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.’

He stopped short and continued in a dry reflective tone, ‘I don’t know why the redemption of my people has taken such a hold on my life. But it has.’

Reuven soon plunged back into his new obsession. He told me how the third-century anti-Christian Roman emperor Julian the Apostate had planned to help the Jews rebuild the Jerusalem Temple but as soon as the work commenced the workers were frightened away because great balls of fire gushed out of the ruins. This was some sort of proof, thought Reuven, that in the third century the Ark was still there.

He told me about the destructive, murderous power of the Ark as it is described so graphically in the Bible. He told me about Templar knights who are known to have thoroughly excavated beneath Temple Mount during the Crusades and according to some unsubstantiated rumours taken the ancient treasures of the Jews back to the Languedoc.

With increased intensity he went on to describe more recent secret excavations to locate the Temple treasures. He told me about an eccentric Finnish scholar and poet Valter Juvelius who had organized a covert dig on Temple Mount in 1910-11. Juvelius claimed to have discovered a secret bible code in a library in Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman empire, indicating where the Temple treasure, including the Ark, lay hidden. He raised funds for an expedition and persuaded a captain in the Grenadier Guards, one Montague Parker, the thirty-year-old son of the Earl of Morley, to lead it.

At Juvelius’ insistence, the team was accompanied by a Danish clairvoyant who directed their labours. One night, in April 1911, under cover of darkness, having first bribed the Governor of Jerusalem, Azmi Bey, Parker and his team, disguised as local Arabs, climbed into the compound and started digging directly under the cupola of the Dome of the Rock itself, the holiest place on earth.

The sounds reached the ears of a Muslim attendant and the alarm was raised. Violent riots flared up throughout the city and Parker and his team beat a hasty retreat to their expedition yacht moored off the coast near the port town of Jaffa. When they got back to London the headlines of the London Illustrated News blazed: ‘Have Englishmen discovered the Ark of the Covenant?’

Whether the discovery of the Ark would indeed bring about peace between Israel and the Muslim world I had no idea. In 1992 the political situation throughout the Middle East was far worse than it had ever been previously. The First Gulf War had been fought a year before and Jerusalemites were still recovering from the fear of attack from Iraqi Scuds tipped with biological or chemical warheads. Reuven spoke of this a lot. He was terrified of what might happen to the Jewish people in the future. He thought another holocaust was entirely possible. I often tried to reassure him that this was not really very likely, but he wouldn’t listen. It was this fear and his dread of extreme Islamism that drove him.

In January 1991, just before the scuds started falling on Israel, I had been to see my old friend Lola Singer. I had first met her when I was working in Jerusalem for the British Voluntary Service Overseas in 1963 (it was that year in Israel that had, in fact, originally made me decide to study Hebrew at Oxford a year later). While doing VSO I was assigned to an institution for handicapped children where Lola was a social worker. Some of the children were the offspring of women who had been the subjects of sterility experiment in the concentration camps. They were all grotesquely deformed. Once a week for a year I went with Lola to visit the parents of the various children in different parts of Israel.

It was through endless conversations with Lola and the kids’ parents that I began to understand something of the tragedy of recent Jewish history. Lola’s own story was dreadful enough. A Polish Jewess from Radom, Lola had lost most of her family members during the Holocaust: they were gassed at Auschwitz. In 1939, before the war, she was a beautiful and talented young woman, studying to be a doctor. For a Jew to be admitted to a medical faculty in Poland in the years before the Second World War was virtually impossible. The entrance exams she wrote were literally faultless. They had to admit her. She was a young genius. After the German invasion Lola’s world fell apart. Her young husband, kicked out of Germany as a Jew was shot by the Russians as a German. She managed to escape from Poland via Russia and arrived in Jerusalem in 1943.

The day I visited her she was all alone in her small apartment. Like many Jerusalemites she was afraid that Saddam would launch poisoned gas missiles against the city. Now an old woman she was standing on a chair trying to tape plastic sheets to the window in the vain hope of making them impervious to gas attack. Of all the people I knew she was the last one upon whom I would have wished this futile activity.

As I helped her down from the chair she said between clenched teeth, ‘They gassed my mother and my father, they gassed my aunts and uncles, and cousins. They gassed my friends from school. They gassed my childhood sweetheart from next door. But you know, they are not, they are not going to gas me.’

She slumped into a chair and burst into tears. I finished taping up the plastic sheeting. There were places where it would not stick onto the window frame and you could feel the draft coming straight through. This protection would not keep out a medium-strength breeze let alone a poison gas attack.

By the time I went to Oxford I knew a great deal more about Jewish suffering than most gentiles and like all sane people I wanted to see an end to it. Like Reuven I also passionately wished to see Jews and Arabs reconciled. Maybe, I thought, a crazy idea like Reuven’s was worth considering. Even a lavishly funded worldwide search for the Ark would cost less than even a couple of American smart missiles.

Reuven left at about two o clock. I stayed up for another couple of hours staring into the embers of the olive wood fire, dreaming about my friend’s quest. When, finally, I went to bed I couldn’t sleep. The whole house stank of paraffin. To get some fresh air I pulled on my old brown Arab jalabiyyeh and went on to the roof terrace of my house.

Jerusalem was bathed in cold white moonlight. Looking towards the Temple Mount, I could see the great golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock shimmering in the pale light. On this night, the city was breathlessly beautiful. In the Talmud it is written, ‘God gave ten measures of beauty to the world: nine measures he gave to Jerusalem and one only for all the rest of creation.’ It was here that the Temple had once stood. The rocky outcrop over which the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock had been constructed once formed part of the Holy of Holies where, according to Jewish mythology, King Solomon had placed the Ark.

It seemed to me that the stories that surrounded the Ark were the stuff of fairy tales. In much of Jewish tradition there was something ineffably improbable about the Ark. The texts maintained that when the Ark was brought into the Temple by Solomon, the very wood and gold with which it was made came alive and formed trees which yielded abundant harvests of fruit. The Ark breathed life into everything. It was only when the faithless Israelite king Manasseh, hated by Jewish tradition, brought a foreign idol into the Temple that the miraculous trees dried up and the fruit withered on the branch.

This was strange, I thought, as I gazed out at the night. The Ark at some level was the secret weapon of the ancient Israelites. It meted out death, yet it breathed life into everything. These properties seemed to carry a powerful mystical message. Reuven had explained that for the Kabbalists this dualism expressed different and opposite forces acting in the Universe. When the two properties of the Ark were finally in harmony the Messianic era would arrive. Whatever the Ark expressed symbolically, it was pretty extraordinary. But had it ever been a real, objective thing or was it just a powerfully symbolic multi-layered, multi-tasking myth?

I stayed on the roof for a long time, huddled in my rough woollen cloak, gazing at the sleeping city.

But what, I asked myself, if the Ark were more than just an imagined, mythical construct - the legend of a visible little home for an invisible big God?

Some had said that the Ark was still buried in a secret passage beneath the Dome. Others had claimed it might have been secreted away to the Judean Hills, which I could see all around me on the distant horizon; or further still to the Arabian Desert; alternatively, in the murky depths of the Kinneret.

I had even heard rumours from starving refugees when I had been in Ethiopia a few years before at the time of the great famine, that the Ark had been taken to Africa by the first Ethiopian emperor Menelik. And I had heard about a strange Ark-like object when I was in southern Africa. As I thought of where the Ark might be, I could feel a growing, irrational excitement course through my veins.

The words of Kipling that I had loved as a boy came into my mind. ‘Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges - something lost behind the ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!’

But had the Ark ever really existed? Was there anything hidden? Anything to look for? I had my doubts.

My mind turned to Reuven. Sometimes when I looked at him I could sense an awareness of things which few people had. His eyes, which had been trained to discern the slightest flaw in gems, seemed to see further and with greater clarity than normal eyes. However, I wondered if he was as capable of seeing flaws in arguments as he was of seeing flaws in gems.

I could see that if his quest ever delivered this enigmatic object, as an actual object, in some physical manifestation, its discovery would achieve more than a thousand unread monographs.

But was there any earthly way in which I could help him? Could I help him to change the world? Did I want to?

Protocols Of The Priests

The sirens howled all night. Groggily I faced a new Jerusalem day and realized that I had a growing obsession. Reuven’s infatuation with the Ark had now taken over my dream time as well as a lot of my waking hours. It seemed absurd but I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

When he had come round to my place a week before, Reuven had asked me to provide him with a scholarly reading list and this day would be spent achieving that goal.

It was the day when the scales fell from eyes and I saw the Ark for what it was.

I had made an appointment to see a distinguished academic in the field of Ancient Semitic Studies: Chaim Rabin, Professor of Hebrew at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Many years before, Rabin had taught at Oxford, where I had studied. His successor, David Patterson, who had been my teacher, had often urged me to look him up. To ask Rabin’s help in compiling a bibliography was a perfect excuse finally to make his acquaintance. He was a quite outstanding scholar even though by now he was getting on in age and I had heard that his mind was beginning to wander from time to time.

