by Tahir Shah
But to me it symbolized a family obsession.
In the 1920s my grandfather, Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah, an Afghan traveller and scholar, searched for King Solomon’s mines in southern Arabia. He felt certain that Solomon had acquired his gold in what is now Yemen. He was forced to cut his expedition short after being accused of spying. Thirty years later, my father carried on the search, scouring the Red Sea coast of Sudan. He found no gold either, but did come across a great labyrinth of what appeared to be ancient mine shafts.
Not long before his death, my father cautioned me not to continue the search, declaring it to be a waste of time and money. I had never given much thought to carrying on the family tradition, but Ali Baba’s map changed all that.
I spent almost two years researching the mines, turning to texts like the Septuagint, the oldest known version of the Old Testament. It describes the magnificent temple that Solomon constructed in Jerusalem, near to where the Dome of the Rock now stands. The building’s interior was overlaid with the purest gold, supposedly brought from the mysterious land of Ophir.
The Bible suggests that Ophir was a source of exotic merchandise, brimming with peacocks and apes, frankincense, ivory, silver and gold.
I realized that if I were to have a hope of discovering the source of Solomon’s wealth, I needed to find Ophir, a land searched for by scholars and adventurers for almost three millennia.
Ptolemy said it lay near the Straits of Malacca (off the Malaysia peninsula); Christopher Columbus was sure he had found it in modern-day Haiti; while Sir Walter Raleigh thought it was hidden in the jungles of Suriname. Others have said it was in India or Madagascar, China or even in Peru.
Eventually, in the 1880s, amid the gold and diamond bonanza in southern Africa and the discovery of the ‘Great Zimbabwe’ ruins, the Victorians felt that they had at last solved the mystery. The young writer Henry Rider Haggard capitalized on the hysteria, and his rattling novel King Solomon’s Mines first appeared in 1885.
As my research progressed, I became sure that Ptolemy, Columbus, Raleigh and Rider Haggard – not to mention my own father and grandfather – had all been looking in the wrong place.
They should have been searching in Ethiopia.
We know that the Israelites gained their knowledge of mining and working gold from the Egyptians, during their slavery under the Pharaohs. We know, too, that the Egyptians mined their gold in Nubia, near Ethiopia’s western border (nub meant gold in ancient Egyptian).
The imperial family of Ethiopia claims descent from the child born to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But, most significant of all, Ethiopia has an abundance of pure gold which – unlike in other parts of Africa – is close to the surface and can easily be mined.
So I packed a Bible, some old clothes, hiking boots, and Ali Baba’s map. Then I bought myself a Gold Bug metal detector, and a cut-price ticket to Addis Ababa.
As the plane landed at the Ethiopian capital, I was overcome with fear. I sensed my father and grandfather peering down at me, shaking their heads in disappointment.
When I was sitting comfortably at home in London, it was easy to talk about searching for King Solomon’s mines. But the task at hand was impossibly difficult: a foreigner travelling in Ethiopia with a metal detector and gold-mining manuals is immediately suspected of being a spy. I had to keep the real reasons for my journey a secret.
Then I met a young taxi driver called Samson.
It turned out that he had worked as a miner in the illegal gold mines of southern Ethiopia. He spoke several tribal languages, and had secretly studied the country’s history during the oppressive Derge regime (1974 – 1991). Taking one look at Ali Baba’s map, he cackled in laughter. It was complete rubbish, he said.
Impressed by his candidness, I hired him on the spot.
I had heard that an important manuscript was preserved at a monastery in the extreme north of the country. My informant said that the text – known as the Kebra Negast (meaning ‘The Glory of Kings’) – contains clues to the whereabouts of the mines. So we travelled northward, through the highlands and over the Simien Mountains, to a cliff face called Debra Damo.
The monastery, which is perched at the top of a precipice, is home to three hundred priests. No women or female creatures of any kind are permitted to ascend.
At the base of the cliff, we deliberated how we could scale it. As we stood there, gazing up, a plaited leather rope was lowered down. I wrapped it around my waist, tied it in a reef knot and, as if by magic, I was pulled upward.
