Page:Legends of Old Testament Characters.djvu/376

354 Naama were left in the wilderness without food. Then they wandered on till they came to the borders of the sea, and Solomon found some fishers, and he laboured for them, and every day they gave him, in payment for his services, two fish.

Thus passed the time, till one day Solomon's wife, Naama, on cleaning one of the fishes, found in its belly a ring, and she brought it to her husband; and, behold! it was his signet which he had put in the hands of Djarada, and which had been taken from her by subtlety by the evil spirit. And this was how he recovered it: on the ring was engraved the Incommunicable Name, and this the Jinn could not endure; therefore he could not wear the signet, and he had cast it into the sea, where the fish had swallowed it.

Now when Solomon recovered his ring, he was filled with joy, and the light returned to his eyes; he went back to Jerusalem with great haste, and all the people recognized him, and bowed before him; and when the Evil Spirit saw Solomon, and that he had the signet upon his hand, he uttered a loud cry and fled. Solomon refused to see again Djarada, the author of his misfortune; but he visited Queen Balkis every month, till the day of her death.

When Balkis died, he had her body conveyed to Tadmor in the desert, the city she had built; but her grave was known to none till the reign of the Calif Walid, when, in consequence of a heavy rain, the walls of Tadmor fell. Then was found an iron sarcophagus which was sixty ells long and forty ells wide, which bore this inscription:—"Here lies the pious Balkis, queen of Sheba, wife of the prophet Solomon, son of David. She was converted to the true faith in the thirteenth year of the reign of Solomon; she married him in the fourteenth, and died in the three-and-twentieth year of his reign."

The son of the Calif raised the lid of the coffin, and beheld a woman, as fresh as if she had only been lately buried.

He announced the fact to his father, and asked what should be done with the sarcophagus. Walid ordered him to leave it where it had been found, and to pile blocks of marble over it, so that it might not again be disturbed by the hand of man.

Solomon, when he was again on the throne, placed a crown on the head of Naama, and seated her beside him, and sent for