Lawrence and the Arabs

by Robert Graves

XIII

Lawrence was about to withdraw from Feisal’s tent at Wejh after the exchange of news and greetings, when there was a stir of excitement. A messenger came in and whispered to Feisal. Feisal turned to Lawrence with shining eyes, trying to be calm, and said: ‘Auda is here.’ The tent-flap was drawn back, and a deep voice boomed out salutations to ‘Our Lord, the Commander of the Faithful,’ then entered a tall strong figure, with a haggard face, passionate and tragic. It was Auda; and with him Mohammed, his only surviving son, a boy of eleven years old, already a fighting man. Feisal had sprung to his feet, an honour not due to Auda on account of his rank, for nobler chiefs had been received sitting, but because he was Auda, the greatest fighting man in Arabia. Auda caught Feisal’s hand and kissed it; then they drew aside a pace or two and looked at each other, a splendidly unlike pair, Feisal the prophet, and Auda the warrior, each true to his type. They had an immediate understanding and liking for each other at this first meeting.

AUDA

from a drawing by ERIC KENNINGTON

Auda was simply dressed in white cotton robes and a red headcloth. He looked over fifty and his black hair was streaked with white: yet he was straight and vigorous, and as active as a much younger man. His hospitality was such that only very hungry guests did not find it inconvenient; his generosity kept him poor in spite of the profits of a hundred raids. He had married twenty-eight times, and had been wounded thirteen times. He had killed seventy-five men with his own hand in battle and never a man except in battle. These were all Arabs; Turks he did not count and could not guess at the score. Nearly all his family and kin had been killed in the wars which he had provoked. He made a point of being at enmity with nearly all the tribes of the desert so that he might have proper scope for raids, which he made as often as possible. There was always an element of foresight in his maddest adventures, and his patience in battle was great. If he got angry his face would twitch uncontrollably and he would burst into a fit of shaking passion which could only be calmed by battle: at such times he was like a wild beast and men fled from his presence. Nothing on earth could make him change his mind or obey an order or do anything of which he disapproved. He saw life as an epic in which he took a leading part, though indeed he believed his ancestors even mightier men than himself. His mind was stored with old ballads of battle, and he was always singing them in his great voice to the nearest listener or to the empty air. He spoke of himself in the third person and was so sure of his fame that he would even shout out stories against himself. He had a demon of mischief worse even than Lawrence’s and in public gatherings would say the most reckless or tactless things that he could find to say: more than that, he would invent and utter on oath dreadful tales of the private life of his hosts or guests. Yet even those whom he most embarrassed loved him warmly; for he was modest, simple as a child, honest, kind-hearted.

I heard the following story from a friend who was present at a state banquet given after the War at Maan in Transjordania when Sir Herbert Samuel, who had just been made High Commissioner of Palestine, was introduced to all the great chiefs of the district. Sir Herbert, somewhat shaken by an attempt that had just been made on his life, was glad of Lawrence’s chance presence as interpreter. In his speech he trusted that the great chief Auda (turning towards him) was pleased with the settlement of the Turkish empire and hoped that a long reign of peace had begun in the East. Lawrence translated this into Arabic, and Auda burst out violently in answer, ‘What peace so long as the French are in Syria, the English in Mesopotamia, and the Jews in Palestine?’ Lawrence, with equal mischief, translated this literally into English, without turning a hair. Fortunately Sir Herbert was content to answer with a smile.

Auda had come down to Wejh chafing at the delay of the campaign, anxious only to spread the bounds of Arab freedom to his own desert lands. The weight of anxiety was off the minds of Feisal and Lawrence before even they sat down to supper. It was a cheerful meal but suddenly interrupted by Auda, who leaped up with a loud ‘God forbid!’ and ran from the tent. A loud hammering was heard outside and the rest of the company stared at each other. It was Auda pounding his false teeth to fragments on a stone. I had forgotten, he explained, that Jemal Pasha (the Turkish commander in Syria who had hanged so many of the Arab leaders) ‘gave me these. I was eating my Lord Feisal’s bread with Turkish teeth!’ As a result Auda, having few teeth of his own, went about half-nourished for two months until a dentist was sent from Egypt to make him an Allied set.

