It would do you no good to wander there. The treasures of Solomon's Temple were indeed carried by the plundering Visigoths to Carcasonne. But only the light ones. THe heavier ones fell much later to the Vandals, who had them shipped to North Africa, to ancient Carthage, which in turn was conquered by the mighty army of Belisarius the Byzantine, who took or sent them to his liege lord Justinian in ancient Constantinople. Alas, they were not to find peace yet. An ancient Jewish scholar who had access to justinian's ear told him that ruin had fallen on everyone who had held the treasures--the tablets, the golden menorah, the emeralds--and that the only way to assure Justinian's safety from the same curse was for the treasures to find their way again to the Holy Land. There, they would cease the mystic and catastrophic evil they had wrought on the Romans, the Visigoths, the Vandals.

Justinian paled, and decreed they should be housed not in the ancient Temple of the Crucifixion itself, the Holy Sepulchre, but in the newly-building New Church of Mary.

There, the ancient treasures of the sons of Israel were entombed, to rest in peace until the sacking of the city by the Persians under Alexander's generals. There, the tale as told by the ancient historian Procippus grows dim. It is believed that the Persians carried the them away, perhaps to Persepolis, where they were hiddden from the prying eyes of history until the late 1960's when a new generations of vandals in the form of AMerican juvenile delinquents discovered them while planting a private pot patch in the deserts of Iran.

They made off with them, but one of their history professors passed on Procippus' tale of the fate of those, as told by the ancient Jew, who trifled with the holy treasures. So unnerved were they by this warning that they secreted the treasures in the basement of an unidentified K-Mart somewhere in the Midwest, where they remain to this day.


A