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THE
LOST ARK
OF THE
COVENANT
THE REMARKABLE QUEST FOR
THE LEGENDARY ARK
TUDOR
PARFITT

CONTENTS

Dedication

Maps

1 The Cave

2 The Sign Of His Kinship

3 Protocols Of The Priests

4 The City Of The Dead

5 A Key To The Past

6 Opposites Are One

7 The First Cataract

8 Legends Of The Queen Of Sheba

9 The Tomb Of Hud The Prophet Of God

Maps

10 The Moses Gene

11 The Fire Of God

12 The Sacred Fire Pot

13 Watchdogs Of The King

14 The Dust Of Its Hiding Place

Epilogue

Colour Plates

Picture Credits

Index

Copyright

About the Publisher

Dedication

For my brother Robin Parfitt, 1946–2006

and his sons Adam and Ifor Parfitt

and his granddaughters Poppy and Ella Parfitt

Maps

The Cave

It was a time of drought. In 1987 my home was a grass hut in a dried out tribal area of central Zimbabwe in southern Africa, completely cut off from the outside world. I had been doing fieldwork on a mysterious African tribe called the Lemba. This was part of my job. At the time I was Lecturer in Hebrew in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London and for a while now this tribe had been my main academic subject.

How had I spent my time in the village? In the blistering heat of the day I would wander over the hills near the village and poke around the remains of the ancient stone-building culture, which, the Lemba claimed, was the work of their distant ancestors. With my little trowel I had discovered a few bones, pieces of local pottery and one or two iron tools of uncertain age. Not much to write home about. Then I would read, write up my notes and spend much of the night listening to the elders’ narratives.

The Lemba harboured an astonishing claim to be of Israelite origin, although the presence of Israelites or Jews in central Africa had never before been attested. On the other hand, since early medieval times there had been rumours of lost Jewish kingdoms in darkest Africa. What I had heard was that the tribe believed that when they left Israel they settled in a city called Senna - somewhere across the sea. No-one had any idea where in the world this mysterious Senna was located and neither did I. The tribe had asked me to find their lost city, and I had promised to try.

What I knew about the 40,000 strong Lemba tribe in 1987 was that they were black, they spoke various Bantu languages such as Venda or Shona, they lived in various locations in South Africa and Zimbabwe, they were physically indistinguishable from their neighbours and that they had a host of customs and traditions identical to those of the African tribes among whom they lived.

They appeared to be completely African.

But, on the other hand, they also had some mysterious customs and legends which did not appear to be African. They did not intermarry with other tribes. They did not traditionally eat with other groups. They circumcised their boys. They practised the ritual slaughter of animals, using a special knife; they refused to eat pigs and a number of other creatures; they sacrificed animals on high places like the ancient Israelites; and they followed many of the other laws of the Old Testament. The sighting of the new moon was of cardinal importance for them as it is for Jews. Their clan names looked as if they were derived from Arabic or Hebrew or some other Semitic language.

During the months I had spent in the village trying to unveil their secrets, I never found the absolute proof - the smoking gun, demonstrating that their oral tradition, which linked them with ancient Israel, was true. I never found an inscription on stone, a fragment of a Hebrew prayer, an artefact from ancient Israel. Not even a coin or a shard of pottery.

Before arriving in Zimbabwe I had spent a couple of months with the large Lemba communities in the neighbouring country of South Africa. Here the leaders of the tribe had given me a good deal of information. I had hoped to build on this in Zimbabwe and asked the local Lemba chief to facilitate my research. Chief Mposi called a meeting of the elders of the Lemba clans and, tempted by my promise to try to find their lost city of Senna, they formally agreed to permit me to research their history.

But subsequently they did not tell me nearly as much as I had hoped they would. They were tight-lipped about anything to do with their religious practices. It was only my willingness to sit around late into the night, until my whisky had loosened the old men’s tongues, that had enabled me to hear something of their remarkable cult.

The following day they would regret their nocturnal indiscretions and mutter that the clan elders shouldn’t have authorized my research, that white men had no business meddling in their affairs and that I should stop trying to penetrate the cloak of secrecy which veiled their religious rites.

Others tried to frighten me into leaving by telling me lurid tales of what had happened to previous generations of researchers who had wandered too far down forbidden paths. One of them had been forcibly circumcised after daring to walk on Dumghe, the tribe’s sacred mountain. Another had wandered too close to a sacred cave at the base of Dumghe, and had been stabbed with a traditional assegai and badly beaten. He had narrowly escaped with his life.

As my hopes of finding the critical clue regarding their true identity began to die, so did the crops in the fields around the village. It had not rained at all for months. There was some thick muddy liquid at the bottom of the boreholes. Every morning the women brought water in rusty old oilcans balanced on their heads. When that was gone, there would be nothing left to drink. Except beer from the bottle shop, for people with money. And there weren’t many of those.

This morning, early, before the sun had risen, the chief had called for a rain ceremony. The chief’s messenger had arrived just as the household was beginning to stir. The cooking fire was being blown into life and water was being heated for tea and the washing water, which was brought every morning to my hut by the daughter of my gentle host, Sevias. The messenger told Sevias that his presence would be required that evening. This was a last desperate throw of the dice.

There had been drought for so long that the streams which once had brought life and the occasional fish to the village had completely disappeared. They now looked like goat tracks filled with deep, fine dust. With no water, life in the village would soon become impossible. The tribe would have to move elsewhere. But where? The drought covered the whole land.

Towards evening the elders and notables congregated in the chief’s large hut at the centre of his kraal - the group of huts that formed his property. They had been invited to drink chibuku - home-brewed maize beer, the consistency of porridge, dance the night away and to entreat the ancestors for rain. This was deepest Africa.

Sevias invited me to accompany him. We walked together across the parched earth as he told me about the great herds he had once owned, of the trees groaning with fruit, of the maize which used to be as big as pumpkins.

We were among the first guests. I sat next to Sevias on a baked mud bench circling the hut and watched the preparations for the ancestor party with keen interest. I had never imagined I would be permitted to observe anything as close as this undoubtedly was to the heart of their cult.