I walked from the Old City across town to the modern quarter of Rehavia and found the old scholar waiting for me in his neighbourhood café. Rabin was a balding little man with bushy eyebrows, keen probing eyes, and an infectious smile. As we sat drinking a lemon tea in its silver-rimmed glass, I explained the background to my visit, without saying anything about Reuven. I wanted hard facts about the Ark from a wise, unbiased source.

‘Is there any chance at all,’ I asked, weighing my words carefully, ‘that the treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem and Ark of the Covenant will ever be found?’ I grinned at him in what I hoped was a disarming way.

Frowning uncertainly, he scratched his forehead. ‘Oh, not another treasure seeker! Don’t tell me that Patterson has sent me a treasure-seeker!’ He spoke English with a pronounced German accent, which failed to make his tone any more agreeable.

I was embarrassed and confused by this little barb and muttered that I had a sort of marginal interest in the topic and wanted some help in preparing a short bibliography. Briefly, Rabin looked the picture of contrition.

‘Yes, well, I am sorry. It’s just that there’s been so much talk recently about the Temple treasure and quite a few odd characters have beaten their way to my door to pick my brains and waste my time. It’s quite true - they waste my time! A lot of individuals and institutions are looking for the Ark. Some are charlatans and some are downright sinister! There’s a rather overly enthusiastic American gentleman by the name of Mr Wyatt from Tennessee who claimed not long ago to have actually found the Ark in a cave just outside the city walls. No proof of course. And Wyatt is not the only enthusiast of this kind.’

‘But why are people so fascinated by it?’

What Rabin told me opened a small window into the past and changed my view of the Ark forever.

He thought the reason people were interested in it had something to do with its unmythical nature. It was a simple object with strange properties. It had great symbolic importance both for Rabbinic Judaism and for Kabbalists, but it had started off as a real object.

There were so many improbable stories about the powers of the Ark in the Bible that I had failed to perceive it as a truly historical artefact. The historicity of the Ark was substantiated, he said, in the most factual biblical chronicles. If it still existed, I did not know; but on the basis of what Rabin, one of the greatest scholars in the world in this field had to say, there was little doubt that it had existed once.

In addition Rabin explained that the Ark still exercised an enormous amount of power. He told me, in the hushed tones of someone who had difficulty believing what he was saying, of an extremist Jewish organization called Ateret Cohanim (the Crown of the Priests) which was planning the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple. They believed that the world was in End Time: the period before the coming of the Messiah. Restoring worship in the Temple after a gap of 2000 years would further accelerate the coming of the Messiah.

Rabin told me that some of the rabbis of Ateret Cohanim believed that the Ark still existed and had been searching for it behind the Western Wall in the Old City. After Israel’s fateful victory over the Arab states in 1967, this area of the Wall came under Jewish jurisdiction for the first time since the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70, and a small prayer hall was soon constructed in a tunnel to the left of the Wall. From there, members of Ateret Cohanim and their sympathizers secretly excavated under the Temple Mount at night and penetrated into a system of ancient tunnels that they considered to date from the First Temple. There had even been rumours that the Ark had actually been discovered.

‘If ever they do find the Ark,’ said Rabin, ‘the Temple will be rebuilt. Without a doubt. If the Temple is rebuilt, the Dome of the Rock, you understand, will have to go. Yo u see it is rather in the way. The Temple would be rebuilt on its foundations. On its smouldering ruins. As it is Islam’s third most sacred site, it would be a reasonably efficient recipe, I believe, for the next world war. They want to eject Islam from the site: a couple of attempts by Jewish zealots to blow it up have been foiled. The next time we may not be so lucky.’

Rabin looked at me, one bushy eyebrow raised, his lips pursed in disapproval.

‘You seem almost to be implying that finding the Ark is a possibility,’ I said.

‘Perhaps I am. Well, you know, theoretically,’ he murmured, smiling in a conspiratorial way. ‘As you know, serious scholars don’t pay much attention to it. It is rather a topic for a certain kind of adventurer. Along the lines of the film, that popular American confection, Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ Again he pursed his lips.

‘But perhaps, briefly, we could put our scholarly reservations to one side and for a moment enjoy a bit of speculation.’ He sat back in his chair and smiled, not unkindly.

Rabin’s main argument for the possible continued existence of the Ark was that it would never have been allowed to fall into enemy hands. The priests would have removed it long before a besieging army was knocking at the gates of Jerusalem. Both in 587 BC, when the Babylonians took Jerusalem, and in AD 70, when the Romans destroyed the city, there was adequate warning before the city eventually fell.

‘In those days,’ he said, ‘armies travelled slowly and noisily. And in any case, before the Roman attack there were horrifying warnings and portents: the most prescient being that a swordshaped star hung over the Temple, which it did in a way in the form of a Roman sword - the gladius.’

‘So you think it would have been taken?’

‘Yes, no doubt. They would never have just left it in the Temple to be defiled by the enemy.’

‘Who do you think could have removed it?’

‘Certainly priests. A possible line would be to follow the trace of the priests. If they left a trace.’

Rabin took a sip of his tea and looked out onto the busy street. He reflected for a moment and said, ‘It could be that the prophet Jeremiah, who was of a priestly family, had it taken out just before the Babylonians came, as later Jewish tradition suggests. After Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 587,’ he continued, raising his hand to attract the waiter, ‘we hear nothing more of the Ark. If it was hidden somewhere, it was probably hidden just before the destruction of the city. Alternatively, possibly some time before. But probably not later.’

Rabin seemed to pause for breath and briefly regarded his gnarled hands. Then, thoughtfully, he continued. ‘No Jew would ever have destroyed the Ark, and if the Egyptians or Babylonians or Romans had destroyed it or stolen it or taken it away, there would be a record of it. They would have boasted about it. For the Jews it would have been the greatest possible national disaster - a calamity even greater than the destruction of the Temple - and they would have chronicled it and would still be writing about it and lamenting it! How we Jews love to lament! We have a whole three-week period of lamentation from the 17th of Tammuz to the 9th of Av - but there are plenty of other days of lamentation throughout the year. However, we have no festival of lamentation for the Ark. Instead, history provides us with total silence.’

I felt embarrassed about asking the next question. How could anyone really have any idea at all where it was after so much time? But I asked it anyway.

‘Mmm…’ he replied, smiling enigmatically and rubbing his hands together. ‘Somewhere in the Middle East or Africa, I suppose. There is some outside chance it was taken to Egypt in the ninth century BC by a certain Pharaoh who is called Shishak in the Bible. Or it could have been taken later. And if it were hidden somewhere in Egypt there is some chance it might have survived because of the hot, dry conditions. However, if you want further precision there are a number of serious possibilities. Even one or two, well, let us call them clues.’

In spite of himself, I could see that Rabin was enjoying the conversation. Over my protests, he paid for our tea, took my elbow in a firm grip, and ushered me across the bustling Rehavia street to the apartment where he lived.

In his book-lined study, he took out a dusty volume from a shabby wooden cupboard. ‘You know the Hebrew word for cupboard?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Aron.’

‘That’s right. Aron means chest or cupboard, anything that stores things. It is a very simple word, nothing very fancy or spiritual about it. It is the same word we use for the Ark - aron ha-brit - Chest of the Covenant. In English, “Ark” - which ultimately comes from the Latin arca - sounds, how would one say it, rather romantic or mysterious, does it not? In Hebrew it’s just a good old word for “chest” or, even more prosaically, “box”.’

‘Could it have any other meaning?’ I asked. ‘Is it connected with cognate words in other Semitic languages?’ As I asked the question the word ngoma flitted briefly through my mind but I dismissed it instantly. There was no connection between Semitic languages and Bantu languages that I knew of.

‘The cognate word means coffin in Phoenician and second millennium Akkadian, and could be a wooden box in first millennium Akkadian if I remember correctly.’

‘The meaning “coffin” seems a long way from the dwelling place of the living God,’ I remarked. ‘On the face of it, it even seems a little absurd.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, wrinkling his nose, in the charming way he had. ‘No I think we can be fairly sure that in the classical Hebrew of the Jewish Scriptures the word means what it appears to mean, which is to say, well, yes, something like coffin - it does actually and literally mean coffin once or twice in the Bible - but more generally box or chest. Now where could that good old box be? What clues do we have?’ he asked with a boyish smile.

He told me that in the writing of the Jewish Sages and even in the Bible there were a number of clues as to the Ark’s whereabouts. In early rabbinic works, for instance, it was thought that King Josiah, who came to the throne of Israel in around 639 BC - the precise date is debatable - hid it somewhere in the Temple under the instructions of the Prophetess Huldah. This was probably the standard Jewish belief over time. The Sages wrote that the Ark was hidden ‘in its place’. This presumably meant somewhere in the Temple. Specifically it is suggested that it was buried under the floor of the part of the Temple where the wood used for sacrificial fires was stored.

