Chapter X: The Lost Tribes

King Solomon, or in oriental vernacular Suleiman, had the honor of elevating the Jewish nation to the pinnacle of wealth and glory among the inhabitants of the earth.

His was the proudest name throughout the world, not only as a wise and moderate ruler, not only as a just and upright judge, but in literary attainments, in which he had no rival.

In the midst of all his official duties wherein he found time to hear the case even of two poor harlots, he found time to become a prolific writer on natural science. He spoke three thousand proverbs and his songs were a thousand and five. And he spoke of trees from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon, to “the hyssop that springeth out of the wall.”

He spoke also of beasts and of fowl and of creeping things and of fishes. But in the midst of the luxuriant foliage of this green bay tree of power lurked the worm of human frailty. The man of wisdom came at last to worship at the shrine of self. The vast riches that poured in upon him blunted his powers to discriminate between good and evil, and the blandishments of his princesses weakened the fiber of his moral integrity, and led him away after strange gods.

The reckless extravagance of his splendid court drained the wealth of toiling subjects. Laying the yoke of servitude at first only on his subjugated enemies, he soon drained the resources of those nations, and, in order to maintain the splendor of his royal dissipations on their former scale of magnificence, he began to lay the hand of oppression upon his own people. Murmurs began to swell into roars of discontent; but the name of Suleiman was almost omnipotent in his realm and beyond it wherever it was known. It almost became the word in every known tongue to give expression to regal wisdom, and the mighty prestige of that name was able to overrule every objection and every murmur against his authority. The fires of discontent were smoldering through all the substructure of his kingdom, but they did not burst into flame till the messengers went throughout the kingdom with the intelligence that Suleiman the mighty, the rich, the powerful, the wise, the wonder of his age, the envy of the world, was dead.

The humblest and most oppressed of his subjects would not now accept his fate though all the wealth and power of a score of Suleimans were attached to it. There remained for him but the pomp and pageantry of a magnificent burial to console him for the loss of human delights. Henceforth he could partake of his pristine glory only in the immortality of fame. He climbed to the proudest heights of ambition only to fall ignominiously to the depths of weakness and folly.

Hope sprang up fresh in the heart of the Hebrew subjects. Alarming and general revolt broke out in all but the two tribes of Judah and Benjamin, and the ten tribes acknowledged allegiance to the house of David no more forever. But Salmanasser, King of Assyria, carried the adhering tribes of Judah and Benjamin as well as the revolting ten tribes away into captivity. Seven hundred and fifty years later, Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and carried away the better population which had been reorganized since the Assyrian captivity into Babylon. Cyrus in turn overthrew the Babylonian empire and gave the Jewish people full liberty to return to their beloved Jerusalem; Judah and Benjamin, nursing the memory of past glory and cherishing the hope of a deliverer and Messiah “as foretold by their prophets” gladly availed themselves of the privilege to return to their native country.

But here the world’s record of the remaining ten tribes breaks off abruptly, and for twenty-five centuries no word or token has come across the chasm of years to indicate the fate of Israel. But as Babylon has recently yielded up her secrets to the demand of modern search and learning, so the beetling cliffs of the Colorado were to be robbed of the dark and mysterious records of the lost tribes of Israel, lying concealed so long in their bosom. The captivity of Israel in Babylon was a tolerable one, being allowed as they were to preserve their tribal relations and to govern themselves in their own way, which was in the form of a theocracy, each tribe governing itself as a separate republic, all being united under the invisible rule of Jehovah. They came in contact daily with the Accadians, an element in the Assyrian nation, originating in the mountains of Elon east of the river Tigris. They were a highly educated and refined people, bringing with them the knowledge of many fine arts unknown to their captors, such as the recording of events by a system of characters stamped upon tablets of brick.

Their mountain home gave them sturdy frames and lithe muscles, and the maidens of this comely, intelligent people might well be supposed to have been lovely in form and feature, and what is better, the sparkle of their eyes was that of intellectual fire, and the glow on their cheeks was of health. The young men of the ten tribes were not slow to perceive the superior gifts and attainments of the Accadian damsels, and intermarriage was the natural result. But while in skilled arts they were in a position to become their husbands, teachers, in religion the maids of Elim became their tempters; for their ideas on this subject were far behind those of the Jews, they being worshipers of Baal, closely allied to, if not identical with the worship of the sun, pure and simple.