I had a camera, tape recorder and notebook. I was fairly sure that this evening would provide me with the material for at least one academic article, and an impressive one at that.

Chief Mposi sat alone. He was in poor health and gave the impression of being preoccupied. He stared at the mud floor, resting his head on the knop of his stick. With a sudden movement he bawled at his wives to serve beer.

‘It’s sitting there and it’s not doing any good to anyone!’

‘I’m serving it,’ snapped his oldest wife, lifting up the beer pot with her muscular arms.

‘Too late,’ he growled.

The chibuku pot was passed from hand to hand, from right to left, with no unseemly show of haste, like a decanter of Madeira after a dons’ dinner at Oxford.

The silence was broken by the chief calling out the names of his four wives. They were singularly different from each other in age, size and beauty. They answered in turn, knelt side by side, and started to clap. They turned away from the chief, rose to their feet and lit candles, as the other women began ululating and whistling.

A long antelope horn was thrust through the opening into the hut and a triumphant blast silenced the shrill sound of the women. The man blowing the horn was tall and well-built. He was wearing a skirt made of strips of black fur and around his head he had a strip of leopard skin. He was the witchdoctor. His name was Sadiki - one of the Lemba clan names - an unmistakably Semitic name whose presence in central Africa was a mysterious anomaly. He led the ceremony. Magagada rattles made of dried marrows were tied to his ankles with bark fibre thongs. He stamped his feet on the earthen floor of the hut and blew a long haunting note on the horn.

Four elderly women sitting together on the mud bench that went round the hut started pounding on wooden drums. The rest of the guests were clustered behind the witchdoctor, propelled into the small, juddering movements of the dance by the rhythms of the drums and the magagada rattles, barely moving, lost in concentration.

Sadiki stood at the epicentre of the storm of sound, directing its movement. He had an overpoweringly regal air, and looked arrogantly around him. Suggestively he moved a foot. Then a hand. His body followed and, positioning himself in front of one of the drums, he danced, like David before the Ark, pausing to blow the ram’s horn similar to the shofar which had once been blown in the Temple of Jerusalem. The drummers looked far too old and frail to be able to produce such a sound and yet they were to drum for hours without a pause.

The beer started to circulate faster. Poverty had taken its grip on the village. It had been a long time since the beer pots had been passed around so liberally. Some of the men, no longer accustomed to drinking, were already inebriated.

The chief’s oldest wife was apparently already possessed by the spirits of the ancestors. Staring from side to side she fell to the ground weeping. Looking around in an unfocussed way she pulled her long, western-style dress up over her fat marbled buttocks and over her head. She danced naked, positioning herself in the space in front of the women drummers vacated by Sadiki.

The pulse quickened again. Sadiki, sweat pouring down his broad, muscular chest, placed a headdress of black eagle feathers on the naked woman’s head. Sevias told me that this was to show respect to the ancestors. She danced on, casting great shadows on the candlelit walls. She fell to her knees, sobbing, in front of the old chief and tenderly placed the headdress on his head.

The chief was dying. Everyone said so. He looked grey and ill. He gestured to me that I should join him. He took my hand in his and whispered in my ear, ‘The ancestors have come from Israel: they have come from Senna. They are here with us. Goodbye, Mushavi. Perhaps we shall see each other in Senna.’ Senna was the lost city from which they had come and it was also the place they expected to go when they died.

His face, illuminated by the flickering light of the candles, was corrugated with lines of age and illness; his eyes were concealed by dewlaps of mottled light-coloured flesh. He peered at me and then indicated that I should rise and leave him. Saddened and mystified by his words, I went back to the bench to my notebook, camera, and recorder.

I had been here in the village so long I was beginning to feel at home, one of them. I had drunk a good deal of their chibuku beer. After the first few swigs it becomes more or less palatable and after a while positively acceptable. It struck me that this was no time for sitting in a corner taking notes and recording Lemba music. There were more important things to do. This was more a time for observer participation. I removed my shirt in order, as I thought, to blend in with the half-naked men and women whose ghoulish shadows were leaping wildly on the walls and who were falling into a kind of trance all around me. The chief’s oldest wife crossed the hut, leaned over me, her withered breasts brushing my shoulder, and whispered something incomprehensible in Shona, the language of the dominant Shona tribe among whom the Zimbabwe Lemba lived.

I started to dance to the pounding rhythm of the drums. One of the chief’s younger wives was dancing topless in front of me, swaying drunkenly, supplicating the ancestors, running her hands over her breasts and down over her belly and legs.

The women drummers quickened the rhythm of their drums.

Another woman in a bleary-eyed trance slid out of her clothes and moved into the centre of the hut. Men stood around her admiring her slim body and full breasts, urging her on.

‘She is speaking to the ancestors,’ Sevias bellowed in my ear. ‘Soon they will reply. When their voices are heard it will be better for you to leave.’

Towards midnight there was a change in the atmosphere. I imagined that the time had come for the cultic incantations and secret prayers to be offered up. These were the closely guarded things. These were the oral codes which governed their lives and which no doubt held the clues to their past that I was seeking. These codes and incantations were for me the heart of the matter. This is what I wanted to be part of. This is what I had come here for.

My arms were raised; my face was turned up to the straw roof above. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt a great sense of excitement. I had been accepted. I was one of them. The ancestors were about to descend and I would be there to observe what happened next. No one from the outside had ever observed this before. Inside my head I could feel a kind of channel opening which seemed to be a channel of communication with the Israelite ancestors of the tribe.

I was rejoicing in the efficacy of my five-star research methodology when I felt a fist driven into the side of my face. It was the fist of the chief’s oldest and sturdiest wife. I fell to the ground on top of the recumbent and malodorous body of Mposi’s greatest drunk - a sort of tramp called Klopas whom I had met and smelled many times before. For a few seconds I lost consciousness. I was pulled out of the hut by some of the men and propped up against the side of the chief’s hut.

‘Er, I upset the chief’s wife,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

I did not feel at all sorry. I felt bloody furious.

‘Mushavi,’ said Sevias leaning over me. ‘You did not upset anybody. This blow was just a welcome from the ancestors. Perhaps it was also a little warning. Just a little warning. If the ancestors had not wanted you here at all they would not have given you a light blow like this but they would have torn you into pieces. Now you must go because the ancestors are coming among us. The uninitiated must leave.’