‘Putting aside political problems, is the Temple where you would search if you were looking for it?’

‘If I were looking for it, I would always start with texts. That’s what I always advise my students: Go to the text. There’s more to be found in dusty old tomes than people imagine. In this case, I think, the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls could provide us with some enlightenment.’

The story of the discovery of these remarkable documents started on a rugged Palestinian hillside in 1947, as the violent conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine grew out of control and the British, who had governed Palestine for the previous twenty years, were preparing to pack their bags for good. A lean, unkempt Bedouin goatherd was searching the rocky hills along the Dead Sea for a lost goat. He threw a stone into a cave. Instead of the bleating of a frightened animal, he heard the unmistakable sound of breaking pottery.

Further investigation revealed a number of terracotta jars filled with manuscripts. Seven of these manuscripts were sold to a Jerusalem antique dealer and cobbler called Kando, who in turn - and at some profit - sold them to clients in the Holy City: three to a scholar at the Hebrew University and four to the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Monastery of St Mark.

Between 1947 and 1956, a total of more than 800 manuscripts or parts of manuscripts were found in 11 different caves.

Once the press found out about them, the scrolls became a sensation. What would they reveal about the origins of Christianity, the person of Jesus and the authenticity of the Bible? Scholars soon established a collective view that the Jewish Essene sect, which lived in this desolate place but about which very little was known, had hidden the scrolls as the Roman army was advancing towards them in search of Jews involved in the First Jewish Revolt (AD 66-70) against the Empire.

One of the most remarkable finds was the Copper Scroll. Discovered in the third of the Qumran caves to yield its treasures, this scroll records a list of 64 underground hiding places of valuable items: gold, silver, aromatics like frankincense and myrrh, and manuscripts. Initially a number of scholars refused to believe that this list of lost treasure was genuine. Some thought it was no more than a kind of literary collection of lost-treasure stories. I asked Rabin about it.

He shrugged. ‘The Copper Scroll was a bit of an embarrassment. Look at this.’ He reached for a file in the bookcase behind him and took out a yellowing clipping. ‘This is what the New York Times wrote when the scroll was first published: “It sounds like something that might have been written in blood in the dark of the moon by a character in Treasure Island.”’ Rabin laughed. ‘But just because it was embarrassing does not mean it was not true. Of course it was not prudent to advertise the scroll too much we had to avoid a gold rush. But a lot of what was said at the time by the scholars involved - Milik, Mowinckel, Silberman, even de Vaux - was off the mark. I think I can say that I was successful in putting them right,’ he murmured with mild, scholarly satisfaction. ‘Their idea was that this was a kind of joke perpetrated by a semi-literate scribe - a crank. Now, a sort of hoax about a fabulous but non-existent Temple treasure clumsily scratched on a copper plate by a dirtpoor ascetic in a filthy goat-ridden cave in the desert would have been potentially amusing, would it not? But I fear my Israelite ancestors were not noted for their sense of humour! No?

‘No, I believe that the Copper Scroll is what it appears to be - a verbatim protocol of the priests’ evidence. It is a priestly document from Jerusalem, I am sure of it. A listing of the secret hiding places of the Temple treasure. That’s all it is - a list - there is no colourful prose, not even any verbs. It is dry as a bone! Problem is,’ he continued, ‘that the descriptions of the hiding places are meaningless. Take these clues for instance.’

He looked up a passage in the book he had reached down from his shelves and started to read. ‘One of the hoards consisting of 65 bars of gold was hidden in “the cavity of the Old House of Tribute in the Platform of the Chain.”’

He looked at me with a quizzical expression on his face.

‘And how about this? This pile of goodies is listed as being “in the gutter which is in the bottom of the water tank”. Or this treasure trove carefully concealed “in the Second Enclosure, in the underground passage that looks east”. Or this priceless collection “in the water conduit of the northern reservoir”. I ask you! Jerusalem postmen are noted for their skill at tracking down addresses written in all the languages and scripts of the world,’ he said, chuckling, ‘but with addresses like this, even they would have to give up! For our generation they are quite meaningless. As for the specific treasure of the sanctuary, I fear the information is no less vague.’

‘Do you think that these phrases could be codes?’

‘It has occurred to me. But, on balance, my sense of the document is that it is prosaically what it seems to be. A list of addresses which sadly are no longer meaningful.’

Again, he read from the book. ‘“In the desolation of the Valley of Achur, in the opening under the ascent, which is a mountain facing eastward, covered by forty placed boulders, here is a tabernacle and all the golden fixtures.” This may well refer to the Ark,’ he added, rubbing his chin with unnecessary vigour.

I had a sudden flashback to the night I spent walking over to the cave of Dumghe with my police bodyguard Tagaruze: Dumghe was a mountain facing eastward and it was indeed covered with great round boulders. I had been told that the ngoma lungundu was hidden beneath it. Was it possible that there was a connection?

‘The valley of Achur?’ I interrupted. ‘Does that resonate with you at all? Does Achur mean anything? Do you have any idea where it is?’

‘No, unfortunately not,’ he replied. ‘The anonymous author of the Copper Scroll as you may realize gave no map references. It has been posited that it refers to an area around Mount Nebo in Jordan. This is what the apocryphal book of Maccabees says. He took a book down from the shelves and read aloud.

‘The prophet [ Jeremiah], being warned of God, commanded the tabernacle and the Ark to go with him, as he went forth into the mountain, where Moses climbed up [Mount Nebo], and saw the heritage of God.

And when Jeremy came thither, he found a hollow cave, wherein he laid the tabernacle, and the Ark, and the altar of incense, and so stopped the door. And some of those that followed him came to mark the way, but they could not find it. Which when Jeremy perceived, he blamed them, saying, as for that place, it shall be unknown until the time that God gather His people again together, and receive them unto mercy.’

‘Another thing,’ he said, ‘is that there are a number of indications that there may have been two or more Arks. The first Ark was built to house the two tablets of the law which had been engraved by “the finger of God.” When the people of Israel started worshipping the golden calf rather than the One God Moses broke the tablets and was commanded to create a new set himself with the identical text. Jewish tradition suggests that there was one Ark intended to house the broken tablets of the Law and another for the tablets carved by Moses.’

Rabin smiled at me in a boyish way, and for a second I could see the Berlin schoolboy of decades before.

‘The sages of blessed memory drew a moral from the idea that even the old broken tablets had a place of honour in the Ark - the moral was that even an old scholar like me who has forgotten most of his learning still deserves respect. And he still deserves his rest.’

The old man, who suddenly looked very frail, ushered me to the door and explained that it was time for his afternoon sleep. He faltered as we reached the entrance to his study and his face seemed to go blank. Gathering himself he murmured gently, ‘My mother made me learn a long poem in English when I was a little boy. Let’s see if I can remember some of it:

‘Maybe ’tis true that in a far-off land

The Ark of God in exile dwelleth still,

It resteth ever with the pure of hand,

Who do his will.’

He recited it in the fluting voice of a prepubescent boy. Smiling, he let me out.

Again the Jerusalem sirens were letting the world know that all was not well in the City of Peace. Wondering if the ‘pure of hand’ were still guarding the Ark in some remote corner of the world I walked back to the Old City with a good deal on my mind.

A couple of days later I arranged to meet Reuven at Finks’ Bar, on the corner of King George and Histadrut Street in western Jerusalem. There were troops everywhere and the city was tense.

True to his word, Rabin had sent me a bibliography with several dozen entries through the mail. He also sent me a brief and courteous letter apologizing for breaking off before we had really finished our conversation. He wanted to define his thoughts more clearly.

When I was a boy in Germany, [he wrote] all those years ago, during the Weimar Republic, who would have imagined that the Dead Sea Scrolls would be discovered? The scrolls, written on parchment, are much more fragile, after all, than gold or silver objects or even the Ark made of shittim wood. And if they were rediscovered in the caves of Qumran after two thousand years, why not the Ark and the Temple treasure!

Reuven read the letter, nodding in agreement. I told him that Rabin had said that the Copper Scroll seemed to offer the best way forward if it was ever possible to decode the clues. As I ordered a whisky for both of us he skimmed through the bibliography and brought me up to date on recent searches for the Ark. He had been making enquiries for the previous few weeks.

As Rabin had suggested, a lot of people were after it.

There was a young American eccentric who hung around the Petra Hotel just inside the Jaffa Gate. He drank a lot of vodka and had more girlfriends than he could handle, but he had a degree in Semitic languages from Stanford and a good mind. He had made friends with an Arab family who owned a house not far from the Temple Mount and had allegedly been burrowing enthusiastically in their courtyard. Reuven said there were others like him and distractedly gave me an account of recent claims.

