The Complete Collection of Travel Literature

by Tahir Shah

  First he sent word to the Phoenician king Hiram of Tire, ordering him to fell cedar trees from his forests in Lebanon. The cedars, a symbol of strength and power in biblical times, were the most highly prized trees in the ancient world. Hiram sent timber as instructed and also skilled metalworkers, carpenters and masons. The masons knew the secret science of geometry, some of whose cryptic codes are kept alive today by the Brotherhood of Freemasons, and it was they who cut and polished the immense stone blocks. The accuracy of their work was so great that no hammers were used while the temple was being built, or so the Bible relates.

  The temple was built on a conventional Phoenician design, suggesting that King Hiram’s draughtsmen helped with the plans. It comprised an outer hallway, the ulam; a central courtyard, the heikal; and an inner sanctum, the debir, or “Holy of Holies”. It was here, in the inner sanctum, sequestered away from the eyes of laymen, that the Ark of the Covenant was to be kept.

  The stone for the temple is thought to have been quarried from beneath the city of Jerusalem. In 1854 one of the royal quarries was discovered by an American physician, Dr Barclay, who was taking an evening stroll with his dog. The dog suddenly disappeared down a narrow shaft. Barclay enlarged the hole and found himself peering into an immense cavern. The entrance to the cave, known today as Zedekiah’s Grotto, can still be seen not far from the Old City’s Damascus Gate.

  When the temple was finished, its decoration began, as the Second Book of Chronicles records:

  And the porch that was in the front of the house, the length of it was according to the breadth of the house, twenty cubits, and the height was an hundred and twenty: and he overlaid it within with pure gold. And the greater house he cieled with fir tree, which he overlaid with fine gold, and set thereon palm trees and chains. And he garnished the house with precious stones for beauty: and the gold was gold of Parviam. He overlaid also the house, the beams, the posts, and the walls thereof, with gold: and graved cherubim on the walls. And he made the most holy house, the length whereof was, according to the breadth of the house, twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof twenty cubits: and he overlaid it with fine gold, amounting to six hundred talents. And the weight of the nails was fifty shekels of gold. And he overlaid the upper chambers with gold. And in the most holy house he made two cherubims of image work, and overlaid them with gold.

  The temple was completed in the seventh year of Solomon’s reign and on the day of its dedication the Ark of the Covenant was carried from Mount Ophel in a grand procession, led by King Solomon himself. Priests dressed in pure white linen followed the king, blowing their trumpets, and behind them came a jubilant cavalcade. Every six paces oxen were sacrificed, drenching the road in blood. By the time the Ark was in place in the Holy of Holies, and the temple was dedicated, 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep had been slaughtered.

  The temple served the people of Jerusalem for almost four centuries after the death of Solomon in 926 bc, but Solomon’s successors lacked his wisdom and the land was misruled. The final blow came when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judah, almost annihilating its population and laying waste its cities. Jerusalem itself was besieged for a year and a half, and when the starving defenders finally capitulated, their capital was plundered. Solomon’s temple was destroyed and every ounce of gold was stripped away, and carried back to Babylon.

  In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem, a gaggle of nervous Russian tourists were taking in the sights and trying to remain calm. Gunfire was ricocheting off the walls outside, but the priests said there was nothing to worry about. They’d seen much worse. One at a time the Russians stooped to kiss the Stone of Unction, where Christ’s body is said to have been anointed after his death. Then they filed into “Christ’s tomb”, the holiest site in Christendom.

  The mood in the church was subdued, the air filled with the smell of burning beeswax and incense. The walls were filthy, especially at waist height where millions of pilgrims’ hands had stroked them as they filed past. I sat on a low wooden bench and waited for the gunfire to stop, but it didn’t.

  I had already spent two days reading the Old Testament and staring at Ali Baba’s map. The West Bank’s Intifada was claiming new casualties on a daily basis and making it tricky to see the sights or even to sit in a café. To pass the time I’d bought a tattered third-hand copy of Henry Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines near the American Colony Hotel, where I was staying along with much of the world’s press corps.