The spirits of the ancestors would not be happy to see me there, he explained. Secrets would be shared. There were things I should not know. Truculently, I thought to myself if I don’t get to learn the secret things, here, tonight, the chances are I never will. It was now or never.

Outside the hut, a group of elders were looking anxiously at the night sky, hoping for signs of rain. Sevias sat down next to me against the wall. His kindly lined face betrayed signs of concern. His concern was not only for the rain, or lack of it, although this was as critical a matter for him as for the others - indeed his own life and the life of his family depended upon it - but also for me and my disappointment at not being admitted to all the tribal secrets. I had already told him that my fieldwork had not yielded as much as I had hoped.

Head cocked, his hands held in a gesture of supplication, he asked with just a hint of a smile, ‘Mushavi, have you found what you were looking for in your time with us?’

He often honoured me with the tribal praise name Mushavi which the Lemba generally use solely among themselves and which I thought could perhaps be connected with Musawi - the Arabic form of ‘follower of Moses (Musa)’. Perhaps he was trying to flatter me by calling me Mushavi but the rest of his question was incomprehensible. He knew full well that the tribal secrets for the most part were still intact.

I smiled and with as much patience as I could muster said, ‘You know very well, Sevias, that there are still many secrets you have not told me. And don’t forget the elders of all the clans agreed that I should be given access to everything.’

‘Yes,’ he replied gravely, ‘but many times I have explained to you that no matter what was said at that meeting of the clans, there are things which cannot be told outside the brotherhood of the initiated. Prayers, spells, incantations. Many of our secrets cannot be revealed. We told you that. My brother, the chief, told you that. The others told you that. They would have to kill you, Mushavi, if you learned those sacred things. That is the law.’

His lined face became almost a parody of concern and anxiety.

Sevias was a good man. In all the months I had spent in his kraal, despite the drought and the uncertain political situation both within the tribe and in the country at large, despite family difficulties, he had always been calm, kind and dignified. I realized now that I had never been happier in my life than sitting writing under the great tree in Sevias’ kraal.

He shuffled his bare, calloused feet in the parched earth.

‘But how about the tribal objects?’ I insisted. ‘Those things you brought with you from the north, from Senna. I’ve been told about these but I’ve still seen nothing of them.’

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘We brought objects from Jerusalem long ago and we brought objects from Senna. Sacred, important objects from Israel and Senna.’

Senna was the original lost city which the tribe maintained it had once inhabited after leaving the Land of Israel. Professor M.E.R. Mathivha - the scholarly head of the Lemba tribe in South Africa - had already told me a good deal about their Senna legend. The tribe had come from Senna ‘across the sea’. No-one knew where it was. They had crossed ‘Pusela’ - but no-one knew where or what that was either. They had come to Africa where they twice rebuilt Senna. That was the sum of it.

‘Sevias,’ I insisted, ‘can’t you at least tell me what happened to the tribal objects?’

He studied the sky and said nothing. Then he murmured, ‘The tribe is scattered over a wide area. Yo u know, once we broke the law of God. We ate mice, which are forbidden to us, and we were scattered by God among the nations of Africa. So the objects were scattered and are hidden in different places.’

‘And the ngoma? Where do you think that may be?’ I asked.

This was a wooden drum used to store sacred objects. The tribe had followed the ngoma, carrying it aloft, on their sojourn through Africa. They claim to have brought it from Israel so many years ago that no-one remembered when. According to their oral traditions they carried the ngoma before them to battle and it had guided them on their long trek through the continent.

According to Lemba oral tradition the ngoma used to be carried before the people on two poles. Each pole was inserted into the two wooden rings which were attached to each side of the ngoma. The ngoma was intensely sacred to the tribe, practically divine. Sacred cultic objects were carried inside. It was too holy to be placed on the ground: at the end of a day’s march it was hung from a tree or placed on a specially constructed platform. It was too holy to be touched. The only members of the tribe who were allowed to approach it were the hereditary priesthood who were always members of the Buba clan. The Buba priests served and guarded the ngoma. Anyone who touched it other than the priests and the king would be struck down by the fire of God which erupted from the drum itself. It was taken into battle and ensured victory. It killed the enemies of its guardians.

I had first heard of the ngoma months before in South Africa. Professor Mathivha had told me what he knew about it and I had had a detailed account from an old Lemba man called Phophi who was steeped in the history of the tribe. Phophi had told me how big the ngoma was, what its principal properties were and what traditions were associated with it.

I also knew that some forty years before, an ancient ngoma had been found by a German scholar called von Sicard in a cave by the Limpopo, the crocodile-infested river which marks the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. He had photographed it and the photograph had been included in a book he had written on the subject, but apparently the ngoma had long since disappeared without a trace. Mathivha, Phophi and other Lemba elders had told me that the artefact found by the German in its remote cave was without doubt the original ngoma that the Lemba had brought from the north.

One night, a few weeks before the rain dance, sitting up late around the fire with Sevias and other old men, I heard a little more of the legend of the ngoma.

‘The ngoma came from the great temple in Jerusalem,’ said Sevias. ‘We carried it down here through Africa on its poles. At night it rested on a special platform.’

It suddenly occurred to me that in form, size and function the ngoma lungundu was similar to the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, the famous lost Ark which had been sought without success throughout the ages. The biblical description of it, which I knew from the years I spent as an undergraduate studying classical Hebrew at Oxford, was etched in my mind:

an Ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof […] thou shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in the four corners and two rings shall be on one side of it and two rings in the other side of it. And thou shall make poles of shittim wood and overlay them with gold. And thou shalt put the poles into the rings by the sides of the Ark, that the Ark may be borne with them. The poles shall be in the rings of the Ark; they shall not be taken from it. And thou shalt put into the Ark the testimony which I shall give thee.

