The Lost Ark of the Covenant: The Remarkable Quest for the Legendary Ark

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.