  The book, which first appeared in 1885, was written by Rider Haggard when he was twenty-nine, as the result of a shilling bet with his brother, who doubted he could write a best-seller. Advertised by its publisher as “THE MOST AMAZING BOOK EVER WRITTEN”, the novel was a runaway success, and more than thirty thousand copies were sold in the first year alone.

  In the novel, Solomon’s mines lie in what is now South Africa, but they are diamond mines, not gold mines. Rider Haggard was capitalizing on the diamond fever of the time. As a laborious introduction in my copy points out, he set the book in southern Africa because he had spent time in the Colonial Service in Natal and Transvaal, and so knew the region well. As well as an introduction my copy also contained a map. It was even sketchier than the one I’d bought from Ali Baba, marking little more than a river, a pan of bad water, “Sheba’s breasts”, a kraal and a treasure cave. After going through the Old Testament for a second time, I came to the conclusion that Rider Haggard’s novel, although a rattling good read, was of no use to anyone engaged in a serious search for Solomon’s gold mines.

  From the outset, I’d grasped that the biblical land of Ophir was the key clue to follow. The Bible can be deciphered in many ways, with an interpretation often hanging on the precise meaning of a single word. For that reason I chose to use the Septuagint version, the earliest known translation of the Old Testament. Made during the third and second centuries bc, it is still the official text of the Orthodox Greek Church. At the time it was written, the Hebrew version of the Bible still wasn’t standardized.

  The First Book of Kings relates that king Solomon made a navy of ships in Ezion-geber, which is beside Eloth, on the shore of the Red sea, in the land of Edom. And Hiram sent in the navy his servants, shipmen that had knowledge of the sea, with the servants of Solomon. And they came to Ophir, and fetched from thence gold, four hundred and twenty talents and brought it to king Solomon...

  Now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was six hundred threescore and six talents... And king Solomon made two hundred targets of beaten gold: six hundred shekels of gold went to one target. And he made three hundred shields of beaten gold; three pounds of gold went to one shield... Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold... And all king Solomon’s drinking vessels were of gold... For the king had a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.

  Stop a man in the street today and ask him the meaning of Ophir and he is likely to shake his head. But for centuries the word was steeped in myth.

  The Bible reveals what came from Ophir, but it does not say where it was located. Its authors took it for granted that everyone knew where it was and recorded only that those who journeyed to Ophir were away for three years. Interpreting this literally, some scholars took it to mean that the actual traveling time was three years. So they, and others, pointed to the most distant lands they knew. Ptolemy, in his maps, placed Ophir in the Malay peninsula and Christopher Columbus believed he had found Ophir in modern Haiti. Some suggested India, Madagascar, Ceylon, Arabia or even Peru, while others postulated that Ophir may merely mean “remote”.

  It was the discovery of an immense set of ruins in southern Africa – known as Great Zimbabwe – that led the Victorians to believe that they had finally discovered the Bible’s Ophir. The ruins, after which Rhodesia was renamed at Independence, were found in the 1870s. To the Victor
ian mind, the stone workings, which lie nearly two hundred miles inland, resembled Solomon’s temple. Though this was amateur archaeology at its most suspect, at the turn of the last century dozens of books appeared claiming that the riddle of Ophir had at last been solved. Rider Haggard’s novel was but a fictional account of an astonishing discovery.

  These days the Great Zimbabwe theory has been discredited and the location of Ophir remains a mystery.

  If Ophir is the first real clue to finding the mines, then the second lies in the most famous consort of King Solomon — the Queen of Sheba. Just as we are never told the location of Ophir, so the Bible fails to give the exact location of the Queen of Sheba’s kingdom. In fact, it doesn’t even tell us the queen’s name, but the First Book of Kings does hint that she hailed from a land which was rich in pure gold:

  And when the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the Lord, she came to prove him with hard questions. And she came to Jerusalem with a very great train, with camels that bore spices, and very much gold, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart... And she gave the king an hundred and twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones... And king Solomon gave unto the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatsoever she asked, beside that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty.