The Ark, like the ngoma, had supernatural powers. It was never allowed to touch the ground. It was practically divine. Like the ngoma it was carried into battle as a guarantor of victory. Sacred objects, including the tablets on which the Te n Commandments had been inscribed and the magic wand of Moses’ brother Aaron, were kept inside it. Anyone who as much as looked at it would be blasted by its awesome power. A priestly caste founded by Aaron, the brother of Moses, guarded the Ark. The priestly clan of the Buba founded by an individual called Buba, who was thought to have led the Lemba out of Israel, guarded the ngoma.

The functional similarities were striking. But the differences in form were significant. The Ark was apparently a kind of box, coffer, or chest, while the ngoma - although it also carried things inside it - was a drum. The Ark was made of wood but it was covered in sheets of gold; the ngoma was just made of wood.

Most critically, there was no connection in ancient times between the world of the Bible and this distant and remote inland corner of Africa. And there was no proof at all, in any way, that the Lemba guardians of the ngoma were of Jewish ancestry. Nonetheless, the area of overlap between these seemingly very different objects attracted me and turned my mind towards the strange story of the Ark of the Covenant. It was an interesting comparison but, I thought, no more than that.

* * *

Outside the chief’s hut, with the tumultuous din of the drums crowding out all the night sounds, I leaned against the mud and straw wall of the hut and slowly felt the pain of the blow recede. Sevias looked ill at ease. He took my arm and raised me to my feet, guiding me further away from the groups of men who were standing around, enjoying the cool of the night air before returning to the frenzy of the dance.

‘Talking about the ngoma and the things that were brought from Israel is too dangerous, Mushavi. This is part of the secret lore of the tribe. I cannot tell you any more about this than we have already told you. We told you that we call ourselves Muzungu ano-ku bva Senna - “the white men who came from Senna”. We told you that the ngoma came with us from Senna. We told you what the ngoma used to do. And we told you that the ngoma has not been seen by men for many, many years.’

Sevias was about to turn away when he hesitated and put his hand on my arm.

‘The old men say it was the ngoma that guided us here and some people say that when the time is right the ngoma will come to take us back. Things are getting worse in this country. Perhaps the time is coming.’

‘Sevias,’ I asked. ‘I know this is one of the great secrets of your tribe and I know that there are many in the tribe who do not wish to share their secrets with me. But I am leaving soon. I don’t want to leave empty-handed. Could you just tell me, please, if you have any idea where the ngoma lungundu might be?’

Sevias paused, looked around, and fell silent. He glanced up at the disappointingly bright night sky and again shuffled his feet in the fine dust of the kraal. ‘Where it is now I do not know. But some years ago the very old men used to say it was hidden in the cave below Dumghe Mountain. It is safe there. It is protected by God, by the king, by the “bird of heaven”, by twoheaded snakes and by the lions, “the guardians of the king”. It had been taken there, so the old men said, by the Buba from Mberengwe. They are the clan of Lemba priests and in those days there were some of them who stayed down on the Mberengwe side. But, as you know, that is the one place that you should not go. Not on Dumghe Mountain.’

He bade me goodnight and walked quickly back to join the elders.

I took Tagaruze, the policeman who had been instructed by the local police headquarters to act as my bodyguard (and to keep an eye on me), and walked the couple of miles back to Sevias’ kraal.

I felt a pang of regret that I would soon be leaving this beautiful place with its rugged hills and great rounded boulders, moulded and shaped by aeons of wind and rain, sun and drought.

The next day, I was planning to move on north towards Malawi and Tanzania, following the trail of the passage across Africa of this enigmatic tribe, in search of their lost city of Senna. It seemed a long, lonely quest and all of a sudden I found myself yearning for home.

I had had a letter from Maria, my voluptuous, salsa dancing Latin American girlfriend. It was tender but firm. She wanted me to go back, to leave this self-indulgent quest of mine for what she called the non-existent Senna. She wanted me to marry her and lead a normal life, the conventional and sedentary life of a scholar and university teacher. If I didn’t want to marry her there were plenty of men around who did.

‘Men,’ she said, ‘there are millions of them. Yo u are an imbecil if you do not take the chance now when you have it. Others would.’

And it was true. Every time she walked down the street there were very few men who failed to notice her. She had a way of walking. I tried to put her out of my mind. She would wait. Probably.

I was still feeling tipsy from the chibuku. If what Sevias had told me was correct there was perhaps some chance of me actually finding their ngoma lungundu. This would perhaps reveal something about where the tribe had come from. It would perhaps help me find the lost city of Senna. Perhaps there was some writing on it, or secret, sacred objects inside it, which could help me on my quest. All I needed to do was to go to Dumghe.

I felt a tremor of excitement. The sacred mountain of the Lemba is situated a couple of miles away from Sevias’ kraal. It was a beautiful rounded hill, east facing and covered with the characteristic rounded boulders of the region and was sparsely wooded. There was open country between the kraal and Dumghe. There were no villages or kraals - and no noisy dogs to alert the tribe to my activities. There was no dangerous wild life, save packs of jackals and the occasional leopard and I was too drunk to be overly concerned about them.

Following a sudden, chibuku-inspired urge, I decided to walk to the sacred cave, the one place where the tribe had forbidden me to go. A no-go area. In the past anyone daring to go there not of the initiated would be punished by death.

The elders would be dancing and drinking for hours to come, I thought to myself. The rest of the tribe were asleep. No one would ever know I’d been there. I knew that the cave was situated at the base of two massive rocks which had sheared away from a cliff which formed the eastern side of the mountain. It is covered with great, smooth round boulders created over the millennia by wind erosion. The rocks behind which the cave was hidden had once been pointed out to me, and I had been told that behind the sacred cave there was another cave even holier than the first. That was perhaps where the ngoma was protected, as they said, by its guardian lions and polycephalous snake.

It was about two o’clock in the morning when I arrived - along with Tagaruze, my tough police bodyguard - at the great meshunah tree where I had encountered the Lemba guardian of Dumghe during my first days in the village. From the tree all paths leading to the cave could be seen. The official guardian was reputed always to be on duty but that was difficult to believe and, in any case, as far as this occasion went, I had little to worry about for I had seen him at the rain party, drunk like all the others.

We paused for a moment and then made our way up the side of the mountain towards the rough track which led down to where the cave was. To one side the path hugged the rock face; to the other there was a sheer forty-foot drop into the void. It was a treacherous descent and stones kept plummeting into the abyss.