Auda and Lawrence liked each other at first sight. The irony of their friendship has never been properly appreciated. From his schooldays onward, the greater part of Lawrence’s imaginative life seems to have been lived in the mediæval romances of Frankish and Norman chivalry. This was not a light passing romanticism, for Lawrence’s Irish-Hebridean blood would not allow such a thing: light romanticism is an English trait. It was, as I have said, an incurable romanticism which is at times not to be distinguished from realism. An English schoolboy is content to play for awhile at being a knight of the Round Table out of the Idylls of the King, or a jousting baron out of Ivanhoe; but later to dismiss the game as a stupidity and take to football, cigarette-smoking and the appreciation of cinema-actresses. Lawrence did nothing of the sort. Instead he went behind Tennyson’s Victorian sentimentality to the bolder and finer Morte D’Arthur of Malory; nor was he content to play at being a knight of the Holy Grail without binding himself, for the sake of personal efficiency, to the same rules of chastity and temperance and gentleness that Malory’s Galahad had kept; he certainly kept and keeps a knightly sense of honour as strictly as a Geraint, or a Walter de Manny. He went behind Scott’s false mediævalism in search of the real mediævalism; made an intense study of ancient armour and cathedrals and castles; read old French, studied the Crusades in the Holy Land itself. As an undergraduate he told a friend that in his opinion the world had virtually come to an end in 1500, destroyed by gunpowder and cheap printing. Lawrence so logically pursued his romantic career, which began by putting his nose between the pages of Scott and Tennyson, and then between those of Morris and Malory, and then between those of the original mediæval French and Latin romances, that at last he forced his whole head and shoulders and body between the pages of an epic in the making, and in the first book met Feisal, and in the second Auda.

This would have been all very well if Lawrence’s mediævalism had been natural as Auda’s was, the Middle Ages being not yet over in Arabia when he was born. But in his struggle against the forces of false romanticism, to avoid becoming a second Don Quixote, Lawrence had to arm himself with a careful twentieth-century scepticism which he continually used in test of his behaviour; true mediævalism was often cynical, never sceptical. It is, therefore, interesting to note that he carried three books with him throughout the Arabian campaign. The first was Malory’s Morte D’Arthur; but the second was the comedies of Aristophanes, whose laughing scepticism, especially in his anti-militaristic Lysistrata, provides a fine antidote to false romanticism.

His choice of a third book was equally interesting—the Oxford Book of English Verse, a collection which, in my opinion, gives the poetry it contains too strong an atmosphere of literary artistry. Perhaps I should have added to my portrait of Lawrence that his blind desire to be a literary artist is the more to be wondered at because he might well be something better than a mere artist. Artistic writing comes from a competitive literary atmosphere and should be the last thing on earth for Lawrence to aim at; the pursuit of ‘style’ is a social practice of the vulgarest sort. Lawrence may be excused for carrying this anthology (which is no worse than most other anthologies and weighs little when printed on India paper) if he chose it merely as a mixed potpourri of the English poets, faintly recalling the true smell of each individual. But I do not believe that this was the case; for a straining after literary artistry is one of his characteristics. The justification of the literary epic that came out of this adventure, his Seven Pillars, is that where the pursuit of style is forgotten in the excitement of story-telling there is clean and beautiful writing, and that where it is not forgotten one feels that Lawrence is admitting an unfortunate taint, the suppression of which would be a suppression of part of the truth about himself. He has, in fact, only been able to keep his integrity by confessing to an occasional weakness. But of this more later. The influence of the Oxford Book of English Verse on his feelings and actions during the campaign would be well worth studying. The copy survives with marginal annotations, many of these dated.