Thus far history attends and supports us in the narrative, but from this point the burden of proof devolves upon our humble agency to prove the subsequent history of the lost ten tribes, and here our parchment steps into the breach and points out the circumstances surrounding them in their captivity that induced them to try the fortunes of unknown lands, preferably to going to Palestine once more.

The parchment is written in the form of a narrative of Israelitish events from the time of embarkation from the land of their serfdom till the time when they were about ready to leave the cliff dwellings for more permanent ones farther southward, and bears the simple signature of “Elib the scribe.” The writing is substantially as follows:

The blending of Accadian and Israelitish blood had awakened the highest activity and ambitions in the tribes of Israel. The cunning skill of the Accadians to work in brick and stone with the graver’s tools roused the national pride once more to emulate the magnificent architecture of King Suleiman’s reign, and their advanced intelligence in religious matters supplied them with a worthy object upon which to employ their constructive skill. Their education and prestige as a nation had taught them to associate the idea of rich stores of gold and silver for adornment of temples of worship, in their minds, as being necessary to complete a dwelling acceptable to the Most High.

They resolved that they would once more set up the kingdom of Israel as an independent government, and to do this they must needs seek a new country where they should be safe from their old enemies until their kingdom should be firmly established. Naturally their thoughts turned toward Ophir as a country rich in treasures, and isolated enough to be a safe refuge from Judah and Assyria. Their knowledge of this country had been preserved from the time of Suleiman by the seamen who were the successors and pupils of those furnished to Solomon by Hiram, King of Tyre. But the knowledge of this mine had inured to the benefit of their captors, the Babylonians.

Now they resolved to reap some of these benefits of knowledge themselves, and availing themselves of the generosity of Cyrus in granting leave to depart, and in supplying them with a passport among all people who owed allegiance to Cyrus, King of Persia, and few in that day would care to ignore his friendly admonitions “to give comfort and succor to these, my former subjects, wherever their lot may fall among you,” they made ready their merchantmen and many of their Accadian allies and kindred by intermarriage secretly prepared to embark with them, freely furnishing their ships and supplies.

Stratagem or artifice was employed to account for their departure in the opposite direction from that of Palestine. They expressed a reluctance to leave a country where they had enjoyed many privileges, and avowed their intentions of going to the Java Islands on a trading expedition, thence, with their families and their stuff, they would sail northward by way of the Red Sea, and build a city on its shores to the northeastward where their seafaring men could carry on their commerce both on the great Southern Sea and on the Mediterranean. The Accadians obtained a commission from Cyrus to accompany the expedition on their own behalf, and when all was ready their fleet of merchantmen, which in those days were also warships, for merchantmen on the high seas were little more or less than privateers, with some of their ships built with a sharp and powerful brass-shod prow to be used as a battering ram, also others built for running alongside of an enemy and boarding her--set sail.

Dropping down the Euphrates to the Persian Gulf they skirted the coasts of India, doubled the Malay Peninsula, and skirting the coast of China they reached a latitude about twenty degrees north, which their former voyages had taught them was the point at which they struck out straight to the eastward on the Great Sea, guided in their course by Tyrean and Jewish seamen, skilled in knowledge of the stars, and familiar with the various constellations of the heavens, the wisest astronomer, necessity, having been their teacher.

The Tyrean seamen, who were descended from those whom Hiram had so generously tendered Solomon for his voyage to Ophir were also learned in the use of the “magician’s hand,” which is believed by scholars to have been a rude form of the mariner’s compass, and could compute rudely the problems of latitude and longitude which enabled them with tolerable accuracy to reach the point for which they had started out, the land of Ophir, which was no other than the southwestern coast of North America, to which the port of entrance was the Gulf of California, thus proving the almost universal fact that men who are seeking a country turn their eyes east or west, and follow closely their own native lines of latitude, instead of crossing them. Palestine has elsewhere no such exact counterpart of climate and products as California and Mexico. The list of fruits and cereals that grow in one is almost an exhaustive treatise on those of the other, and it is natural that these sailors should mark the similarity and bring back to their people glowing accounts of the fertility of soil, salubrity of climate, and fabulous mineral wealth of Ophir.

