The Exquisitely Old #3
After a few flight mishaps, some more dangerous than others, Malraux gave up on his fruitless crusade.
There was no concrete discovery to show for it, no victory; everything suggested that he’d looked for the Lady of Sheba in a place where she couldn’t be found.
He hadn’t been able to set foot in her Red Palace, nor on the streets of her mythic kingdom, nor could he unearth her treasures.
To play down the fiasco, Malraux declared that from the air he’d seen the lost traces of a sparkling empire.
The newspapers spread this claim with great bombast even though there was no proof of it being true, a detail to which no one ascribed importance, perhaps because the real finding was Malraux’s story itself, which made humanity dream of magical, vanished worlds.
Later he wrote a beautiful little book where he described the kingdom of Sheba as more of a fata morgana than a reality.
That part wasn’t a lie: It’s known that when fata morganas glint on the horizon, they take the form of a princess’s palace from fairy tales.
And to a Western audience, the Queen of Sheba was that above all: an Eastern mirage, and a fairy-tale princess.
A romantic spin turned the failure of Malraux’s expedition into a triumph.
The world has long dreamed that a passionate hero would finally find the Queen of Queens and wed her, and what better hero for the task than the svelte, bold, and narcissistic Malraux?
A true magician at erasing the line between reality and imagination, Malraux had invented the bride by writing elegantly about her, and had pursued by plane the very woman he’d created.
In the end, it wasn’t his fault. Everyone who gets involved with the Queen of Sheba gets tangled up, talks nonsense, and comes up empty-handed.
When we evoke her, sing to her, paint her, or novelize her, we fall into a flamboyance drawn from the Bible, or else we invent Versailles-style settings in primal form.
We force her to personify a kind of Marie Antoinette of the desert, a Mesopotamian Catherine the Great, an Isabella the Catholic with Moorish blood.
We foist crown and scepter on her, as well as armies of cavalry or legionnaires, and we imbue her with a sinful sensuality in the vein of Lilith, Marilyn Monroe, or Mata Hari.
We enthrone her among candelabras, tapestries, banquet halls, prisoner-filled dungeons, falconers, and jesters. But she escapes us.
How can an earthly kingdom of Sheba exist when she’s the nomadic princess, the eternal wanderer, the black-maned lion, she who has no roots nor possessions, she who follows the star, who knows no starting point nor aspires to any destination?
When the wind erases her footprints and her legacy is pure mirage and dream?
Malraux’s disillusionment serves as a warning, but those of us who insist and persist are legion, even knowing beforehand that she can’t be reached.
Who is she, how does her myth reverberate, what does she have to say to us across the centuries?
It’s unknown. In fact, it’s never been known; the only supposedly historical references are a mere few vague lines in religious texts.
The image of this archaic queen is covered by a patina, or sfumatura, that lends her grace and mystery.
One could say of her what was written of a warrior goddess in an ancient temple of Sais: Oudiez epon peplon aneile, “nobody has lifted my veil.”
No one has lifted her veil. No one? Who knows.
Every once in a while, a valiant youth appears, like Rimbaud, who challenges the notion and thinks he’s unveiled the myth: I lifted her veils, one by one .
. . and gently explored her immense body.
1 Even so, who knows? Given the word apocalypse means “to reveal, or unveil”—to remove a veil—perhaps it’s better not to do so.
Maybe it’s healthier to let the vast queen stay veiled, secret, in peace.
“Listen, whatever your name is,” says Zahra Bayda, and her voice catches me so distracted that I startle.
“I was in the clouds,” I confess.
“I could tell. Well, you really did fall from the sky, you know, because I’ve been in need of a priest. In Muslim lands, that’s like seeking a needle in a haystack.”
“I’m not a priest, nor a monk. I’m not even a baby monk.”
“In your email, you said you lived in a monastery.”
“Yes, but not anymore.”
Zahra Bayda doesn’t hear me, or doesn’t want to, she keeps talking as if nothing had changed.
She says that there’s a Catholic woman in the camp we’re headed to who’s been dying for days and wants to give confession.
She’s in the terminal phase, tormented by pain, and there’s no cure for her.
