“Those ruins have their charms,” she says. “The roof looks like a tray of meringues fresh out of the oven.”
Meringues fresh out of the oven, that’s where fate is taking me. Who would have believed it, freshly baked meringues. Something is something; at least I’m learning.
Zahra Bayda drives a Mitsubishi SUV belonging to Doctors Without Borders that isn’t very new but is in good condition. It’s white, and bears the red and highly visible MSF logo on its hood and doors. I’m sitting next to her. I like this Zahra Bayda; not only did she rescue me from the airport when I’d thought my cause was lost, but also, she drives like Niki Lauda. I like the way this woman connects with her vehicle. She’s not one of those people who rides in a car, so much as the type to wear the car as if it were a coat or suit of armor.
We approach a military checkpoint and I go tense. It’s right where the high terrain ends and the desert begins. “Checkpoint,” Zahra Bayda says to me, and I get the sense that she’s a little unsettled too.
“It’s complicated sometimes,” she says. “There’s a whole culture around checkpoints here.”
We stop in front of a dozen guys armed with assault rifles. They’re smoking as they raise and lower a chain across the highway, retaining vehicles or letting them pass. Immediately I imagine being detained, searched, blackmailed, beaten with rifle butts, kidnapped? But nothing happens to us, the guys see the MSF logo, glance inside the vehicle, and nod their heads to say we can go on.
Two vistas open up before my eyes, in total contrast with each other, the intensely blue sky above and the red sand below, or, as Rimbaud put it when he lived in these lands, an azure abyss and pits of fire.
Nobody in sight. There’s no trace of urban noise; a vaulted silence reigns here, like the silence of a church. The mythic kingdom of Sheba must have extended through this place, or so at least André Malraux believed in the 1930s when he set out to fly over them inan early plane, determined to find the legendary ruins of her palace and claim that he’d discovered them.
“Lies, you found nothing!” I must have spoken to Malraux aloud, because Zahra Bayda asks me what I mean.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I say.
“There’s nobody else here.”
Aside from his renown as a writer, Malraux bore another less glorious claim to fame, namely as a plunderer of ancient monuments and thief of archaeological heritage. In his youth he was caught stealing stones etched with Vishnu’s four-armed figure from a temple in Angkor. Though he was only jailed for a short while, the scandal followed him from then on. So he already had a record when he boarded that small plane to fly over this region in search of the fabled queen and her treasures.
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 wouldfinally 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, orsfumatura, 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 wordapocalypsemeans “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.”
