They avoided Shibam, climbing the mountains facing it so as to look across the Hadramawt Valley from their peaks. The city was filled with towering mud buildings of five, six, seven stories, which stood like a crowd of giants gathered in a space of no more than five hundred meters across, destruction masochists, so fragile was their position on the plain, which was constantly at the mercy of mountain floods.
“You must pass by the reservoir of underground water before you reach the temples,” advised Happy Solomon. He led Joseph ibn Nagrela to the outskirts of Ma’rib, a city that stood on the remains of the Great Dam and was known as the “city astride the two gardens of paradise.”
“I will leave you here to continue your journey,” said Happy Solomon. “If you’re fortunate, the lord of the genies and birds will permit you to enter the village of Solomon’s Seal.” He vanished then and there, as if he’d never existed.
Joseph ibn Nagrela found himself alone, standing between the two temples — Baran, temple of the sun, which was also known as the throne of Bilqis, Queen of Sheba, and Awam, temple of the moon, which was known as Bilqis’ Sanctuary. He looked out on the vast sand sea that was the Empty Quarter.
The first night fell pitch black, erasing Joseph’s features, forming deep pools of shadow in the valley and hovering over the temple of the moon, revealing to Joseph the place where lovers from all over the Arabian Peninsula came to die. As night proceeded, the nine-meter-high crescent-shaped temple wall, carved from a single block of stone, came to life. It emerged out of the great sand guarded by eight eastward-facing pillars inlaid with seashells or moonshells, which invited him to enter, luring him into the Holy of Holies whose translucent marble walls were woven out of silver and gold and precious stones.
Joseph spent his nights in a trance between the four columns of the Holy of Holies, listening to the two tableaux that stood seven meters above the ground on either side of the entrance, whispering prayers for love and prosperity, begging the Queen of Sheba to materialize out of the milky sand, naked and as lithe as the moonlight, which gleamed on the temple floor as she walked on tiptoe to take up her ceremonial gown of shimmering silver that left her shoulders and arms bare, two slits running from the top of her thighs to her bare feet. Wearing her crown, she then approached her seat among the stone seats that surrounded the stone table at the entrance of the Holy of Holies. The seats of mother sun and father moon and Venus were taken up as well as they all met to discuss how to lure back her lover Almaqa from Awam. The pale, translucent marble would light up with his presence, reflecting the faces of the resurrected lovers who had risen up from the graves that lay in row after row to the south and west of the temple.
Joseph spent his nights in a fever for Bilqis, listening and emptying his soul of everything but his longing for that door.
Finally, when the moon waned and withdrew, Joseph ibn Nagrela followed it, with the flood of lovers illuminated by Bilqis’ breaths, walking three kilometers to the west and crossing the plain of henna and coffee trees of the left garden of paradise, led by five pillars and a sixth broken pillar to the temple of the sun where he waded through the wide water channel to the south and then entered the gate to the main temple, crossing the vast courtyard, which was still alive with the echoes of feasts held in Almaqa’s honor. Inscriptions threatened curses on any thieves who dared to enter the sanctuary. He climbed the stairs in the courtyard to the huge dais to the Holy of Holies, where the bull planted its four-meter-high legs to fertilize the soil and the lovers.
Joseph spent his days deciphering pledges of love inscribed in cuneiform on the eastern columns of the dais and the offerings that lovers brought from the ends of the earth: jars of herbs, perfumes, incenses, silver that the lover-pilgrims laid along the length of the wall of the external courtyard and on both sides of the main gate. To Joseph the temple seemed a polished expanse of translucent alabaster, breathing in the sunlight and exuding a faint cinnamon-scented incense, a pool of goodness that healed his senses and filtered the light around him so that it magnified the image of the door inside him.
News of Joseph ibn Nagrela spread: they said he was a hermit who had brought to life the pilgrimages Bilqis and her lover Almaqa made to visit each other, traveling constantly between Baran and Awam, and had taken up residence in Almaqa’s Holy of Holies, where he received the lover-pilgrims who came to Almaqa seeking the moon’s spells and the farmers and shepherds who came seeking the sun’s. With the lust of a miser, Joseph ibn Nagrela devoted himself to receiving the pilgrims and collecting from their mouths and hearts their harvest songs and love poems, learning from their dances the primitive, animal, chest-splitting cries that begged a lover to be swayed, a plant to grow, a harvest to be enriched.
Joyful pilgrims traveled to see him from all over the Arab lands, to meet him between his two gardens of paradise, among the sweet clouds of song gathered around him, raining torrents over the Hadramawt Valley for three consecutive moons and showing Joseph the secret that gave that land its nickname, “the Happy Land of Yemen.”
On Joseph’s seventh sunrise between the two temples, he was awoken by the soft scent of incense, and when he opened his eyes, glittering strips of light on the horizon dazzled him. The mountain opposite looked like it was covered in solid gold bricks; when he looked more carefully, he could make out hundreds of doors covering the entire surface of the mountain. He rushed toward them blindly, desperate to get inside, but when he reached the mountain the doors had melted into one huge gate that was firmly closed against him. No matter how hard he knocked, no answer came. At sunset, the doors faded away and he wondered if it had all been a mirage; nevertheless he didn’t dare leave.
Dawn after dawn, those shining doors reappeared, but each time he approached they would be transformed into that single, closed gate. He got thinner and thinner, surviving only on the water and goat’s milk brought to him by the girls of Solomon’s Seal, near Ma’rib, girls who were the descendants of Solomon and Bilqis.
“These are doors between the parts of Creation,” they told him. “Between animal, vegetable, and mineral, between tongues, between life and death and God knows what else … Some of them opened for the prophet King Solomon, and that’s how he earned the name “King of the Genies,” but those doors have never opened for another living being. It all comes down to keys. You’ll have to find the original key before you start dreaming about one of those doors opening for you!”
The sun peeled Joseph’s skin and grilled his flesh a dark, aromatic teak while the moon polished him to a silver gleam; his coal-black braids grew longer. He was getting thinner still, as thin as a key, but whenever he approached a door, the closed gate would stand in his way. At the age of seventy, having never lost hope, he woke up to find that his seed had caused the bellies of the Solomon’s Seal girls to swell. When the pains of labor took them, and the ground of the two gardens shook, all he remembered was the first girl to be born. She had a moon-shaped birthmark on her palm. Joseph’s memory kept the sandstorm that had covered the mountain: when it finally abated, the mountain had vanished behind a veil that made it difficult to see; countless doors were scattered all over the valley bed and figures that looked like a band of beggars flocked from everywhere on earth and began to collect the doors, piling them up on a huge bonfire that they’d lit to help them see.
“It is not the destiny of Eve’s sons to possess these doors, and it is a curse to try to break the locks preserved in the tablets,” he was warned, but Joseph ibn Nagrela slipped away from them and plunged his bare hands into the fire to save the doors, forgetting all about his newborn daughter who had disappeared with the rest of the village of Solomon’s Seal and forgotten the earthquake she’d been born into.