An elderly monk led us through dark cloisters, thick with the smell of incense. Sweeping a scarlet cloth away from a lectern, he revealed a very large book: the Kebra Negast. Handwritten in Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia, it recounts in detail the story of Solomon and Sheba. The monk translated some of the text in a whisper. I asked him if it gave the exact location of Solomon’s gold mines. He narrowed his eyes, and barked at Samson ferociously in Amharic.
‘What’s he saying?’
Samson replied: ‘He says that the book does have the answers, but we’re not to reveal them to foreigners like you, or else you’ll steal all the gold for yourself!’
I pressed the monk with more questions about the gold, but Samson was growing nervous. He nudged me, insisting that we leave immediately. It was maddening, especially as I thought I was on to something with the ancient manuscript. Samson told me later that the monks at Debra Damo had a direct line to God. As far as he was concerned their wishes had to be respected.
We negotiated the cliff face once again, and beat a retreat.
Samson suggested we head to the south, where he’d mined gold for eight years. The journey took many days, taking us through some of the most dramatic landscape on the African continent. There were great expanses of farmland, endless forests, and rivers seething from heavy winter rain.
In the West, our impressions of Ethiopia have been moulded by television images of drought and starvation, yet much of the country is lush, and utterly breathtaking in its beauty. In a land where poverty is endemic, the illegal gold mines near the small town of Shakiso offer a chance of escape.
Nothing could have prepared me for the mines.
They were like a scene from a Hollywood epic of the Old Testament: hundreds of men, women and children drenched in mud, digging the ground, many with their bare hands. They had excavated a crater the size of a football pitch. At the bottom of the pit was alluvial silt, which Samson told me contained the gold dust. The silt was scooped onto rounded wooden pans and hurled to the surface in a relay.
The mine is one of many to have sprouted up in southern Ethiopia over the past fifty years. The alluvial seam probably wasn’t worked in ancient times, as it would have been entirely depleted. But what was so interesting was that the mining techniques were almost identical to those devised five millennia ago by the Egyptians.
Solomon’s slave labour mined tons of gold in the same way – using wooden trays, sluices and panning pools. The big difference was that the people I saw mining near Shakiso were not slaves. They were working for themselves.
Life is cheap there, especially for the fraternity of young miners, many of whom worked in tunnels, digging down to the seam. In the rainy season, when the ground is soft, fatalities are common. The tunnels collapse, burying brave men alive.
The risks may explain the miners’ way of life. In the makeshift village adjacent to the pit they spend their money as fast as they earn it. All kinds of illicit services are available in the dark grass-roofed shacks – including gut-rot araki, gambling and prostitution.
I was impressed that Samson had broken free from such a destructive existence. One morning, he told me, he had glanced into a sliver of broken mirror and seen not himself, but the Devil.
He fled to Addis Ababa to begin a new life.
Although I’d hoped at first that these mines could be those once worked by Solomon, I realized there was little real chance of that. Yet, as we left the mines and
continued westward following another lead, I was buoyed by having seen such ancient methods in action.
In the 1920s an eccentric Englishman called Frank Hayter claimed to have found a cave on a remote mountain near the border with Sudan. There, he said, he came upon a cache of gold and precious stones. He thought the find was somehow connected to King Solomon’s mines.
In western Ethiopia we hired a herd of mules. They were savage, resented having to work, and bit anyone who got near them. They bucked, too, tossing both Samson and me to the ground.
We made the long trek to the mountain, through forests and stretches of deep mud, in search of Hayter’s cave. It rained non-stop for a week. I kept the muleteers going with handfuls of monosodium glutamate powder.
We scoured the mountain for days, but the only cave we came to ended after a few feet in a natural stone wall. If the cave was indeed there it eluded us, yet I felt certain that we were close to where Solomon mined the gold for his temple.
By the time we finally reached the main road, morale was very low, made worse by mule bites and the constant downpour. Samson and I hitch-hiked towards the capital. We stopped for the night in the small town of Nejo and put up at the only hotel which wasn’t a brothel.
