Assuming the doorways were six feet high… ‘The whole city must be well over half a mile across,’ she said after some rapid mental calculations. ‘And I’m guessing from these trees around the outside,’ she pointed out clusters of shrivelled twigs, ‘that it was either in a forest or a jungle.’
‘It was in the jungle,’ said Ziff.
Nina looked up at him. ‘You’re sure?’
‘I’ve translated more of the text. It describes Zhakana as being hidden in the jungle on the outer reaches of the territory of Sheba.’
‘Sheba?’ asked Howie, who had been taking photographs. ‘As in, the Queen of?’
‘No, the cat food,’ Nina said sarcastically. ‘Of course that Sheba. Or the kingdom of Seba or Saba, depending on the translation. There hasn’t actually been much archaeological evidence found of it to date, but it seems that it covered both the Arabian and African sides of the Red Sea.’
‘The queen, Bilqis, came to Solomon here in Jerusalem,’ said Talal. ‘Some say Solomon summoned her to pledge her kingdom to God, others say she came to test him, to see if he was truly the wisest man on the earth. But in each story, they married and had a son, Menelik — the first emperor of Ethiopia.’
‘Bilqis is the Arabic name for the queen,’ said Ziff, excitement in his voice. ‘But I think we can now say that her traditional Ethiopian name, Makeda, is correct.’
‘Why?’ Nina asked.
‘Because it is written here! After they married, the kingdoms of Israel and Sheba were united. Solomon visited his new lands with his wife — and she took him to Zhakana, City of the Damned, the greatest secret of Sheba.’ He waved a hand towards the impressive miniature below. ‘And this is it. Perfect in every detail, or so Solomon claims.’
‘Solomon claims it?’
‘If the text is correct,’ Ziff continued, ‘this chamber, this map room, was built on Solomon’s orders to be an exact replica of Zhakana.’
Nina noticed more carvings on the lowest wall surrounding the city. These were not words, however. She pointed her flashlight at the nearest. ‘Look at this.’ The beam revealed a rolling relief chiselled into the stone. ‘It’s a landscape — hills and mountains.’ She moved the light along the wall. The terrain rose and fell, sometimes with multiple planes to show where a more distant peak was visible beyond nearer features.
She looked back at the model, noting that one of the palace’s towers was capped by a small bronze cylinder — the only metal in the city. ‘I wonder…’ she said to herself, crouching beside the cliff to peer more closely at it. Its top had several vertical slots cut across it at different angles. At a nudge from Fisher, Rivero turned away from Ziff to film her.
Nina positioned herself to look through one slot as if it were a gunsight, aiming her torch at the target area of the wall. One of the carved mountains was highlighted.
Talal stood beside her. ‘What have you found?’
‘Hold on, let me try this…’ She sidestepped to look through another slot. This led her gaze to a second peak. ‘I think it’s some sort of navigation aid, a way to—’
‘Nina!’ Ziff’s cry this time was full-blown exhilaration. ‘Mohammad! Come here, quick!’
She and Talal hurried back up the stairs to find Ziff reading a dense section of Hebrew text. ‘What is it?’
‘More about the city. The large building on the cliff — it is the Palace Without Entrance!’
‘What, from the legend?’ Nina asked dubiously.
‘I know, it sounds unbelievable. But according to this, Solomon ordered the Palace Without Entrance to be built to contain a great, yet dangerous power. Only those with the wisdom to use it for good can enter, because Solomon’s own riddles protect it.’
‘How do you enter somewhere without an entrance?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps the legend itself holds a clue?’
‘What legend?’ asked Fisher.
Ziff faced him. ‘An ancient Hebrew story. Once, when Solomon was travelling, he discovered a magnificent palace, with no doors or windows. He spoke to some eagles guarding it—’
Lydia’s eyebrows rose. ‘He could talk to birds?’
‘Solomon could do a lot of things, if you believe the legends,’ said Nina, amused. ‘He could summon and control demons, fly on a magical throne, talk to animals — all this and the whole “being the wisest man in the world” thing too.’
Ziff made an impatient sound, then continued. ‘Solomon spoke to the eagles until he found the oldest, who remembered an entrance now buried by sand. So Solomon’s men dug, and found the way in.’
‘I didn’t see any eagles on the model,’ said Nina. ‘Or sand.’
‘We will have to examine it in detail. But there is more in the text.’ He went back to the wall. ‘The power Solomon built the palace to contain is named here. He calls it Imashamir… “the Mother of the Shamir”.’
‘The Shamir?’ she echoed, startled. ‘The stone he supposedly used to build the First Temple?’
‘Nina,’ Fisher said quietly from behind the camera, ‘explanation for the rubes?’
‘The Shamir is… well, it’s hard to describe,’ Nina said. ‘It’s either a green stone or a living creature, like a worm, depending on how you interpret the stories. Either way, it was kept in a lead box that was only opened when it was needed, because its gaze could split stone and shatter metal.’ The crew’s impressed reactions told her that was exactly the kind of juicy legend they wanted to hear.
‘It was given to Solomon by God,’ Ziff went on, bowing his head slightly, ‘so he could build the temple without using anything that could also be used as a weapon, which would defile it. It was only very small, the size of a peppercorn, but incredibly powerful. Solomon used it to cut the temple’s stones.’
‘Which might explain how they were so precisely made,’ Nina mused. She regarded the model. ‘The Mother of the Shamir… it could be where Solomon’s Shamir originally came from. This city in Ethiopia.’
‘Are there jungles in Ethiopia?’ Howie asked.
‘Actually, yes. But the borders of modern Ethiopia are much smaller than in the past — it used to cover a big chunk of the entire continent.’
Ziff was disappointed. ‘Then there is very little chance of finding it. A pity — finding the Temple of Solomon is remarkable, but an entire lost city? That would be incredible!’
‘We still can find it,’ Nina said, her excitement returning. ‘That’s what I was about to say.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Talal.
She looked between the archaeologists and the omnipresent camera. ‘The metal spire on the palace — if you look through the slots on it, they point to different mountains. It’s a way to triangulate the city’s exact position! If you can identify the mountains, you can use their relative positions to calculate the only place where you would see them from those bearings.’
Talal examined the carved landscape. ‘But none of the mountains have names. We do not know which ones they are.’
‘We don’t need to,’ Nina insisted. ‘There are topographical databases of the whole of Africa, and we can use a computer to search for a particular configuration of mountains. I’ve done it before.’ She gazed at the sprawling miniature below. ‘Solomon left clues to Zhakana’s location. We can follow them — and we can find the lost city!’
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