He spoke at length about three Americans who had been hot on the trail of the Ark. There was the Ron Wyatt from Tennessee that Rabin had mentioned who had actually claimed to have found the Ark in a cave near Jerusalem. He told me of a research physicist in the Radio Physics Laboratory of SRI International in Menlo Park, California - who had flown over the Temple Mount to X-ray its foundations with caesium-beam magnetometers but had failed to locate the Ark. And there was a To m Crotser, who had announced in 1981 that he had unearthed the Ark near Mount Nebo in Jordan. Photographs had been taken but only one had been released to the public and that appeared to show a recentlooking brass chest with a decidedly modern-looking nail sticking out of it.

Finks’ was full of writers, poets, and some quite well-known politicians. As usual it was dimly lit. All of the seven tables were taken - people were eating goulash soup or tafelspitz with khren - horseradish and beetroot sauce - Austro-Hungarian house specialities pandering to the diaspora traditions and nostalgia for elsewhere which permeates every aspect of Israeli life.

A dark-suited politician came over to our table and in a low voice told us that there had been some alarming discussions of opening up an entrance under the Temple Mount. The Shin Bet - Israel’s internal security service - was studying likely Muslim reactions. The politician explained: ‘There were some unauthorized excavations done by Ateret Cohanim a year or so back looking for the Ark which caused a good deal of resentment on the part of the Muslim population. In October 1991, a group called the Temple Mount Faithful marched on the compound carrying provocative banners. It was rumoured that they were planning to lay the foundation stones for a new Temple. As you know, 22 Palestinians were killed in the ensuing riots. If any major excavation was done down there now, blood would be spilt throughout the Muslim world from Casablanca to Karachi! And Jews would not be spared.’

A few minutes later, my oldest Jerusalem friend, Shula Eisner, who worked with the Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, sashayed into the bar with the mayor and a group of overdressed American guests of the city. Shula came over for a moment. I had told her about Reuven and his interest in the Ark, and I took this opportunity to introduce them. As she was leaving, I asked her if the Municipality had been involved in closing down the Temple Mount excavations. And whether they were involved in discussions to open them up again.

‘Guys,’ she said, laying on her Bronx accent, ‘don’t even ask the question! Jerusalem is quiet at the moment. Let’s keep it that way. Anything to do with Temple Mount is a tinderbox! As for the Ark of the Covenant - just leave the poor old thing in peace!’ and she floated off to join Kollek and his guests.

The bar emptied, and around midnight we made our way out onto King George Street. Just before we made our separate ways, Reuven asked, ‘Do you have any spare time?’

‘I suppose I could have,’ I replied grudgingly.

Reuven’s driver was waiting for him on King George Street just a few yards from Finks’. When we got to the car, Reuven opened the door and pushed me in. I got out at Jaffa gate. Reuven wished me goodnight in a preoccupied sort of way and promised he would soon be in touch.

The streets were still full of soldiers. There seemed to be some kind of security alert and I did not feel at ease walking through the dark alleys of the Old City, even though there were checkpoints at just about every corner. I was glad when I got home.

A fresh desert breeze wafted in from the Judean hills as I stood on my roof terrace looking over towards the Dome of the Rock. I could not look at the Temple Mount without thinking of the Ark. I decided to do some reading myself.

For the next couple of weeks I buried myself in the Judaica Reading Room at the Hebrew University and National Library in Jerusalem. The shelves were full of dusty, disintegrating tomes, many of which had been gathered after the Second World War from destroyed Jewish libraries and seminaries throughout Europe. The old library and synagogue stamps from Pressburg, Lodz, and Odessa spoke of hundreds of years of destroyed intellectual endeavour. Many of the Library readers were black-coated orthodox Jews poring over rare rabbinic treatises. Pale-skinned young men with close-cropped hair and thick glasses, they swayed backwards and forwards as they read.

After my weeks in the Library, I passed several days seeing no one and barely leaving the house. This new interest of mine was becoming an obsession and I spent hours poring over my notes trying to make some sense of the Ark. The telephone rang, I did not answer.

As they had not seen me for a while my Arab friends from the suq assumed I was ill and brought me hubiz - flat Arab bread - glistening black olives and hard-boiled eggs. I drank their qahehweh, thick muddy Arab coffee, and pondered the mystery of the Ark.

Over the previous years I had visited Jewish communities throughout the world. I recalled an evening I had spent with the Chief Rabbi of Djerba, an island off the coast of Tunisia. It was around the time of Passover. The rabbi invited me to dinner in a small whitewashed house in the heart of the ancient Jewish quarter called Hara Seghirah. Over dinner the conversation turned to the destruction of the Temple.

He described in graphic detail the sack of Jerusalem, the ruination of the Holy of Holies, the tramp of jackboots over the marble paving stones of the dwelling of the Most High. And as he described this national disaster, he wept. The tears flowed down his haggard cheeks and on to his straggly white beard.

Rabin, I thought, was right about one thing. If the Ark had been destroyed either by the Babylonians or by the Romans, Jews would indeed still be lamenting it.

And the idea that Jews would have done anything and everything to save precious pieces of their heritage was also confirmed by what I learned in Djerba. The venerable rabbi told me that a group of priests had fled to the North African coast after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, founding the Djerba community and bringing with them a door and a stone rescued from the Holy of Holies. The stone can be seen to this day. There was no tradition of the Ark going to Djerba, but priests had taken what they could salvage of their spiritual heritage.

‘Follow the priests,’ Rabin had said.

It was February 1993 and Jerusalem was beginning to enjoy an early spring. I sat one morning in my small courtyard, under the lemon tree, surrounded by pots of cyclamen and smallleafed basil and tried to summarize in my mind what was historically known about the Ark up until its disappearance from King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem.

Once the Israelites under Moses’ command had escaped slavery under Pharaoh and crossed the Red Sea, they made their way into the Sinai Desert. On the first new moon after their escape they camped in front of Mount Sinai. God commanded Moses to climb the mountain to receive the Law.

Having received the Law in the form of the Te n Commandments engraved upon stone tablets ‘by the finger of God’, he descended the mountain to discover that the Israelites were worshipping a statue of a golden calf. In fury, Moses smashed the tablets, and was commanded by God to create a new identical set himself.

The Te n Commandments formed an essential part of the ongoing agreement or covenant between God and the Israelites. Moses was given instructions by God to build the Ark of this covenant, in which the stone tablets incorporating the covenant would be placed.

There are two quite different biblical descriptions of the construction of the Ark.

The first description has the Ark constructed by Bezalel, the artist, upon the orders of Moses. The box was covered all over with the purest gold. Its lid (the kapporet) known in English as the ‘mercy seat’, was surrounded with a rim of gold. On its lid were golden cherubim whose outstretched wings formed an arch above the lid. There were two gold rings on each side through which carrying poles could be inserted.

The second version of the construction of the Ark is simpler. According to the book of Deuteronomy, it was Moses himself who made the Ark, and the Ark was a totally different kind of object. It was just a regular wooden box. There is no mention of nails, or of joints, or of glue. So perhaps it was simply a kind of recipient hollowed out of the trunk of a tree with a knife or chisel.

The Ark, in both forms, was made of acacia wood - shittim wood in Hebrew. In many arid zones in Africa, the acacia is the archetypal tree. In the Sinai desert - the land bridge between Africa and Asia - the acacia species rules supreme. It would have been just about the only building material available in the wilderness.

The wood of the acacia is exceptionally hard, very heavy, very dense, and will last for a long time. In desert conditions, it would not perish. In Egypt there are acacia panels which have survived for well over 3000 years.

Under the right conditions the Ark could virtually last forever.

The Ark was 2.5 cubits long, 1.5 cubits wide and 1.5 cubits high which translates as about two foot wide, two foot tall and just under three foot long.

It was about the size of a large suitcase.

It was easily transportable, easy to hide.

But what was it for? The Ark’s first purpose was to serve as a receptacle for the stone tablets. The second was to serve as the throne of God, who was visualized as sitting just above the outstretched wings of the cherubim. The lower part of the Ark was seen as the footstool of God.

In whichever form the Ark was made it was placed in a tent shrine called the Tabernacle. Soon after, Aaron, Moses’ brother, brought sacrifices for the Lord. He prepared his sacrifices according to the letter of the law, but the sacrifices were consumed by a fire, but not by a fire that had been prepared by him.

The fire just happened.

And later his sons Avihu and Nadav made improper offerings not done according to the letter of the law. They brought the wrong sort of fire before the Ark, and its fire killed them.

The fire went out of the Ark.

The Ark had something of the quality of a flame thrower. It could and did kill.

‘Two fiery jets issued from between the cherubim above the Ark’, goes the account in the Jewish legendary literature called the Midrash ‘burning up snakes, scorpions and thorns in its path and destroying Israel’s enemies’.

The Rabbinic sages called this the fire of God.