Its Ethiopian owner, Berehane, overheard us talking of gold and Solomon’s mines. It turned out that his grandfather was an Italian prospector called Antillo Zappa. I knew from my research that Zappa had been a friend of Frank Hayter, and had mined gold nearby.
Next morning Berehane led us out of the town and across open fields. There, on an exposed hillside, we came to a series of pits. They had evidently once been much larger, but had been filled in over the centuries by natural erosion. Berehane said that local people often found shards of pottery here, and that his grandfather believed the pits were ancient.
Given the location and abundance of pure gold in the area, I think there is a strong possibility that these pits once formed part of Solomon’s mines. It is impossible to say for certain without mounting a full-scale archaeological dig, and to this end I have approached the British Museum and several biblical and archaeological foundations in the United States. If all else fails, it may eventually fall to my own children to raise the funds, and thus continue the family obsession with King Solomon’s mines.
TWENTY-TWO
In the Scorpion Palace
THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE Nizams of Hyderabad needs no introduction.
Until losing power at India’s Independence, their Princely State endured for two centuries, presiding over a huge chunk of the Deccan. A byword for profligacy and for spending on a truly lavish scale, the Nizams’ dynasty rivalled large countries in terms of its wealth.
Of the seven Nizams, who governed Hyderabad State from 1720 until 1948, the richest of all was the last – Mir Osman Ali Khan. Regarded as the wealthiest man on Earth, his portrait graced the cover of Time Magazine and, as recently as 2008, he was rated fifth highest on the Forbes’ ‘All Time Wealthiest List’ (Bill Gates ranked 20th).
He had his own mint, printing his own currency, the Hyderabadi rupee, and a vast private treasury. Its coffers were said to contain £100 million in gold and silver bullion, and a further £400 million worth of jewels. Among them, was the fabulously rare Jacob Diamond, valued some £60 million today, and used by the Nizam as a paperweight. There were pearls, too – enough to pave Piccadilly – hundreds of race horses, thousands of uniforms, tons of royal regalia, and Rolls Royces by the dozen.
But it was the Nizams’ great love affair with palaces that cost more than anything else to maintain. They owned more than a handful in Hyderabad alone, staffed by many thousands of servants, retainers, bodyguards, eunuchs and concubines.
The favourite of all was the Falaknuma.
Set on a hillock with sweeping views across Hyderabad below, the Falaknuma Palace was laid out in the shape of a scorpion with a double stinging tail. Known as ‘Mirror of the Sky’, it was constructed in the classical style from Italian marble, with hints of Art Nouveau. No expense was spared to create it, a European masterpiece on the plains of central India.
It was actually the Nizam’s Prime Minister, Viqar ul Omra, who conceived the palace as a lavish residence for himself. The foundation stone was laid in 1884, but the building wasn’t completed for almost another decade. In that time, the Prime Minister was forced to borrow increasing funds to finish it – money that even he had no chance of ever earning.
The story goes that to save face his wife suggested a wily plan. Inviting his master, Mehboob Ali Pasha, the sixth Nizam, to stay, the Prime Minister waited to be extolled for creating such a glorious pleasure dome. And, when the praise was lavished, Viqar ul Omra offered the building to the Nizam as a gift. Accepting graciously, the ruler reimbursed the full cost – a pittance to man of such colossal wealth. With so many homes already, he used it as a residence for his most distinguished guests.
The palace soon became a great favourite with royal visitors, among them King George V, Queen Mary, Edward VIII, Tsar Nicholas II, and a kaleidoscope of European aristocracy. It was for them an illusion of Europe in a principality whose affluence exceeded their wildest dreams. But, with the withdrawal of the privy purse, and the subsuming of Hyderabad into Independent India, the billionaire lifestyle came to an abrupt end.
The palaces were boarded up, their doors fastened with wax seals by order of the courts. And, for decades they slept, like something from a child’s fairytale. The Falaknuma was no exception. For thirty years or more almost no one was permitted entry, and the place went from rack to ruin.