Even Tagaruze was scared. Tonight he was going way beyond the call of duty. He was as fascinated by the Lembas’ stories as I was. But he was beginning to regret having agreed to accompany me this night. He was not much given to words but finally he muttered, ‘Why are we doing this? What are we looking for?’ I was scared too, and did not reply.

I thought I heard a noise in the trees and brush above the stone face of Dumghe. We fell silent. One of the elders had seen a lion, a white lion, he had said, on the mountain, a few days before. The elders had told me that the ngoma was always protected by lions. These were the lions of God, the guardians of the king. We pushed on, slithering down the path which led down to the cave at the base of the rocks, pausing from time to time to listen for signs of danger. Tagaruze took the gun from its holster and stuck it into his belt. There was a damp, acrid smell in the air. My hands were wet with sweat from the effort of the walk and from fear.

Suddenly, the path fell away under my feet and it was only Tagaruze’s swiftness in grabbing my arm that prevented me from disappearing over the edge. Loose stones fell over the cliff in a tidy avalanche. A flat, neat echo sounded below us. We paused and looked down into the ravine. I could just make out the outline of the final stage of the descent which led down the cliff opposite the great wall of rock.

Carefully we edged our way down. Once there was a crack of branches; once the sound of a large bird and of rushing air, then silence. I wondered if this was the ‘bird of heaven’, the creature Sevias had claimed was one of the protectors of Dumghe.

We reached the base of the two great rocks. There was another sound of a branch snapping. Perhaps the Lemba did keep someone posted here all the time to guard their treasures, after all. There was only space for us to walk one abreast. I led the way, flashing my torch around until we reached what appeared to be the entrance to the cave. This, I thought, must be the Lemba holy of holies. Between the boulder and the cliff face there was a mound of loose scree. I placed my desert-booted foot on it, holding the torch with one hand and resting the other against the side of a boulder. There was nothing to be seen. Encouraged, I went through the narrow entrance and pointed my torch straight ahead. All I could see was a wall of rock.

But I could hear something: a sort of rasping sound, a cough or a snarl, and then a louder sound - a snort, perhaps, which became a deafening roar as it bounced off the surrounding rockface. My hand gripped the torch in terror. My legs turned to jelly. The gun, I thought, shoot it whatever it is. Tagaruze had the gun but when I turned around I realized that Tagaruze was no longer behind me. Tagaruze had disappeared. I was alone.

I retreated through the opening, back first, keeping my face to the sound and then scrambled up the narrow track after him and fled through the wooded slopes of Dumghe. The noise followed us, rising through the natural shaft made by the great rocks high into the mountain. It was a terrifying sound - it could have been a lion or a leopard or just about anything else. We did not wait to find out. We ran as fast as we could until we got to the meshunah tree.

Breathlessly we sat down at the base of the tree. As my rump hit the ground I felt something slithering away under me into the undergrowth. Shuddering, I stood up quickly.

‘What the hell was that?’ I asked.

‘That was just a snake,’ Tazaruze said offhandedly.

My blood turned cold and I felt like throwing up. I had been told that one of the guardians of the ngoma was a two-headed snake. I was a million times more afraid of even the smallest, most inoffensive grass snake than of any cat, great or small, on the face of the earth.

I shuddered. ‘And how about that thing in the cave?’ ‘It must have been a Lemba ancestor in the body of a leopard or a lion. Or it was the protectors of the ngoma, the lions of the Almighty, the guardians of the king. Everyone knows they prowl around this mountain. This was a terrible, big mistake.’

What the policeman had said was undoubtedly true. It was a mistake. I was to rue that mistake for many years to come. We did not find the elusive and mysterious ngoma lungundu, the strange artefact which played such an important role in the imagination of this remote African tribe, but the events of that night were to change my life and lead me on a quest which would only be resolved many, many years later.

The Sign Of His Kinship

S’ orry. It’s a forgery!’ It was my very first meeting with Reuven. The year was 1992, half a decade after my adventure at the mouth of the cave at Dumghe. We were in my vaulted study in the Old City of Jerusalem. A weird light seemed to be coming from a yellowing document, which was spread out on the table.

Reuven ben Arieh was a financier and diamond merchant, a highly orthodox Jew and a highly unorthodox everything else. He lived mainly in Jerusalem but also had homes in Paris, London, and Miami. He was a tall, full-bearded, well-built man. The first thing I noticed about him was his eyes. Those eyes were something. This man was something. He had a beautiful, soft-spoken wife, Clara, admired by everyone, and a lifeabsorbing mission.

His mission was stark in its simplicity and bound to fail: it was to end gentile hatred of Jews. To terminate anti-Semitism. For once and for all. It was as simple as that.

Hatred of Jews was a subject about which he had some personal experience: most members of his immediate family, including his father and mother, brother, and sister had been murdered at Treblinka. Reuven, who was about ten years older than me, was born in Holland in 1935. During the Nazi occupation, he spent three years hidden in a neighbour’s garret. In 1945 he emerged to discover that he was an orphan. Later that year he was claimed by some elderly and wealthy childless relatives of his mother’s who brought him up. They died in the early 1950s, leaving him their fortune. He studied chemistry in France, took up his father’s trade of diamond cutter for a few years, and then in 1953 moved to Israel.

By the time I met him he had fought in three wars against Arab states: the Sinai Campaign of 1956, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the Yo m Kippur War of 1973.

It was the hostility of Muslims and Arabs towards Israel and Jews that was of most concern to him. It was this hostility, particularly, that he wanted to eliminate from the world. Whenever I subsequently met him - and wherever I met him - it was Arab and Muslim resentment of Israel and how to combat it that he really wanted to talk about.

A few days previously Reuven had purchased the manuscript from Anis, one of the Jerusalem dealers. It could be dated more or less to the time of the Prophet Muhammad. So he said. It was going to change the world.

When he arrived at my house in the Old City that late summer’s day, clutching his tattered manuscript, Reuven was as excited as I have ever seen him, before or since.

He was wearing a very stylish version of the black hat, long dark jacket, and trousers worn by observant European Jews.