Like a secret missile covered with camouflage sheets on its military transporter, the Ark was always covered over with blue cloth and animal skins. Even the priests were not allowed to look at it.

In the Bible there is a prayer of great antiquity which seems like a prayer you’d say over a weapon.

When the Ark travelled, Moses said: ‘Arise! Scatter your enemies, and let those who hate you flee from in front of you.’ And when the Ark rested, he would say ‘Return…’

In every Hebrew Torah scroll these two menacing verses are enclosed by two letters - the letter nun - the Hebrew N - written upside down on either side. What does it mean? The Rabbis explained that this unique code signified that the verses were not in their proper place.

They said that the verses celebrating the military nature of the Ark constituted a separate book of the Bible.

The Ark was carried on its poles in front of the advancing army by the priests. During the conquest of Canaan it was the Ark which caused the waters of the River Jordan to open up, allowing the Israelites to cross over safely. It was the Ark, carried as part of a military band behind the seven priestly trumpeters as they famously marched around the walls of Jericho, which caused the impregnable double-walled fortifications of the city to collapse.

As the Israelites streamed into Canaan, the Ark was placed first in Gilgal and then in Shiloh, twelve miles north of Jerusalem. Here it stayed for 300-400 years, occasionally being taken out at times of war. Once it fell into the hands of the enemy and was placed in the temple of the Philistine god Dagon in Ashdod. The Ark soon put paid to Dagon whose statue was discovered in bits on the floor.

The Philistine population was not spared either. The people were afflicted with bleeding haemorrhoids and the land was cursed with an infestation of mice.

The Ark then spent 20 years in Kiryat Yearim a hill village close to Jerusalem until King David decided to take it to his new capital. He built a special cart, put the Ark in it, and started off, accompanied by a great crowd of people singing and rejoicing. Then the cart hit a rut in the road. For a moment it looked as if the Ark would fall to the ground. There was no priest standing by to steady it, so a man named Uzzah reached out his hand.

The Ark blasted him to death.

The rejoicing stopped and the Ark was deposited in the nearby house of one Obed-Edom the Gittite. Three months later King David came back to fetch it. This time he did things better. Before setting off for Jerusalem the king made special sacrifices and then supposedly danced naked before the Ark. He was also carrying an ephod - a mysterious and undecipherable object never satisfactorily explained - which had also been created in the Sinai at the same time as the Ark.

After a period of peace King David observed to the Prophet Nathan that while he David was living in a fine house of cedar, the poor old Ark was still languishing in the tabernacle tent. Should something not be done about it? The Ark was not keen to move and let it be known that it would stay where it was for the time being, thank you very much. It would not be until the time of King Solomon, the future king, that the Ark would move into a proper house - the magnificent new Temple of Jerusalem - which would be built to house it.

***

By now, I believed, as Rabin did, that the Ark once existed. The historical account surrounding it was too complex and nuanced for the whole thing to have simply been made up. What it actually was was another thing altogether. The more I pondered its function, the less I understood it. In the wilderness of Sinai, Moses was attempting to transform his ex-slaves into a viable military force. Would these men have been emboldened as they advanced upon enemy lines by following a simple box or coffin carried on poles by the priests? Even if the box or coffin was construed as the dwelling place of the invisible God. It apparently had destructive powers too, but how these powers worked, if they can be credited, was anybody’s guess.

Whatever its true function or meaning, it once existed. That being the case, it could theoretically be hidden somewhere. There were numerous clues in the ancient texts. Some of them suggested that the Ark was in Jerusalem, others that it had been taken far away from Jerusalem. Whoever hid it would certainly have been a priest. But how would it be possible for anyone to follow the passage of priests two and a half thousand years later?

The next morning I woke up to find strong sunlight pouring into my bedroom, revealing untidy piles of books and papers, unwashed clothes, empty bottles of wine and whisky and copper trays covered with the debris of meals brought up from the suq. I had overslept.

On the other side of the small courtyard there was a metal door leading out on to the street. There was an electric bell mounted to one side of it. As I gazed blearily at the mess the bell sounded, jolting me out of my morning reverie. I went out with a towel wrapped round my middle and saw my friend Shula. She had been giving some American guests of Teddy Kollek a tour of the Old City and had come to see me.

‘What’s all this business of the Ark of the Covenant?’ she chided me. ‘I thought you were the sanest person in Jerusalem. Why don’t you leave crazy stuff to the crazies? Teddy’s not happy about it. We’ve got plenty of crazies in Jerusalem and we don’t need any more. Get on with your translations of Hebrew poetry. Write your book on the Jews and Islam. Go back to London to see your girlfriend. But do me a personal favour. A personal favour. Leave the Ark alone!’ She gave me a great hug and said that she would have to go back to join her group.

She was heading to the kotel - the Western Wall. I washed and dressed quickly and went with her some of the way through the Jewish Quarter and then we parted. I continued down through Dung Gate and struck out across the open land towards the seven golden onion-shaped cupolas of the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene at Gethsemane, on the lower reaches of the Mount of Olives.

I knocked on the heavy wooden gate and waited in the shadow of the great wall, which protected the convent. After a while, the bolts were drawn and Luba, a short, stern-faced Palestinian convent servant I had known for many years let me in.

We walked through the fragrant shade of the garden, heavy with the intoxicating scent of sun-warmed pine trees to a little building among the copse that the nuns used to receive people from the outside world.

As Luba offered me some mint tea, she welcomed me: ‘Marhabah! Ahlan! Ahlan wasahlan hawajah. Welcome back sir! What can we do for you? Who would you like to see, hawajah?’ she asked, using the honorific hawajah in a charming, teasing way.

I explained that I had ordered an icon from the nuns who made them and it should be ready for collection. She went off to fetch it.

There was a pile of papers and church magazines in Russian and English on the table next to where I was sitting. I picked up an old copy of the Jerusalem Post. There I found a short article on Ron Wyatt.

According to the Post, he first came to Israel in 1978. His plan, which struck me as being utterly absurd, was to go scuba diving in the Red Sea to look for Egyptian chariot parts, as a way of proving that Pharaoh’s army really had been swallowed up and that the Biblical account of the exodus from Egypt was true.

He soon claimed to have discovered the original site of the Red Sea Crossing, the original sites of the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the genuine original site of the crucifixion of Christ which has never been satisfactorily located.

He first claimed to have discovered the Ark of the Covenant in about 1982 during secret excavations just outside the walls of the Old City. According to him, the Ark was hidden here before the arrival of the Babylonians in an underground chamber above which he located the original site of the crucifixion. No less.

He had a sizeable following in the United States, which included a number of powerful if gullible tele-evangelists, and indeed there was a research institute in Tennessee dedicated to his findings.

As I finished the article, a handsome, longhaired Russian orthodox priest from New York, a friend of Shula’s, whom I had met once or twice, wandered into the vestibule. We chatted for a while about people we knew in common in Jerusalem. As he was turning to go, I asked him, ‘Have you seen this article about Ron Wyatt?’

‘You mean the guy who discovered the lost Ark?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Yes,’ he laughed. ‘I’ve heard a lot about him. He found what he said was an “earthquake crack” just below the site of what he claimed was the crucifixion, which extended down to the hiding place of the Ark. According to him, the actual blood of Jesus flowed down through this crack onto the Mercy Seat - the lid of the Ark. What Wyatt took this to mean was that the traditions of Old Testament animal sacrifice reached their most sublime point with the sacrifice of Jesus, whom he sees as the new High Priest. When the blood of Jesus dripped onto the Mercy Seat, the great and final act in the cult of sacrifice was consummated. It’s a pretty gripping thought.’

‘Wonderful, but why didn’t he reveal any evidence?’

‘He claimed that the Israeli Antiquities department had made secrecy a condition of his permit. So the access tunnel to the chamber was sealed with reinforced concrete. He refuses to say where it is situated and the Ark will remain where it is. The Israelis, he claims, want to keep it that way. Wyatt believes that more than a dozen people have died because they have since tried to locate the Ark! He has held back the documents, video and photographs he alleges to have in his possession but one day, he says, he will show them. He says traces of Christ’s blood are clearly visible. Shula told me that the CIA guy in Jerusalem, who is famously dim, says the Israelis don’t want the connection between the Ark and the crucifixion revealed as it would lead to the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity.’

‘Oh dear. What I don’t understand is how, without a shred of evidence, a story like this can possibly have the status of anything more than an old wives’ tale?’

‘Quite. But it sure keeps chins wagging in Jerusalem. Oh, I forgot the best bit. Wyatt claims to have had a DNA analysis done of Christ’s blood, which proves he was born of a virgin! If He had no father I guess that means He had no Y-chromosome!’

The priest grinned irreverently, waved at me, and left, just as my old friend, Luba, returned with the icon. I gave her the amount that had been agreed, plus a few shekels for the work of the church.