Yet, just before reaching the point of no return, Princess Esra, the Turkish-born former wife of the current Nizam (he has the title but nothing else), stepped in. Realising the terrible loss about to occur, she brokered a deal that would save not only the Falaknuma, but other properties once owned by the Nizams.
For an extendable lease of thirty years, the Falaknuma has been signed over to the Taj Group. As part of the arrangement, the luxury hotel chain agreed to foot the jaw-dropping bill for renovations. Every detail was overseen by Princess Esra herself, in a transformation that took more than a decade to complete. Once again sparing no expense, the Princess brought in experts from all over world, each one charged with the solemn duty of returning the apple of the Nizam’s eye to its original state.
And the result is a royal palace fit for a Nizam again.
As the standard bearer leads the way up the great bowed staircase, the thing that strikes you first is the silence. There’s nothing for miles around and, in India, such seclusion is itself a symbol of wealth.
Inside, there’s a vestibule, its walls and ceilings adorned with lovely frescoes, Greek urns and alabaster nymphs. There’s no reception desk, no concierge, none of the trappings of a luxury hotel. Rather, there’s a sense that you are a guest in the Nizam’s own home.
Step through into the main body of the palace, and you enter a world that disappeared half a century ago. In the distance there’s the delicate chiming of a Louis XIV timepiece and, nearer by, a row of liveried factotums are standing to attention, awaiting instructions.
Once welcomed in whispers, and suitably indulged with refreshments, I was taken to my suite in the Zenana wing, where my luggage had already been unpacked by a valet. While lavish, the sixty or so rooms and suites of the Falaknuma exude the kind of understated luxury that only true prosperity can provide.
A little later the palace historian, Prabhakar Mahindrakar, took me on a palace tour. A towering figure of a man, dressed in a flowing black sherwani, he walks softly over the rosewood parquet.
We stroll into the ballroom, with its great Venetian chandeliers, gilt ceiling, teak and walnut furniture, and miles and miles of silk.
‘Before Princess Esra saved the palace,’ says Prabhakar, ‘I thought it would simply crumble into dust. You should have seen it. In this very room the curtains were rotting, the upholstery eaten away by termites and ants. There were cobwebs everywhere, rats the size of ca
ts, and unimaginable amounts of dust.’
He leads the way out onto the landing, illuminated by Carrera marble lamps, and adorned with portraits of the Nizams looming down in giant rococo frames. Next door is the Jade Room. Haute Chinoiserie in style, it’s festooned with objets d’art, with yet more magnificent chandeliers above, and an intricate geometric parquet under foot.
Prabhakar paces softly through to the Hukka Lounge, replete with its multi-stemmed water pipe, chaise longues, and embossed leather walls. There’s a vast billiard table too, made by Burroughes & Watts of Soho Square and, beside it, a rack of ivory-tipped cues. And, slipping through a small doorway to the left, we emerge into the cavernous dining-room. Running down the centre is one of the longest dining tables in the world. Thirty-three metres in length, fashioned from teak and rosewood, it can seat one hundred and one guests, and was once laid with the Nizam’s solid gold cutlery and plates.
He may have owned the palace, but it was his Prime Minister, Viqar ul Omra, whose monogram is all over it. Just about everything from the dining chairs to the stained glass bears his initials – ‘V.O.’
Even the library ceiling is monogrammed. Inspired by the one at Windsor Castle, the room has six thousand rare volumes, including a series of oversized leather-bound tomes, entitled Glimpses of the Nizam’s Dominions. Flicking through them, you get a sense at the limitless power and wealth held by the Nizams – power and wealth that’s long gone.
The palace historian, Prabhakar, suddenly seems overcome with melancholy. Kissing his fingers, he touches them gently to the book.
‘We’re all equal now,’ he says, ‘but I must admit I wish the old days would come back if only for a while.’
TWENTY-THREE
The Islamic Legacy of Timbuktu
THE CARAVAN OF SULTAN MANSA MUSA, ruler of the Mali Empire, snaked its way through the scorching heat of the central Sahara on its long return from the pilgrimage to Mecca.