The Gospel of Sheba Read Online Free PDF Page A

townhouse the family expects me to care for, eighteenth century, you know, impossible to heat, and I discovered this in a secret room behind a sliding panel along with many other books of esoteric medicine and alchemy. Here is The Gospel of Sheba , Mr. Lomax, make what you will of it. Apparently I’m the only chap it’s taken a liking to thus far.”
    Leaning down with pale gloves hovering, I eased back the cover. The Brotherhood of Solomon behind me engaged in muttered speculations—questions as to my presence, accusations of the book’s fraudulence, warnings over the dangers in dabbling with ancient vice.
    The Gospel of Sheba certainly looked like a sixteenth century document to me. It still does, here upon my desk, while Grace slumbers down the hall with her stuffed rabbit clutched to her neck. It was re-bound around two hundred years ago, I believe, with crackling blue animal hide stamped in black, but the paper seemed very old indeed and the penmanship typically cramped and mesmerizing. Books can own a curiously hypnotic draw, and this is one of them, whatsoever its occult capacities may be.
    Conscious of many eyes boring into me, I moved with care through the pages, noting esoteric symbols paired with line drawings of recognizably African beasts, and recalled that the Queen of Sheba was the all-powerful ruler of her Ethiope empire. There was something electrifying about thinking it possible—that here were her occult studies, combined with King Solomon’s, over the sort of giddy intimacy Lettie and I used to share, preserved by an obscure Christian monk without a name or a legacy many centuries later. I said as much.
    â€œYes, precisely!” cried one of the Brotherhood. “It’s the most important discovery since The Key of Solomon the King itself.”
    â€œIt’s a bloody hoax,” sighed a bearded banker.
    â€œIt’s evil made manifest, Mr. Jenkins, and you ought not to be playing with such fire,” whimpered a third man, who kept himself well away from the proceedings and had poured himself a large glass of claret. “We are scholars, mystics, men who seek the ancient insights of a Biblical king—we are not sorcerers , scheming to unleash the furies of hell upon our enemies.”
    â€œI can think of one or two enemies I’d not mind lending that book to, as a matter of fact, if it weren’t a fraud,” quipped the banker called Jenkins, and several chuckled.
    â€œStop touching it, I tell you. No purity of soul could withstand the summoning of the creatures listed in that blasphemous thing.”
    â€œIt’s a little thick, don’t you think, Huggins, whinging over blasphemy at this point?” drawled a City type with a waxed moustache. “By Jove, next he’ll be trying to wring spells out of the Sermon on the Mount. I say let a scientist study it rather than we financial types—it isn’t as if we have any clue what we’re talking about in the forensical sense.”
    To tell the truth, neither do I. I am a student of all disciplines, a kite upon the wind of the rare and the beautiful. I only know that something in me loved this book from the beginning, wanted to peel back its feather-soft pages and lose myself in the gentle curlicues of its embellished borders. I confess I am doing so now between jotting down these notes, my amber lamplight lost eternally the instant it hits the void-like black of The Gospel of Sheba’s ink. The Latin is lyrical enough never to be tedious, and I just translated:
    Come further into the night, O spirit longing to serve me, O Many-Eyed, Hairy-Tongued Beast of Burden. Come further. Come into me with your seven furred tongues and your single hand beckoning, place your hand in my darkest place and be made flesh among the living, as you were living, as you are dead, as you were gone, as you are returned, as you are summoned, as you are MINE TO COMMAND .
    It isn’t Shakespeare