‘People have been talking about you, Ha w a j a ,’ she scolded. ‘Hara m . Poor fellow! They say you are working with the Jews. Is this true? Do the Jews not have friends enough already? I’ve heard them say you are looking for the Ark of the Covenant. Is this really so? How is the Ark going to help the Palestinians? Will it save us from the Jews? Or will the Jews use it against us? It was a dangerous thing I read about it in the Bible - and people are scared of it. Both here and in my village I see many more people than you think. Some of them are violent men. Take my advice. Be careful!’

She took both my hands in hers and squeezed hard.

Before I walked back to the Old City I sat under the ancient cedars and gazed down at the Temple Mount, listening to the distant noises of the city and the nearby rustlings and crepitations of this most sacred garden of Gethsemane. Clearly Wyatt was one of the enthusiasts Rabin had warned me about. Jerusalem was full of cranks looking for the Ark in soil which had been raked over for thousands of years by Assyrians, Romans, Crusaders and assorted modern investigators of varying degrees of seriousness. I was beginning to feel that Jerusalem was the least likely of places in which the Ark would turn up. I felt anyway that I could put Wyatt and co. out of my mind. Luba’s warning was more worrying.

A few weeks later I was walking in the Old City of Jerusalem carrying a supply of the world’s best humus from Abu Shukri’s famous establishment near the Via Dolorosa. To my surprise I saw Reuven rushing down the street towards me, his coat flapping wildly about him. Every vestige of his vaguely orthodox look had disappeared. He was dressed in a conventional navy blazer and a Hermes tie. This was not his orthodox uniform. His luxuriant beard had been transformed into a small, stiff affair, and he had shaved his moustache.

He looked scared. His suntanned face was red with exertion and he was breathing with difficulty.

‘Quick,’ he said, looking over his shoulder. ‘Let’s have a coffee, I have something urgent to tell you.’

I led him to a small Arab café I sometimes used in the Muslim Quarter. It was lost in a maze of little alleys and had a first-floor room reached by a metal spiral staircase, which was hardly ever used except by young courting couples.

If Reuven was in sudden need of a secure bolthole, this was the place.

I ordered two cardamom-flavoured coffees and jerked my thumb in an upward movement towards the upper room.

Reuven went ahead, breathing with some difficulty and I followed. There was no one else there. It was a good place to talk. We sat on low, perfumed sofas upholstered in elaborate woven Damascus cloth. The coffee, served in small glass cups, arrived almost immediately.

‘Shukran,’ I thanked the waiter, and asked him not to allow anyone up there while we were there. ‘What on earth is the matter?’ I asked Reuven. ‘You look awful.’

‘So do you,’ he said. ‘Have you stopped eating or what?’

I explained that I had spent some time in solitary, scholarly confinement.

He smiled thinly and said, ‘You have been industrious, but I’ve been a fool.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You remember Anis, that dealer who sold me the Yemenite document about Muhammad?’

‘Yes, I remember very well.’

‘When you told me it was a forgery I stopped the cheque. I gave him back the manuscript, of course, but he was not pleased. The problem is that I had already told him all about my mission. I was absolutely convinced that the document was genuine and really would change the religious and political situation in the Middle East. Of course I told him to keep quiet about it. At the time, Anis was quite sympathetic, or at least he seemed to be. As you know, he is a Muslim, but a rather unobservant one. We often used to have a whisky together in the American Colony Hotel bar. Since we had this financial disagreement he has turned against me, and I believe he has spread the word that I am trying to subvert Islam. With everything that’s going on in Israel at the moment, I need that like a hole in the head.’

He looked away for a moment.

‘He’s also apparently told some fundamentalist Muslim friends of his that I am looking for the Ark and that I am connected with Ateret Cohanim. The problem is that he has let people believe that I somehow want to use the power of the Ark against the Palestinians and Muslims in general. I told him how the Bible describes the Ark and the awesome power it was supposed to have. Some of these people are very superstitious and believe Jews have superhuman powers anyway. The message has got round that I am plotting against Islam.’

He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Word has it in the street that Hamas has been showing an interest in me. Yo u know the Hamas flag features the Dome of the Rock? They’ve been saying I want to dig up the foundations of the mosque to find the Ark!’ He giggled helplessly. ‘You see, it could hardly be worse!’

Hamas is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement (Harakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya). It had been founded some years before by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin at the beginning of the First Intifada - the Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule which lasted from 1987 to 1993. The charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and its replacement with a Palestinian Islamic state in the whole of historical Palestine. Hamas was not very keen on Jews in general and Reuven had every reason to be afraid.

Reuven told me that he and Clara had moved to a rented flat in Te l Aviv for security reasons, and today he had just come back to his Jerusalem place to get some books. Clara had telephoned and pleaded with him to go straight back. However, inveterate collector that he was, he had taken the opportunity to nose round some antique dealers in the Christian Quarter. When he left one store, with a couple of manuscripts and books under his arm, a couple of Arab-looking men had snatched the books from him and pushed him around a bit.

‘It was the books they were after. They wanted to see what I am up to. I think I was very lucky.’

‘I doubt they’re Hamas,’ I said. ‘If they had been, and if Hamas has anything on you, you wouldn’t be sitting here enjoying a cup of excellent coffee! But strangely enough I just heard from a Palestinian friend that rumours are going round about me too. I guess people saw you coming to my place in the Old City. Or did you mention my name to Anis?’

Reuven shook his head distractedly and got heavily to his feet. We walked to the Jaffa Gate where Reuven’s driver was waiting to drive him back to Te l Aviv. At the last minute, he suggested I go with him.

I love Jerusalem like no other place on earth. But sometimes it makes you feel claustrophobic. Te l Aviv is the best antidote to too much Jerusalem. Having nothing better to do and feeling like a break I climbed into his comfortable dark blue Mercedes 500SE.

His encounter in the Christian Quarter seemed to have taken a lot out of Reuven. The headache he frequently had as a result of his slight wound in the Yo m Kippur War was troubling him. He rubbed the side of his head, took a handful of pills, and in a few minutes was fast asleep. I sank into the luxurious leather seats and enjoyed the ride down through the forests of Judea.

I reflected that the Ark had passed this way more than once thousands of years ago during earlier Jewish conflicts with local populations. As I was wondering what its impact on the current conflict was likely to be I dozed off as well and only woke up when the engine was switched off in front of the elegant apartment block where Reuven lived near Dizengoff Street. Clara was out for the evening, it was the maid’s evening off and we had their place to ourselves.

Reuven showered and changed into a pair of jeans and a white T shirt.

‘What happened to your orthodox clothes?’ I asked.

‘With the security situation everywhere in the world being as it is, I do not feel like sticking out like a sore thumb. With a shnoz like mine,’ he said, tapping his nose, ‘anyone can tell I’m a Jew, but I do not need to advertise it any more than God intended. Clara has persuaded me to dress in a more discreet manner, at least for the time being.’

‘And your quest, Reuven?’ I asked softly.

‘This is what I wanted to talk about. I want you to help. I’ve been reading all I can and a number of people have been assisting me. Some progress is being made. However I can now see that the whole thing might be a little more complicated than I first imagined. I am losing my sense of what the Ark really was. I don’t really know what it is I am looking for.

‘On the one hand it appears to be some kind of a weapon. On the other it often formed part of a kind of procession along with tambourines and trumpets. And in addition it was both the footstool and throne of the Almighty. All very good, but what was it? There’s a big question mark over what it actually was.’

My friend looked worried and driven. It was obvious that the whole issue of the Ark was beginning to frustrate him. The more he studied it, the less he understood what it was all about. It would therefore be very difficult to find it. But with massive investment of money, he kept saying, and with a proper businessman’s organization it should be possible. He rambled on, talking of special investments to finance the long-term search for the Ark and then plunging back into its intricate and ambiguous history.

He rubbed his head in his characteristic gesture and I supposed that his ‘Yom Kippur headache’ had returned.

With a strange look on his face he left the room, moving like a sleepwalker, leaving me alone for about half an hour. In the distance I could hear him on the phone to someone, speaking volubly in Hebrew.

When he came back he was carrying a tray full of bread, olives, salted and pickled herring, dill pickles, soft goat’s cheese - jibneh in Arabic - the humus I had bought from Abu Shukri’s which I had put in the fridge, and a bottle of white Golan wine. He opened it, served us both, muttering under his breath that he should not be drinking wine with a bloody, uncircumcised goy, and downed his glass. He ate silently for a few moments and seemed to regain his composure.

It was a warm, unbearably humid Te l Aviv night and I was dressed for Jerusalem, not for Te l Aviv. I had taken a shower but I felt sticky and could feel the sweat trickle down my back.

‘Come outside, there’s a bit of a breeze,’ Reuven said, leading me onto a covered terrace from where I could see the lights of the esplanade and beyond that the inky darkness of the sea.