At all events, Auda accepted Lawrence as a fellow-mediævalist (the shadow of the Crusades happily not falling between them) and Lawrence was content in his company and went through the next book of the epical romance with only occasional critical doubts about himself. There was need for true epic action if Akaba was to be taken, for it was a feat beyond the scope of unheroic twentieth-century soldiering. So the two took counsel together for a journey northward to catch Auda’s Howeitat in their spring pastures of the Syrian desert: they would raise a camel-corps there and take Akaba by surprise from the east without guns or machine-guns. This would mean an encircling march of six hundred miles to capture a position which was within gun-fire of the British Fleet—which indeed was raiding the port at the moment. Yet the longest way was the only way; for Akaba was so strongly protected by the hills, elaborately fortified for miles back, that if a landing were attempted from the sea a small Turkish force could hold up a whole Allied division in the defiles. On the other hand, the Turks had never thought of facing their fortifications east against attack from inland. Auda’s men could probably rush them easily with help of neighbouring clans of Howeitat from the coast and in the hills. The importance of Akaba was great. It was a constant threat to the British Army which had now reached the Gaza-Beersheba line and therefore left it behind the right flank: a small Turkish force from Akaba could do great damage and might even strike at Suez. But Lawrence saw that the Arabs needed Akaba as much and more than the British. If they took it, they could link up with the British Army at Beersheba, and show by their presence that they were a real national army, one to be reckoned with. Nothing but actual contact could ever convince the British that the Arabs were really worth considering as allies, and once the contact was made, there would be no more difficulty about guns, money and equipment: the Arab campaign would no longer be a side-show but part of the main battle, and the British would feed it properly.

Lawrence discussed with the British officers at Wejh, Feisal’s advisers, the tactics that had occurred to him while he was lying sick in Abdulla’s camp. It must always be remembered that Lawrence, though the Englishman most respected by the Arabs, was not the only one fighting in Arabia, and, more than that, was not even a senior officer. On this occasion his views were disregarded. It had been decided some weeks before, chiefly on Lawrence’s impulse, to march the whole force inland from Wejh and occupy a large stretch of the pilgrims’ railway with mixed Egyptian and Arab troops; all arrangements had been made and it was hoped that Medina would soon surrender. But Lawrence had changed his mind: he now argued, against this scheme, that it had been found bad policy to mix Egyptians and Arabs, that the Arabs could not be trusted to attack or defend a line or a point against regular troops, that the country which they proposed to hold was barren, and that to force the Turks to waste men and arms and food in holding Medina and the railway line would harm them more than any military defeat that could be inflicted on them. However, plans were already too far advanced, and Lawrence could do nothing to sidetrack the expedition. He decided to go off on his own to take Akaba and to ask his seniors for no help in arms or stores that would in any way weaken their own expedition.

Feisal was his stand-by (Feisal thought and planned and worked for every one) and gave him twenty-two thousand pounds in gold from his own purse to pay the wages of the party and of all the new men enrolled during the journey. Sherif Nasir, usual leader of forlorn hopes, was in command. Seventeen Ageyl went as escort, and to deal with the Syrian Arab converts in the north came Zeki and Nesib, both important men of Damascus. The gold was shared out between Nasir, Auda, Nesib and Zeki. The party started on May the ninth; every man carried a forty-five-pound bag of flour with him as his rations for six weeks. There were a few spare rifles for presents, and six camel-loads of blasting gelatine for blowing up rails, trains or bridges in the north. It seemed a small force to go out to win a new province, and so thought the French representative with Feisal, who rode up to take a farewell photograph. Auda was worth photographing; he was dressed in finery that he had bought at Wejh—a mouse-coloured greatcoat of broadcloth with a velvet collar, and yellow elastic-sided boots. Nasir was the guide and knew this country almost as well as his own; after two years of fighting and preaching always beyond the front line of Feisal’s armies he was very weary and sunken in spirit. He talked sorrowfully to Lawrence of his beautiful home in Medina, the great cool house and its gardens planted with every sort of fruit-tree, the shady avenues, the vine-trellised swimming tank, the deep well with its wheel turned by oxen, the many fountains. Now, he said, the blight of the Turks was on the place: his fruit-trees were wasted, his palms chopped down. Even the great well, which had sounded with the creak of the wheel for six hundred years, had fallen silent; the garden, cracked with heat, was becoming as waste as the hills over which he now rode.

The baggage-camels went slowly, weak with the mange that was the curse of Wejh, grazing all the way. The riders were tempted to hurry them but Auda said no; because of the long ride before them they must go slowly and spare their beasts. This was a country of white sand which dazzled the eyes cruelly, and they were glad when they came to a small oasis in a valley where an old man, his wife and daughters, the only inhabitants, had a garden among the palm-trees. They grew tobacco, beans, melons, cucumbers, egg-plants, and worked day and night without much thought of the world outside. The old man laughed at his visitors, asking what more to eat and drink all this fighting and suffering would bring; he could not understand their talk of Arab liberty. He only lived for his garden. Every new year he sold his tobacco and bought a shirt for himself, and one each for his household; his felt cap, his only other garment, had been his grandfather’s a century before.