Their perilous voyage was accomplished without the loss of a single vessel which, though small and able to accommodate only four score souls each, were of exceedingly sturdy build and buffeted the waves of the Pacific heroically and triumphantly, the fleet consisting of a hundred of these little vessels.

Here the narrator diverges to inform us that this small number was the flower of the ten tribes, they having been winnowed by Nebuchadnezzar who carried away only the most comely of their maidens, and the wisest of their men, and their families. What Nebuchadnezzar had effected by arbitrary power was repeated in their embarkation to Ophir, many of those who were “faint hearted” remaining at Babylon or joining the tribes of Judah and Benjamin to return with them to Jerusalem; so that the colony was made up of the stout-hearted young men and their wives and little ones, and the most learned and ambitious of their Accadian allies. Continuing, the scribe relates how they entered the “haven of Ophir” (the Gulf of California) with songs of praise to Jehovah for his mercies in delivering them from the angry waves, and with joyful hearts went forward to possess this new Canaan, “sailing up the River of Ophir.”

Landing upon the shores of the gulf they found a country so similar in climate and products to their own, that they were charmed and delighted with the prospect, and set up their temporary dwellings, tents, covered with the skins of their domestic animals, and prepared to feast their flocks and herds upon the unlimited extent of verdure all around them, and rejoiced in the shadow of cedars as stately and comely as those of the Lebanon of their native land.

Wild grapes hung in dense profusion from the vine-covered trees, and coffee trees bloomed luxuriantly, and wild oranges and lemons testified that they had touched upon no desert coast. The climate was such a salubrious one that they found no urgent reason for more substantial dwellings and, added to the pleasure of liberty, they enjoyed the happy freedom of a pure pastoral life.

In solemn conference it was unanimously agreed that henceforth the God of Israel alone should be their ruler, each tribe forming a separate republic connected by the invisible rule of Jehovah--a pure theocracy, which all the tribes entered into a solemn covenant to support, and judges were appointed from each tribe to act as lawyers, priests were ordained to administer their holy religion, and a temporary place of worship or tabernacle was set up.

These weighty matters being decided and settled thus satisfactorily, “a company of ten men from each tribe, who were valiant and skilled in the finding of paths in the wilderness, and learned in all the symbols and images on parchment by which King Suleiman had perpetuated the knowledge of the mines of Ophir, were appointed to journey to Ophir which was in the mountains of Ophir northward and eastward, and bring back treasures of gold, that they might begin to build a temple for the worship of Jehovah. Another company of ten men from each of the ten tribes was sent forth to the southward to spy out the country and choose a place where they might establish Israel once more. But the remainder of the people, with the women and children, remained in camp till all the men of the two companies should return.

“So the companies that were sent out into Ophir journeyed by water toward Ophir, partly sailing and partly rowing, till they came into the ‘great whirlpool and cataracts in the river that cometh down from Ophir,’ and there they took every man a store of provisions and his tools to work withal and journeyed on foot to the westward of the river that floweth from Ophir, for its waters were too strong for them, and came at last to the entrance of the caves of Ophir, according to the symbols on parchment, delivered unto the fathers by the servants of King Solomon, and the testimony of some of our company who had sailed from Babylon in the fleet of Nebuchadnezzar. And behold we found the secret caverns of King Solomon as they were in the days of King Solomon, for the most secret caves and the richest gold of Ophir were hidden to King Nebuchadnezzar and his servants so that they brought back a report that the gold of Ophir was exhausted; for Solomon had guarded the most secret places with cunning doors, and divers passages too hard for the servants of Babylon. And we found the holy temple of King Solomon that he had hewn in the rock that his servants who dwelt here to dig the gold of Ophir might worship the God of their fathers, and the treasures of King Solomon in the secret chamber of the temple were as in the days of King Solomon, and behold the servants of King Solomon were left to themselves when Solomon died, and behold their bodies we found in the tombs of the temple, for they perished while they waited for succor which came not, and for the ships of Solomon which returned not again, for the wise King of Israel was no more.