But she refuses to die, and clings desperately to life.
She says she won’t leave this world until she receives forgiveness.
“But I’m not a priest. I left the seminary, or the seminary left me.”
“After how many years?”
“Just over four.”
“That’s enough for me.”
“I’m saying no.”
“Her name is Yameelah Semela.” Zahra Bayda mentions the woman’s name to make her real and get me to do it, I know that strategy. “There’s no hope for her, it’s a fatal illness. She comes from a Christian community from the high plateaus of Ethiopia.”
This Zahra Bayda. What a character. A doctor, for starters.
More African than Arab, because she isn’t Yemeni as I initially thought, but Somali.
That explains her self-confidence, her bare face, her colorful shawl, her freedom of movement.
She drives the 4x4 at high speed and with flair, windows rolled down, left arm outside and right hand on the steering wheel, while she stays in touch with her base by radio.
I don’t know how she keeps to the highway, blurred as it is by gusts of wind and sand. To top it off, the sun is blinding.
“Does it happen a lot?” I ask.
“Does what?”
“What we heard in Safia. Children tied to a bed.”
“It happens.”
The 4x4 starts to gallop across ever-higher, shifting crests of sand.
Zahra Bayda maneuvers like a helmswoman through ferocious seas.
The SUV bucks, buffeted by the desert, shaking violently; I hold fast to the door handle as if I were in a rodeo.
Our heads hit the roof. We’re shuddering our way across this treacherous wasteland that, in ancient history, devoured the Roman general Aelius Gallus and his whole legion of centurions in one gulp.
About twenty minutes later, the wind quiets down. As if by miracle, the surface beneath our tires levels out, calm is restored, and we’re moving forward again at a prudent speed, on a straight and somewhat visible road. The shaking is over. It was time; that skiing on dry land was getting ugly.
“What a way to have fun,” I say to Zahra Bayda, “driving at full speed on shifting dunes.”
“You think I did it on purpose?” she shoots back, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat that’s streaming down her face and neck and sliding between her breasts. “I don’t know how I veered from the road, we dove into the sand and if I hadn’t accelerated hard, we would have gotten buried.”
“Like Aelius Gallus and his legionnaires.”
We travel on for a good while, through an unchanging landscape marked with clean horizontal lines. That’s it. No more waves, ripples, crests, valleys, or dunes, just a pure, flat geometry and lifeless terrain where nothing could grow. And yet I see them come.
They emerge out of nowhere and walk the desert without leaving a trace.
Gustave Flaubert described them as dressed in gold brocade adorned with pearls, jet, and sapphire.
Legend has them wrapped in silks as subtle as the air.
But before my eyes, they appear shabby, barefoot, worn.
Sand in their mouths, an empty gaze, bodies flayed by sun and salt.
Could they be looking for a faraway king? Do a palace and lover await them somewhere? Somewhere, will they be loved?
They approach like a storm and surround the vehicle. They tell us their names, Ashia, Waris Dirie, Dinka, Zulai, each one immediately adding: “I’m a descendant of the Queen of Sheba.”
I am a descendant of the Queen of Sheba.
What I hear hits me with the force of revelation.
I’m descended from the Queen of Sheba, they say it so naturally and with such conviction, as if that were their surname, their nationality, a stamp of identity.
Myth and reality suddenly fuse into a single thing.
So here she is: the Queen of Sheba. Not in books, nor in museums, nor in some lost palace. Not even in Marib, but here. And she isn’t one, but many. They are her. Daughters of Sheba, myth made flesh, heiresses of Goat Foot and her immemorial tribe.
They’ve taken this great journey.
“What do they seek, in the middle of nowhere?” I ask Zahra Bayda.
“They seek everything or nothing. They’re looking for the impossible place where life can be possible.”
They come, rising. From Somalia and Ethiopia, Kenya and Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda.
Hundreds of women with their children. Do they know that many will die on the road, that they’ll have to bury the sickest among them, the old?
Zahra Bayda says yes, they know. They know and they accept it, the decision is made, they won’t stop until they find a door that opens.
They will not stop. No matter the cost, no matter who stands in their way.
They are their own house, and what Patti Smith calls the living architecture. 2