  As I sat in the shadows of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that afternoon I thought of Ophir, the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon’s gold. It seemed absurd that so many generations of amateurs and experts should have searched for King Solomon’s mines in such far-flung lands. The answer, surely, must lie closer to hand.

  My Michelin map of the Middle East included a large part of East Africa, stretching south as far as Lake Victoria and east to the Persian Gulf. I spread it out before me. If Solomon’s ships left the port of Ezion-geber, thought to be near modern Elat in the Gulf of Aqaba, then his fleet would have headed south down the Red Sea in search of gold. Solomon’s people had reached the Promised Land after fleeing from Egypt. They were a land-based people, not accomplished mariners, and it seemed unlikely that the king’s ships would have gone further than necessary to find gold.

  I knew that Ophir might have lain in southern Arabia, which may have been the Queen of Sheba’s homeland, but the Sabaen kingdom probably stretched across the Bab al Mandab Straits to the African continent. The more I sat and deliberated, the stronger Africa, and in particular Ethiopia, beckoned me. I had been to a great number of African countries but had long yearned to explore Ethiopia. Like thousands of adventurers before me, I’d been bewitched by the country’s history, its folklore and the strange tales of life there. Years before, I had learned that the imperial family of Ethiopia traces its descent from Menelik, the son supposedly born to the Queen of Sheba and Solomon. A sacred Ethiopian text, the Kebra Negast (The Glory of Kings), tells the story in full.

  After becoming pregnant by Solomon, the Queen of Sheba returned to her native land. She left the wise king to his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and departed with seven hundred and ninety-seven camels, all of them laden with gifts. The Queen, who is known as Makeda in the Ethiopian texts, brought up Menelik on her own. When the boy reached adulthood, he journeyed north to Jerusalem to meet his father. The Kebra Negast says that as they left Jerusalem, Menelik’s companions stole the hallowed Ark of the Covenant and took it back to Ethiopia. The Ark is supposedly still kept in the northern city of Axum.

  I could see from the map that Ethiopia would have been easily reached from Solomon’s kingdom — it was no more than a short boat trip down the Red Sea. In ancient times Ethiopia was a source of apes, ivory, frankincense and myrrh; precisely those items which the Bible says came from Ophir. And in ancient Egypt, Ethiopia was known as a land where gold could be easily mined. Even today the country has extraordinary reserves of gold and other valuable minerals and, unlike in southern Africa where you have to dig down thousands of feet to reach the ore, in Ethiopia’s highlands the gold seams lie close to the surface.

  I stood up, folded my map away and walked out into the afternoon sun. To the right of the main entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there is a doorway that leads to a chapel maintained by Ethiopian Christians. Once there was an Ethiopian monastery in Jerusalem, but in the seventeenth century when the monks could no longer afford the Ottoman taxes, it was forced to move here, to a series of dank rooms that lead off the roof of St Helena’s Chapel. Now a handful of monks continue to maintain a presence in Jerusalem as their forebears had done for centuries.

  In one of the rooms I found a small shrine, its walls black with soot, its benches shiny and worn where thousands of robes had brushed against the wood. The walls were hung with colorful paintings showing the Queen of Sheba being greeted by King Solomon. I walked through the chapel and up a flight of stairs, out on to the roof. A bearded Ethiopian priest, dressed in a flowing black robe, a prayer book in his hands, was asleep beneath a weeping willow. As I watched him sleeping I thought about my map, and about Ophir, and about a journey. Ethiopia was awaiting me.

  On my way back to my hotel, I passed Ali Baba’s Tourist Emporium once again. I glanced in through the open door. The shopkeeper was dozing in his chair but he awoke with a start when he heard my footsteps cross the threshold. Even to the ears of such a reluctant salesman, the sound of feet meant tourists, and tourists meant trade.