“And we opened the chamber of pure gold in the mountain and digged plentiful treasure therefrom; and we took of the treasures therefrom, and we took of the treasure that we had digged, and every man bearing of the gold according to his strength, we prepared to return to our tribes. But I, Elib the scribe, who have written all these things concerning the voyage of Israel and the landing of Israel in the land of Ophir--a pleasant land of grass and pure water and of bountiful fruits and tall cedars of Lebanon--am commanded by the judges appointed from among the ten tribes to make all this writing and to place it in the secret chamber of the treasures of King Solomon, even in the chamber which opened from the Holy of Holies, and to seal it privately with cement that it may abide secretly in the shelf of the rock forever.

“And now I, Elib the scribe, am prepared to fulfill all these things faithfully and truly as I am commanded, and will now, by the blessing of Jehovah and the grace of our judges, establish these writings together with the symbols of the mines of Ophir in the shelf of the rock, and do secretly seal it with cement so that none of our company are privy to its hiding or know aught of the secret shelf of the rock for so I am commanded to do.”

This was the substance of the writing on the parchment. A very lame and broken version of which I reproduced in Abner’s ears in the Garden of Ophir as we lolled in the shade of the semi-tropical foliage overshadowing us, and shielding us from the heat which was almost unendurable at high noon, and for a brief time afterward. Not a breath of air stirred in the high-walled area, and but for the great height of the walls which effectually broke the sun’s rays during the greater part of the day, the heat would have been greater than flesh and blood could endure.

But these former inhabitants had, as also had we, a convenient refuge from the heat in the cool recesses of the rocks, which were singularly free from dampness, the arid climate of that region making itself felt even in the bowels of the mountains, and in all our researches we had found no sign of mold or decay in any of the remains of fabrics in the temple or in the records in the niche in the wall of the “treasure chamber of the temple.”

Within the larger parchment whose contents we have just described, was a smaller one which we knew on sight must be the “symbols of the mines of Ophir,” referred to by Elib the scribe in the records of their people.

It was a system of picture writing or hieroglyphics, together with a complete diagram or ground plan of all the vaults, passages, galleries, and stairways that we have already described, of which the hieroglyphics seemed to be further descriptive, and with the help of the information already gained from the record we had no trouble to recognize in it a complete ideographic guide to the various apartments of the mine itself, and also a rough draft of the country along the Mexican and Californian coast with the configuration of the gulf and a diagram of the Colorado and its branches between the mine and the gulf, and minute information to the initiated to enable them to find the outer entrance to the mine, which was the same one we had discovered along the cavernous bed of the subterranean river. Even the method of transporting the gold to the coast was typified as being by rafts or rude boats down the current of the stream we had followed from its underground source to the outer surface which was represented as a placid stream emptying into the Colorado at the foot of the Grand Canyon, near the “great whirlpool,” utilizing all its tremendous fall and recompensing itself for its placid current by leaping down a sheer precipice hundreds of feet into the Colorado.

Here the raft voyage ended and a portage of a few furlongs brought them to their ships at anchor in the Colorado, whence they sailed with the current to the ocean. The plan of the mine showed us, however, that our exploring labors were far from being ended, for in addition to the apartments we had discovered, the plan showed that many more, especially the ledge, or the miner’s drifts or rooms where their gold was found, remained to be explored. It also proved the sagacity of Abner’s judgment in declaring that another passage than that of the spiral stairway to the underground river existed. It was shown that a straight ascending gallery, beginning near the open-air passage, led along the river, terminating in a branched passage, one fork of which led to the mines and one to a vault in the rear of the treasure vault, and which was marked “The Chamber of Records;” thence it was shown to connect with the treasure chamber itself.

It is needless to say that we were fired anew with a greater zeal than ever for exploring “The Chamber of Records,” but we had been stretching every nerve and straining every faculty to circumvent the skill and cunning of hands and brains that had bestowed their records so safely and we were obliged to own that we must rest and refresh ourselves until the morrow before entering upon any new discoveries, or unraveling any new mysteries.