In Search of King Solomon's Mines is a travel book by Anglo-Afghan author, Tahir Shah.
Shah's search began with a map in Jerusalem. The map showed a trail leading to the fabled mines of King Solomon, who built the first temple of Israel out of gold, mined from the land of Ophir. Solomon’s Mines have enthralled and tormented all those who have searched for them and superstition whispers of terrible curses that will befall anyone that finds them. Bewitched by the legends, Tahir Shah decided to take up the quest.
Chasing clues gathered from passed traveler’s tales, and local folklore to the Septuagint, the copper scroll, and the Kebra Negast, Shah was led to Ethiopia, whose empress traces decent from the son born to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and where gold has been mined for millennia.
In Harar, he fed wild hyenas that are said the guard Solomon’s treasure. With Samson, a miner-turner-taxi driver, he visited an illegal gold mine near Shakiso, where hundreds of men, women and children toiled in "a biblical Hell".
In the Emperor Haile Selassie's jeep, he explored the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, where the gold of Sheba is kept and ventures on to Afar, possibly ancient Ophir. Shah’s desire was to reach the cursed mountain of Tulu Wallel, where decades before an English adventurer called Frank Hayter claimed to have discovered the gold mines of King Solomon.
Read more about In Search Of King Solomon's Mines: Reviews
Famous quotes containing the words search, king, solomon and/or mines:
“The search for happiness ... always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn’t actually fall down.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.”
—Oscar Solomon Straus (1850–1926)
“Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:M”I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.””
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)