  When he’d wrapped the loops of his glasses around his ears and squinted in my direction, Ali Baba asked how I was enjoying the gunfire. He said that there was nothing like a little shooting to keep everyone on their toes. I told him that I’d been unable to think of anything but King Solomon’s mines since buying the map, and that I had decided to look for the mines myself. I was heading for Ethiopia, I said.

  Ali Baba warned me against making the journey. It would be full of dangers. He should never have sold me the map. His mother would be turning in her grave, his father would be cursing the day he was born. As he spoke I noticed something familiar hanging on the far wall of the shop. Little more than a sketch, and smudged by a clumsy hand, it was an inky hand-drawn map. I went over and compared it with my own map. Although obviously executed by the same unskilled artist, and set in identical chipped gold frames, they were different.

  Furious, I demanded to know why another map was hanging in the very same spot as the one I’d purchased. Ali Baba ran a callused hand across his cheek. Times were desperate, he said woefully, and desperate times called for desperate measures.

  “That’s all well and good,” I said with mounting anger, “but this is fraud. I’ve got a good mind to call the police.”

  Sensing trouble, the old shopkeeper started to board up his emporium. He packed away the splinters from the Cross, the Virgin Mary fridge magnets, the fluorescent pink rosaries and the kitsch Nativity scenes.

  “The map I sold you was the real one,” he said slyly, “I’m giving you a head start in your search. You see, this other map is a fake. It”ll keep the competition from your heels. Look on it as after-sales service!”

  TWO

  Seven Stones

  “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”

  Rudyard Kipling

  When the blind Mauritanian woman’s deranged guide-dog sank its front teeth into my thigh, I doubled over in agony. The pain was terrible, but it was soon replaced by an overwhelming fear. Since my arrival in Addis Ababa, two days before, dozens of people had warned me to watch out for rabies. Ethiopian dogs, they all told me proudly, are very rabid indeed. Pressing a hand to my bloodied leg, I looked down at the dog. It was panting wildly, its eyes seemed to flash manically, and its tongue lolled out of a frothing mouth. The dog’s owner called the creature to heel. I told her that her pet was a danger to society.

  Oh,” she exclaimed frivolously, “isn’t petit Bertrand a naughty little one?”

  An hour later I found myself sitting in a doctor’s surgery
on the other side of Addis Ababa. A pair of impressive medical certificates on the far wall advertised the physician’s skill. I pointed to the crescent of puncture marks in my thigh and grimaced. The doctor asked if the dog’s eyes had glinted. I replied that they had.

  “Was there milky froth around its mouth?”

  I said that there was.

  The surgeon licked his lips.

  “Rabies,” he declared menacingly.

  “The woman was blind,” I said, “she couldn’t see the animal’s condition. Are you going to give me twenty-one jabs in the stomach?”

  “There’s no anti-rabies serum in Ethiopia,” said the doctor. “You’d better go back to your hotel and rest.”

  He began to write out his bill.

  “What if I start frothing at the mouth?”

  “Don’t bite anyone,” he said.

  Back at the Hotel Ghion I sat on the lawn with a map of East Africa spread out before me. Blind people from across the continent had converged on the hotel for their annual conference, and some of their savage guide-dogs had escaped their sightless masters. Now they were tearing around the hotel grounds, hunting as a pack and snapping at the unsuspecting. Spying me from across the garden, and clearly eager to join in the fun, petit Bertrand slipped his collar and bounded over, eyes flashing, mouth foaming. I leapt up and seized a deck-chair, holding it out in front of me like a lion-tamer, and as we danced across the lawn I yelled for help. When at last Bertrand was dragged away, I returned to the matter in hand. I had arrived in the Ethiopian capital charged with a solemn mission to locate the source of King Solomon’s gold.

  There’s nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping. In faraway Jerusalem, the idea of seeking out King Solomon’s mines had seemed irresistible and Ali Baba’s map, though perhaps not the genuine article, seemed the key to a magical journey. Now, faced with a real map, I began to feel daunted by the task I’d set myself.