But everything was subtly wrong. Despite the heat and dust, his clothes were spotless, and immaculately cut by a Parisian tailor. The tropical weight woollen cloth of his suit was a very dark blue worsted with a herringbone pattern. He gave off a slight suggestion of Chanel Homme. As I was to discover later, he usually had his hair cut in New York, went for regular manicures, and his hand-made shirts came from Turnbull & Asser in London’s Jermyn Street. Although I am not Jewish, I had lived in Israel for many years and was familiar with many aspects of the Jewish religion and culture, and it was clear to me that Reuben looked like no other orthodox Jew in Jerusalem - and I told him so.

Grinning at me he said, ‘I want people to say - Hey! Reuven that handsome guy! That beautifully dressed orthodox Jew!’

He had ‘returned’ to Judaism just after the Yo m Kippur War. Before that, he had been a completely secular Israeli. He was now what is known as a baal teshuvah - a sort of born-again Jew. He maintained a fastidiously kosher home but elsewhere he would occasionally eat in a non-kosher restaurant. Since his conversion to Orthodox Judaism, he had immersed himself in the Talmud - the great Jewish collection of religious law - and the Jewish mysticism of the kabbala.

However, he also had what he referred to as his ‘principal interest’. For many years he had been scouring Islamic texts trying to find something that could be exploited to neutralize - or better, eradicate - Muslim hatred of Israel and Jews. What he was looking for was some ancient, unknown Islamic text praising the Jews or foretelling the return of the Jews to Palestine, something that would make the settlement of Muslim land by Jews seem ordained by Allah, something that would legitimize Zionism in the eyes of the Arab world, something that would destroy Muslim hatred of Israel. It was an extraordinary idea.

As he put it: ‘No peace will ever come to the Middle East until both sides - Jews and Muslims - re-orient their spiritual relationship. We need some document from the past which could allow us to put conflict aside and respect each other!’

And today, it seemed, he had found that document.

At first glance it appeared to be a letter from the Prophet. The astonishing thing about it was that it set out not to vilify and condemn the great enemies of Islam - the Jews - but to praise and defend them. In fact, the Sons of Israel, the Banu Israil, as they are called in the Quran, are lauded to the skies.

He explained to me that Muhammad had never, ever had the idea of trying to create a new religion. He wanted simply to introduce the older faiths of Judaism and Christianity to the polytheistic people of the desert. The original direction to which Muhammad’s first disciples prayed - the qibla - was actually towards Jerusalem. It was only after the Jews of Medina - one of the oasis towns near Mecca - proved to be disloyal and fought against him that he turned against the Jews and started to pray in the direction of Mecca.

‘What’s this got to do with changing the world?’ I asked.

‘Everything, my friend, everything. Yo u could say that the Jews’ disloyalty to the Prophet was the beginning of the conflict between Islam and the West. Yo u know the Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis?’

‘Yes, he used to teach at SOAS.’

‘Lewis calls this “the clash of civilizations”. This was the great fissure between the cultures.’

‘Yes,’ I acknowledged, ‘that is true in a way.’

‘But just listen! What I’ve got here could easily reverse all that. That’s why I wanted to meet you. I need you to authenticate it. This manuscript gives a radically new perspective on what the Jews of Medina really got up to. It’s explosive. Muslims could soon be joining Jews and even Christians in prayer. Can you imagine that? They could all be praying together towards Jerusalem. Praying in the same direction is the first step to thinking in the same direction.’

Reuven’s eyes were shining with the splendour of this vision. ‘This document is like a news broadcast from ancient times,’ he continued, ‘from the time these troublesome religions were spawned - a tattered fragment from the past that will permit us to put aside our conflict and actually try to love each other. Armageddon could be postponed for a century or two!’

This was the gist of the document he held in his hand: Muhammad swears in the letter that it was the Jews of Medina and the other oasis towns of Arabia who had always come to his aid in his many battles against the heathen tribes of the desert. The Jews were even ready to desecrate their holy Sabbath to help him. They never left his side. They never betrayed him. During a single bloody campaign, the Jews killed over 20,000 heathen enemies of the Prophet: 7000 knights, 7000 regular horsemen, and 7000 foot soldiers.

‘This is what the Prophet actually promised the Jews,’ declared Reuven reverently, raising one finger for emphasis. ‘Not centuries of contempt and persecution!’

‘Just listen.’ He put on a pair of reading glasses, scrutinized the document and read aloud. ‘“O men of the Children of Israel, by Allah I shall reward you for this…I shall grant you my protection, my covenant, my oath and my witness for as long as I live and as long as my community shall live after me, until they see my face upon the Day of Resurrection.”

‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, his voice suddenly shrill, thrusting the document in my face and revealing an immaculately laundered cuff. ‘If the Muslim world knew about this, they would change their attitude to Israel overnight! There’d be no more Arab-Israel wars! No more terrorist attacks!’

Unfortunately, there was more to the letter than met the eye. It was probably quite old, I could see that. The body of the text was in Arabic and there was a short introduction in Hebrew. I knew something about Hebrew palaeography - the study of the form of ancient writing - and I could see this was a medieval Hebrew Yemenite script. This much was genuine.

Then I recalled that once in the Yemen I had seen an almost identical document in the home of an antiquarian in Sana’a, the capital of the Yemen. It was called Dhimmat al-Nabi (The Protection of the Prophet) and was an ancient Jewish fabrication, an old forgery, which the Yemenite Jews had created to counter the animosity of their Muslim neighbours. There was no Jewish community in the Muslim world quite as wretched and persecuted as the Jews of the Yemen. They needed all the help they could get. However, this document would not persuade many Muslim scholars to turn their received opinions upside down. It would not change the world.

‘It’s a shame,’ I said, ‘but it is a forgery. A very old forgery.’

A yellow hamseen wind was blowing in from the desert. It was stiflingly hot. Reuven’s face fell when I gave him my assessment of his document, and he grew silent. He just sat there grimacing, rubbing the side of his head where he had been grazed by an Egyptian bullet in the last of his wars.

Had it been genuine, the document he had just shown me could have served this purpose pretty well.

‘Are you absolutely sure it’s a forgery?’ he asked trying to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

‘Quite sure,’ I replied flatly.

