staircase and some of the upper floorings,
and kept them in place; and thus it has been possible to reconstruct
a large part of the arrangement of the various rooms and floors in
this quarter of the building (Plate XVI. 1). Far down below the
level of the Central Court lay a fine Colonnaded Hall about 26 feet
square, from which the great staircase, with pillars and balustrades,
led to the upper quarter (Plate XVII. 2), while adjoining it was
a stately and finely-proportioned hall--the Hall of the Double
Axes--about 80 feet in length by 26 feet in breadth, and divided
transversely by a row of square-sided pillars (Plate XVII. 1). In
this part of the building, and especially in the Colonnaded Hall,
the conflagration in which the glories of Knossos found their close
had been extremely severe, and the evidences of fierce burning
were everywhere. In a small room in an upper storey, whose floor
was near the present surface of the ground, there came to light
also evidence which suggested that the catastrophe of