‘I have been speaking to Rabbi Getz at Ateret Cohanim,’ he continued. ‘He doesn’t actually claim to have seen the Ark or to have found its hiding place, but he believes in his heart it might be down there under the Temple Mount in some secret place although he knows as well as we do that the area has been excavated constantly at least since Roman times. I am beginning to doubt it’s there at all. If it had been, why did the knights Templar, who had full access, and unlimited manpower and who spent years looking, not find it?

‘For the moment, anyway, the Government has forbidden any more digging. The last time Getz and his friends burrowed into the foundations, Muslims up on top heard the noise coming up through a cistern and rushed down to see what was happening. Yo u know about the unrest that followed. The entrance has now been sealed up by ten yards of reinforced concrete. I’ve decided I do not want to be involved in any digging around in Jerusalem. Especially after what I heard about Hamas.’

‘That I understand,’ I said, nodding in agreement. ‘In any case, people looking for the Ark in Jerusalem are tripping over each other. In addition, there’s not the slightest proof at all that it is there.’

‘Quite so,’ said Reuven gloomily. ‘Getz said that they had weeks down there before they were discovered. They found traces of many earlier excavations but little else. I think that I am at a dead end.

‘A couple of days ago I was reading the Talmud and came across the passage in Masekhet Shekalim about the Temple priest who noticed that a flagstone on the floor of the Temple wood store was shaped differently from the others. The assumption was that this marked the hiding place of the Ark. He went to tell a colleague about it and was struck dead on the spot. That passage spoke to my heart!’ He laughed. ‘I’m not really afraid of being struck dead, but I’m just beginning to wonder if we should not be looking elsewhere. We were talking the other day about the possibility that the Ark had been taken to Egypt. Maybe that’s where we should be looking? Maybe that’s where you should be looking?’

He looked at me questioningly. I had been dreaming of getting more actively involved in the search for some time. His obsession was becoming my obsession. Now that we had both more or less concluded that the Ark was not in Jerusalem, I was keen to look elsewhere. The thought of setting out on a mission to Egypt was very tempting. But as I stared out at the distant seashore I wondered if I really should embark on what some people would see as a wild goose chase. Did I - a British gentile - really want to go sleuthing round the Eastern Desert in Egypt in search of a Jewish Holy Grail?

‘I’m not sure, Reuven,’ I said. ‘Go to Egypt in search of the Ark? I’ll have to decide first what I want to be, a scholar or an adventurer.’

‘You could, of course, be both,’ he said. ‘Anyway, from what you said and from what I have been hearing, there are many traditions which seem to lead to Egypt. But as you’re thinking it over, perhaps you could bear these in mind.’

He went back into the apartment and returned with a small velvet-covered box, which he placed, gently on the table.

‘Open it,’ he said

There were three very plump diamonds inside.

‘These are for the first stages of the work if you need them,’ he said. ‘Our war chest! And this is just for starters.’

I slid the little box back across the table. I did not want Reuven’s money. Over the following years it was good to know it was there for emergencies but I stubbornly refused to take anything for myself.

‘I am afraid you are not a practical man,’ he replied sighing. ‘And I wonder if you will ever really get anywhere without changing your attitude towards money. Anyway if this does not tempt you, maybe this will.’

He took out a piece of paper, which had been tucked under one of the old leather-bound Hebrew books on the table and passed it to me with a very formal, slightly ironic gesture.

It was just a few lines, written in Hebrew, from a poem by the twelfth-century Spanish Jewish poet Yehuda ha-Levi:

And I shall walk in the paths of the Ark of the Covenant,

Until I taste the dust of its hiding place,

Which is sweeter than honey.

Reuven knew how to touch my Celtic heart. There was an inspiring beauty in these few lines. And what, indeed, could be sweeter than finding something which for millennia had never ceased to excite the imagination of men?

The City Of The Dead

‘Wallah, this is the hiding place effendi! This is where the Ark was put.’

I had no idea what on earth my somewhat dippy and excitable friend Daud Labib was talking about. For the preceding few minutes I had been reflecting on the fact that over the previous year my interest in the Ark had started to take over my life. Indeed it was principally because of the Ark that I now found myself in the spring of 1994 in Cairo, Egypt, having finally succumbed to Reuven’s entreaties to try to find out more about the world’s most sought after artefact. Whatever reservations had constrained me before had been put aside.

There were two main reasons for coming to Egypt. In the first place I wanted to investigate ancient traditions which maintained that the Ark had been brought here long before the destruction of the First Temple. Secondly, I had wanted to try to understand the background of the exodus of the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. Over the previous week I had stood in the shade of the pyramids the Hebrews had helped construct, walked in the fields where they would have collected straw and mud to make their bricks. Whatever the Ark was, and I was still deeply unclear about this, it had started life, at least conceptually, here in the land of the Pharaohs. I had wanted to feel and see and smell the reasons that led to the creation of the Ark.

So far enlightenment had evaded me.

The following day I was going back to England for a stint of library work but when I returned to Egypt I planned to examine various Ark-like artefacts from Ancient Egypt in Cairo’s museums.

My undersized friend was walking in front of me. Gazing down at him I started wondering inconsequentially how it was that his particularly small head could possibly have produced such a disproportionate mass of dandruff: it had settled on the shoulders of his black, synthetic shirt like an ermine stole.

This morning Daud had dragged me out of the archive where I spent most of my time to take me on a tour of his favourite places in Cairo. He was a Copt - a member of the Egyptian Coptic Christian minority - who lived in a suburb of Cairo but who was originally from the southern Egyptian town of Qift which had played an important role in the history of the Copts.

The word ‘Copt’, deriving from the Greek word for Egypt (Egyptos), simply means ‘Egyptian’, a point that Copts are not slow to bring to your attention. Their liturgical language, Coptic, is the descendant of the ancient Egyptian language. But no-one speaks Coptic any more - Arabic is the spoken language of the Coptic minority as it is for the rest of the predominantly Muslim populations. The Copts see themselves as the true heirs of the great civilization of ancient Egypt.

Daud was pointing proudly at a nondescript building set back from the dusty road down which we were walking. His dark eyes radiated enthusiasm. ‘The Ark was put here’ he repeated, making a stabbing gesture with his right hand.

Daud was unlike anyone I had ever met in Egypt. A brilliant and scholarly man who was working on a doctorate on ancient Coptic manuscripts, he carried his irritating eccentricity and individuality before him like silken banners.

‘This is where the Ark was put!’ Daud bellowed, pointing to a plaque on the wall which proclaimed that this was the Ben Ezra synagogue.

I knew of nothing which connected the Ark with the Ben Ezra synagogue. This synagogue is world-famous because of the discovery in one of its storerooms of the world’s most important collections of medieval documents. I was planning to see what this archive - the Cairo Genizah - had to say about the Ark, if anything. But that would not be here or now, as the documents had been removed to western university libraries in the nineteenth century. But there was absolutely nothing as far as I knew to suggest that the Ark had ever been hidden here.

‘What are you going on about, you excitable little Copt? How do you mean the Ark? Nobody’s ever said the Ark had anything to do with this place.’

In fact I was more than a little mystified. I’d certainly not mentioned my interest in the Ark to Daud. We were close friends and in the past had shared confidences but once, in an unguarded and inebriated moment, he had boasted about carrying out jobs for the Egyptian Mubahath al-Dawla (the General Directorate of State Security Investigations), and since then I had been a little careful about what I told him. In Egypt, the Ark with all its political and religious ramifications, was not a subject to bandy around with the likes of Daud. How could he possibly know about my involvement? I felt an unpleasant clamminess at the base of my spine. I looked at him questioningly.

‘You know, ya achi, Musa’s basket when he was hidden in the reeds: “the Ark of bulrushes”.’

He began to recite by heart in a monotonous chant, which he accompanied with a rhythmic movement of his hand as if he were swinging a censer:

‘And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying, every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive. And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. And when she could no longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the reeds by the river’s brink.’

In the Hebrew of the original Biblical account, the word used for the humble basket in which the baby Moses was hidden by his mother was teva. But the English translation was ‘ark’. I breathed a sigh of relief. Daud knew nothing about my true reason for being in Egypt. Of course I knew about the ancient tradition that Moses of the house of Levi was hidden on this very site among the rushes in a floating basket, a miniature coracle. The rushes were the feathery papyrus reeds that still line the banks of the Nile and that have been used for making paper for around 5000 years.

His recitation over, my friend made the sign of the cross, bowing and mumbling to himself. Turning his bony, mottled face towards me, he smiled and fingered the large gold cross he wore over his shirt. Daud had crossed himself in a stagey, ironical way, like some corrupt Italian prelate. And like some corrupt Italian prelate I knew it did not mean much. He had begun to lose his faith while he was studying at an American theological college. He had lost it completely by the time he had finished another undergraduate degree and an MA in an English university. He was fond of quoting Gabriel Garcia Marquez: ‘Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses.’ Daud was no longer religious but he was proud of his remarkable knowledge of the Bible, great swathes of which he knew by heart and could quote in Coptic, Arabic, or English. And for reasons I did not at first understand, he always wore sacerdotal black shirts with a large gold cross swinging from a metal chain around his neck.