One cold, damp Jerusalem evening, some months later, we were walking back to my house in the Old City. Reuven had just flown in from Miami. He was suntanned and exquisitely dressed as usual, but he seemed agitated and I wondered what was troubling him. We had just passed through the Jaffa Gate, one of the main entrances into the walled city of Jerusalem, when he said, ‘Redemption. That’s it, redemption.’

‘What do you mean?’

He said nothing. We walked silently down the alley leading to the Armenian Quarter. After a few minutes he turned to me and murmured, ‘Redemption is what it is all about. I think I have found what I have been looking for. I now know what to do.’

‘You’ve not bought another ancient document from your dealer chum, have you?’ I asked in disbelief.

Stroking his beard, he smiled.

‘I have found it.’

‘Found what?’ I asked.

‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Wait until we get to your place.’

We passed Zion Gate, another of the historical entrances to the city, and walked in the shadow of the medieval walls towards the Western Wall, one of the great retaining walls built by Herod the Great to enclose the area of the Temple, and sacred to Jews ever since.

It had been a bitterly cold winter and was close to freezing when we arrived back at the house. I lit the Friedman paraffin stove in the study and put a match to a pile of olive wood in the sitting-room grate.

Finally when we sat down, he could no longer contain himself.

‘I think that I have found what I have been looking for,’ he announced quietly. ‘I think the solution is the Ark of the Covenant.’

We talked late into the night, huddled around the fire, drinking Israeli 777 brandy. He started by telling me about the efforts going on throughout the world to locate the ancient Temple treasure in Jerusalem. He explained the global religious importance of the Ark and its deep significance for mystics, kabbalists, and freemasons. He explained the history of the Ark as the Bible relates it.

The Ark had been made at God’s command shortly after the exodus of the Jews from Egypt around 1200 BC. It was essentially a coffer containing the tablets of the law which God had given to Moses on Mount Sinai and was believed to be the home of the Israelites’ invisible God. It was placed in a tentlike sanctuary called the tabernacle and could only be approached by priests of the tribe of Levi. The Ark punished by fire those that disregarded the strict rules which governed the way it should be treated. It was carried before the Israelites as they advanced through the desert and was said to have generated some kind of energy which blasted a dry path across the River Jordan.

The Israelites had to destroy Jericho if they wanted to conquer their Promised Land and the Ark was somehow, in some strange, mysterious way that has never been satisfactorily explained or understood, instrumental in making its walls come crashing down before the besieging Israelite horde. The first important religious site the Israelites created in Canaan was at Shiloh not far from Jerusalem. The tabernacle and the Ark stayed here for hundreds of years. During the battles against the Philistines - the great enemies of the Israelites - the Ark was used in battle.

It was seriously dangerous.

Finally at the time of King Solomon, the son of King David, it was placed in the magnificent new temple created to house it. From this moment on we hear precious little about the Ark and the assumption is that at some point over the next few hundred years, and probably before 587 BC, this fabulous artefact disappeared.

As Reuven was speaking, my mind was transported back five years to my perilous night on Dumghe and the vague associations I had imagined between the ngoma and the Ark. But Reuven was unstoppable.

The more he spoke about the Ark the more excited he became. ‘The Ark radiated mystical energy from the centre of the world,’ he said. ‘For Jewish mystics the Land of Israel - Eretz Yisrael - was in the middle of the world. Jerusalem was at the centre of Eretz Yisrael. The Temple was at the centre of Jerusalem. The Holy of Holies - the devir was at the centre of the Temple and the Ark of Moses was at the centre of the holy of holies. Directly beneath the Ark,’ he continued, ‘was the even Shetiyyah - the foundation stone - a stone drenched in mystic power. A kind of cosmic battery for the universe!’

Reuven’s face had taken on a strange radiance and his voice grew louder. ‘This,’ he boomed, ‘was the place where Adam was buried. This is where the patriarch Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac. This is where Muhammad ascended to heaven. This is where the very creation of the world took place. The foundation stone was the critical element which separated the upper world from the pit of chaos below, and the Ark incorporates that elemental centrality.’

Breathlessly he described the construction of the Ark by the Israelite craftsman Bezalel shortly after Moses had led the Hebrews out of Egypt. He spoke of the exquisite golden cherubim which were placed on its golden lid - the Mercy Seat - which was nothing less than the actual throne of the Almighty. To be honest all these mystical, supernatural references left me cold.

‘Oh come on, Reuven,’ I groaned. ‘Anyway, according to the book of Deuteronomy it was Moses who made the Ark, not Bezalel, and it was just an ordinary wooden box. If you remember, God commanded Moses to make two stone tablets and an acacia Ark. He made the simple wooden Ark and took the stone tablets to the top of the mountain. The law was duly inscribed upon them and Moses brought down the tablets and put them into the Ark he had made. No gold, no cherubim, nothing.

‘Modern scholars think that the more elaborate description of the Ark with all its gold stuff was probably a scribe’s attempt to make the Ark match the glories of the Temple and was written hundreds of years after the period when it was made, which would have been about 1300 BC. The scribes who wrote the detailed descriptions of the Ark had never seen it. They simply described what they imagined it to be. Their imagination was infinitely more influenced by Egyptian and Assyrian models than by the Ark itself.’

‘Don’t try to diminish it,’ growled Reuven, seizing my arm. ‘The Ark was the holiest thing in the world, ensconced in the holiest place in the world. It was where the Shekhinah - the divine presence of God lived. The combination of the holiest place in the world and the holiest object in the world radiated its own force and the world is still trembling! My Kabbalistic teachers taught me that the Ark existed and still exists in a kind of hyperspace. It defied all physical laws. When it was put in the Holy of Holies it was attached to its carrying poles. We know that the space available was too small for the length of the poles yet the Ark still fitted in. The Ark was constructed on a heavenly original.’

‘So it was kind of fake like your document. Not even an original,’ I said grinning, hoping to deflate him a little or provoke him into a more rational discourse.

For a few minutes, he appeared to be lost in thought and then he plunged back into the magical and mystical aspects of the Ark which seemed very far from his central interest, his mission. He told me that his Kabbalistic teachers drew an analogy between the Ark, with the two tablets inside, and the brain and its two hemispheres. In the same way as the brain was central to the working of the body, so the Ark was central to the working of the people of Israel.

‘Reuven,’ I said patiently, ‘this is all undoubtedly of great interest, but how can the Temple treasure and the lost Ark possibly help you in your mission to placate the Muslim world?’

‘Because I have found this!’ he said triumphantly. ‘I have found an amazing passage actually in the Quran and this is no forgery.’ He took a copy of the Quran from his briefcase and read aloud in his faultless Arabic.

‘Their prophet said to them, “The sign of his kingship is that the Ark of the Covenant will be restored to you, bringing assurances from your Lord, and relics left by the people of Moses and the people of Aaron. The angels will carry it. This should be a convincing sign for you, if you are really believers.”

‘Muhammad considered the restoration of the Ark to the Jews to be a sign of the kingship of Saul, the first king of Israel. I have no doubt that contemporary Muslims would see the restored Ark as a convincing sign of kingship and political legitimacy today. This should be a convincing sign for you, if you are really believers. The Ark seen in the context of this verse from the Quran would be better than any manuscript. In any event who can say if the kind of manuscript I have been seeking really exists? But the Ark once existed and if I can find it, it would guarantee peace in our time between Muslims and Jews.’

I had never noticed this verse from the Quran. He went on to tell me what Muslim theologians and scholars had to say about the Ark. The Muslim version of events was based loosely on the well-known story in the Apocryphal Second Book of Maccabees, a late Jewish text, which relates that the Biblical prophet Jeremiah carried the Ark out of the Jewish Temple just before the Babylonians seized Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in 587 BC. Jeremiah took it across the River Jordan into what is today the Kingdom of Jordan, hid it in a cave on Mount Nebo, the mountain from which Moses had gazed upon the Promised Land before the Israelite conquest of Canaan, and then sealed up the entrance to the cave. Some of the Prophet’s followers tried to find the path that Jeremiah had taken in order to find the Ark. He rebuked them and said that the Ark would remain hidden until God gathered his people together at the end of time.

Here the Arab historians take up the story and this was new to me. According to them the Ark was subsequently discovered on Mount Nebo by the Jurhum tribe. They took it to Mecca and there it stayed. According to some Muslims the Ark is still to be found beneath the Ka’aba - the construction at the heart of Mecca which is the holiest place in the world for Muslims. Reuven told me of other Muslim theories concerning the fate of the Ark. Abbas, a cousin of Muhammad, maintained that the Ark was hidden in the Sea of Galilee, Kinneret, in Hebrew - and would be found just before the end of time by the Mahdi, an Islamic Messianic figure.

Reuben’s handsome face was glowing as he added that Islamic scholars believed that relics of Moses and Aaron would be found inside the Ark, including the tablets of the law, Aaron’s rod, the sceptre of Moses and Aaron’s turban.

I smiled sceptically at this piously enunciated list. ‘Did Aaron have a turban?’ I asked.

He looked at me steadily. ‘You don’t get it, do you? Don’t you understand that if I can find the Ark I can bring peace and redemption to this part of the world? I’m not going to leave it for the Mahdi to find! Muslims will accept the legitimacy of Israel and this country will become what it was meant to be - a land of peace, a land flowing with milk and honey!’ His voice was hoarse with excitement.

I could see that Reuven was in the grip of a genuine passion and realized that there was little to be gained by teasing him.

‘Well, it’s a very interesting idea. In fact in some ways it’s an interest that we share. We just have different ways of expressing it. I’ve been fascinated by the Ark, in my own way, since my African days. What I find compelling is that the idea of the Ark has sent ripples throughout the world. I discovered what I think was the end of one long, sinuous ripple when I was in Africa and I imagine there are others.’

Reuven nodded solemnly. ‘Yes, its rays penetrated every corner of the earth as the Kabbalists teach us. Its impact upon the world when I find it will be overwhelming.’

‘When you find it? Come on, come back down to earth, Reuven. Yo u have no idea where it is. Yo u don’t really know if it ever existed. I don’t think it did. Personally I think it was an idea more than a thing. This is not, my friend, what I would call a realistic project. Anyway,’ I continued, ‘the Quran says that angels will bring it. Yo u don’t look much like an angel to me. But you could work on it.’

Brushing aside my objection and sarcasm with a dismissive movement of a manicured hand, he looked me straight in the eyes and said doggedly, ‘I have spent years combing the Islamic texts for the forgotten passage which would change the world. Thus far, I have failed. So now, realistic or not, I am going to broaden my search to include the Ark. The Ark, if I can find it, is going to give real legitimacy to Israel. It will give our spiritual sovereignty back. It will redeem us. It will redeem the world!’

I felt a shiver running up and down my spine. The firelight flickered on the stone, vaulted ceiling. Next to the passionate Reuven I felt prosaic. For me, the story of the Ark ensconced in its tabernacle tent took me back to my childhood in Wales and to the little chapel called Tabernacle where I had gone with my father. And when I had mentioned the Ark to my father en passant on my previous trip to England his eyes had lit up with interest.

But nonetheless my interest in it was historical, pragmatic. Reuven’s apocalyptic vision was quite the opposite. I wanted to deflate his rhetoric, bring him down to earth, but I couldn’t. It was as if his intoxication and passion had paralysed me. I began to sense that his passion was taking me over too. I refilled his glass and my own and stared into the flames. He pushed his well-shod feet closer to the fire and leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head, then began to intone in a tense, menacing rasp:

‘From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be the blade that was broken;

The crownless again shall be King.’

‘That’s Tolkien, isn’t it?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘from The Fellowship of the Ring. It just seems to catch my mood. Just think: political and religious redemption for the Jewish people. “The crownless again shall be king.” The redemption of Israel will be brought ever closer by the discovery of the Ark. For thousands of years it has been hidden somewhere, probably broken, crushed, worm-eaten. But “renewed shall be the blade that was broken”. I have a strong sentiment that in my lifetime that blade - the Ark - will indeed be renewed. I have a strong sentiment that the final redemption of the Jewish people is not far distant.’