Notwithstanding his overall eccentricity, in one respect he conformed to Egyptian norms: he was opposed to all the doings of the Israeli state (he refused to use the term ‘Israel’ and persisted in calling it ‘the Zionist Entity’) and extended this animosity to the Jews of recent times with the exception of Einstein and the Marx brothers. He had reservations about me, too, as I was a frequent visitor to Israel, but had substantially overcome them as I had done some work on an illustrious ancestor of his called Labib who had played the leading role in the (failed) revival of Coptic as a spoken language. It was my interest in the Coptic language revival that had led me to contact his family, and thus meet up with him.

Daud was anxious to show me this ancient but much restored Cairo synagogue as part of the tour of the city he had planned for me. This was not, however, out of love for the ancient Jewish heritage in Egypt, but because it was the site of an ancient Coptic church. The church, he told me, had been bought by the Jews for the paltry sum of 20,000 dinars over a thousand years before, in AD 882.

‘Only 20,000 dinars - they had it for nothing, effendi. Yo u can’t imagine the price of land in Cairo,’ he said. Once they had purchased the church, the Jews turned it into a synagogue. ‘Damned cheek, ya achi,’ he said indignantly. ‘They tricked us out of our birthright, same as they are doing with the Palestinians.’

His anger caused his face to break out in small pink blotches. For Daud it was as if the purchase of the church had taken place the day before - yet another reminder of the vividness of historical memory in the Middle East.

‘Come on, you ineffably daft Copt,’ I said. ‘The Jews would not have much use for a bloody church, now would they? Anyway I read somewhere that the Copts couldn’t afford to pay their taxes and were forced to sell the church. Yo u could say the Jews helped them out.’

‘Wallah, another Jewish lie!’ he snorted, shaking his head violently and causing another layer of his shedding derma to explode over his shirt. ‘The Copts were rich in those days. They could afford their taxes. They were the intellectual and commercial elite of Egypt - always were, still are. No, the rubbish Jews cheated us.’

The day was oppressively hot. We were standing in the shade of the synagogue. ‘That was the hiding place,’ he repeated, stabbing his finger at a point to one side of the building. ‘That’s where the bulrushes used to be. That’s where the prophet Musa was hidden and that’s why we built a church there - one of the finest churches in the whole of the Middle East.’

He put his arm round my shoulder and opined piously: ‘Wallah, Musa was a great man! He had horns, it is true, like quite a few Jews, so they say. But he was a very great man. A great prophet.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘He managed to rid Egypt of all its rubbish Jews when they escaped from slavery under the Pharaohs.’

His face became sombre again. ‘Problem is, they came back. And desecrated our damned church.’

Again he fingered his cross, a troubled look on his face.

After a brief look around the synagogue, we walked through medinat al-mawta, the City of the Dead, Cairo’s ancient cemetery, which has given shelter to the living as well as the dead for over a thousand years. Thieves, outlaws, pilgrims, professional reciters of the Quran and guardians of graves have often made their homes here in the tombs and, over the last many decades, their numbers have been swollen by hundreds of thousands of homeless people. The cemetery used to be in the desert, far outside the city, but the city has grown around it and this vast area is now right in the centre of the great noisy metropolis that is Cairo.

The City of the Dead was an island of relative calm. In its alleys there were bands of black goats and dirty, ragged children. Today the whole area was covered by veils of smoke and mist which formed and dissolved around the shapes of the tombs, leaving one to guess what was real and what was imagined. The few spring flowers were dulled with a coating of fine white dust.

Daud obviously knew the cemetery well. Walking at breakneck speed, despite his pronounced limp, he led me on a tour that took in most of the important shrines and mausoleums. He gave me a hurried explanation of the main sites and then pushed on restlessly to the next one. Finally he came to something that really interested him. Just next to a stone-built marvel of high medieval Islamic architecture, crowned with a dome, the tomb of some long-dead poet or saint, a group of men were constructing an ugly concrete breezeblock wall around what appeared to be a small vegetable patch.

After our long walk in the heat of the day, the normally indefatigable Daud now complained of tiredness and wanted to stop for a while to smoke a cigarette. We walked over and sat close to them on slabs of masonry from another age fringed with red and yellow lichen. A cold tainted draught seemed to be coming out of the tomb itself.

From the proprietary way he had walked around the tomb, Daud gave the impression that he knew the place.

From the colour of their skin I guessed that the builders were from the south of Egypt or perhaps from further south still, from the Sudan. They were black, emaciated men with faces devoid of any semblance of hope. They appeared so crushed by the burden of their lives that they did not greet us or even acknowledge us.

A woman walked out of a squat aperture set into the side of the tomb. She greeted Daud with a knowing smile. On her shapely hip she was resting an aluminium tray on which I could make out some small gold-rimmed glasses and a number of home-rolled cigarettes. She placed the tray on the ground and poured out thick black tea, the colour of ink, which is typical of Upper Egypt, from a charred pot sitting on the ashes of a cooking fire, and served the men: each one received a glass of tea and a cigarette. The men squatted on the ground, arms resting on their thin knees, in the lengthening shadow of the wall they were building, and lit up. The fragrant smell of hashish mingled with the smoke of the fire.

‘This is a drug den,’ sneered Daud, showing his blackened teeth. ‘They are building the widow a wall, and she pays them with tea, drugs and I don’t know what else. Egypt is a strange place. Our wonderful law bans the growing of tobacco - nobody knows why - so we have to import millions of tons of it every year; but every delinquent grows hashish in his back garden. This widow, this Maryam, grows it and sells it.’

One of the men picked up a drum and started playing an intricate, pulsating African rhythm. Daud had forgotten his tiredness and started performing a kind of lopsided disco dance. Ricky Gervais has serious competition. It was the strangest dance I had ever seen: he would leap in the air, eyes rolling, cross himself fervently and then bow deeply in the direction of the setting sun. No one paid much attention.

After a while Maryam went back into her tomb and came out wearing a colourful sequined shawl over her long shabby cotton dress. She walked over and stood squarely in front of me. Smiling, she too started to dance, her movements sinuous and sexy. Daud eyed her anxiously.

To the widow’s evident annoyance, the drummer stopped playing, put his drum on the ground beside him, and shot me a truculent look, a glimmer of interest in his eyes. I guessed he was wondering if there was any chance that I would pay him something to continue.

The widow faltered in her dance and tossed her head. The dust rose up around her fine ankles like a small cloud as she descended on the drummer. A victorious look on her face, she lifted the drum above her head and started playing it herself. Dancing and playing. Triumph in her eyes.

I was sitting in the shadow of the tomb watching this pantomime. I had wanted to imagine the days before the appearance of the Ark in the world, to understand what may have led to its construction. Bizarrely what was happening here had given me more enlightenment than all my walks around the pyramids and building sites of ancient Egypt. The scene before my eyes reminded me of something I had almost forgotten, something I had read without paying much attention years before when I was a student. I was reminded of the victory dance of Miriam, the prophetess and sister of Moses and Aaron.

Once the Israelite slaves had managed to evade Pharaoh’s army, which was dramatically engulfed by the waves of the Red Sea, Moses recited a poem of triumph known to be one of the most ancient passages in the Bible: ‘I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea…’ Then his elderly sister Miriam takes the stage. Like Maryam here in the City of the Dead, she had a drum (tof ) in her hand - an instrument that the Israelites had encountered and adopted for their own purposes in Egypt - and started to dance, no doubt triumphantly.

As the woman strutted in front of the emancipated slaves, one can imagine the gestures she made in the direction of Egypt.

But the unfragrant widow was no longer dancing triumphantly; she was dancing sexily. To o sexily for my taste, and far too close. I imagined that she was a prostitute of some sort. She was rather handsome and had a lithe, curvaceous body. But this was not for me. Predictably she was holding her hand out for money.

‘She invites you to rest your weary body in her humble tomb. Or do I mean womb?’ whispered Daud, giggling.

‘Er no thanks,’ I said.

‘If the widow is not your style,’ said Daud huffily, ‘I can assure you that she is mine. Very much mine. Perhaps you could lend me a few pounds?’

He was swinging his cross with a circular movement of his hand, one of his eyebrows raised expectantly.

‘You loathsome little Copt,’ I muttered.

Dusk was turning to night and the fruit bats were starting to swoop and circle in the half-light, making their typical highpitched buzzing sound. I had a flight to London the following morning and I was looking forward to an early night. I had little desire to walk back through the City of the Dead alone, nor did I wish to wait around here while Daud had his way with the widow. Shaking my head I stood up to leave and gave the woman a few well-worn Egyptian notes.

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