THE RIDE TO AKABA

May 9–July 6: 1917

At this place they met Rasim, Feisal’s chief gunner, Maulud his A.D.C., and others, who said that Sherif Sharraf, Feisal’s cousin, whom they were to meet at the next stopping-place, was away raiding. So they all rested for a day or two. The old man sold them vegetables, Rasim and Maulud provided tinned meat, and they had music each evening round the camp-fire. This was not the monotonous roaring ballad-music of the desert, or the exciting melodies of the Central Oases which the Ageyl sang, but the falsetto quarter-tones and trills of Damascus love-songs given bashfully on guitars by Maulud’s soldier-musicians. Nesib and Zeki, too, would sing passionate songs of Arab freedom, and all the camp would listen dead silent until each stanza ended, then give a sighing longing echo of the last note. The old man went on splashing out his water into the clay channels of his garden, laughing at such foolishness.

Auda hated the luxuriance of the garden and longed for the desert again. So on the second night they pushed forward again, Auda riding ahead and singing an endless ballad of the Howeitat. ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!’ he boomed on three bass-notes; and his voice guided the party through the dark valleys; Lawrence did not understand many words of the dialect, which was a very ancient form of Arabic. On this journey Nasir and Auda’s cousin Mohammed el Dheilan took pains with Lawrence’s Arabic, giving him alternate lessons in the classical Medina tongue and the vivid desert language. He had originally spoken, rather haltingly, the dialects of the country about Carchemish. Now, from mixing with so many tribes, he used a fluent ungrammatical mixture of every possible Arabic dialect, so that new-comers imagined that he came from some unknown illiterate district, the shot-rubbish ground of the whole Arabic speaking continent. Of Lawrence’s knowledge of Arabic he has written to me in a recent letter:

‘In Oxford I picked up a little colloquial grammar, before I first went out. In the next four years I added a considerable (4,000 word) vocabulary to this skeleton of grammar; words useful in archæological research mainly.

‘Then for the first two years of the War I spoke hardly a word of it and as I had never learned the letters to read or write—and have not yet—naturally it almost all passed from me. So when I joined Feisal I had to take it all up again from the beginning in a fresh and very different dialect. As the campaign grew it carried me from dialect to dialect, so that I never settled down to learn one properly. Also I learned by ear (not knowing the written language) and therefore incorrectly; and my teachers were my servants who were too respectful to go on reporting my mistakes to me. They found it easier to learn my Arabic than to teach me theirs.

‘In the end I had control of some 12,000 words; a good vocabulary for English, but not enough for Arabic, which is a very wide language; and I used to fit these words together with a grammar and syntax of my own invention. Feisal called my Arabic “a perpetual adventure” and used to provoke me to speak to him so that he might enjoy it....

‘I’ve never heard an Englishman speak Arabic well enough to be taken for a native of any part of the Arabic-speaking world, for five minutes.’

The march was difficult, over rocky country; at last the track became a goat-path zigzagging up a hill too steep to climb except on all fours. The party dismounted and led the camels. Soon they had great difficulty in coaxing them along, and had to push and pull them, adjusting the loads to ease them. Two of the weaker camels broke down and had to be killed: they were at once cut up for meat and their loads repacked on the others. Lawrence was glad when they came to a plateau at the top: he was ill again with fever and boils. They rode over lava, between red and black sandstone hills, and at last halted in a deep dark gorge, wooded with tamarisk and oleander, where they found the camp of Sharraf. He was still away and they waited until he came three days later.

Sleeping here in a shepherd’s fold Lawrence was awakened by the voice of an Ageyl boy pleading to him for compassion. His name was Daud and he had an inseparable friend called Farraj. Farraj had burned their tent in a frolic and would be beaten by the captain of the Ageyl who were with Sharraf. Would Lawrence beg him off? Lawrence spoke to the captain, who answered that the pair were always in trouble and had lately been so outrageous in their tricks that he must make an example of them. All that he could do was to let Daud share Farraj’s sentence. Daud jumped at the chance, kissed Lawrence’s hand and the captain’s and ran up the valley. The next day Farraj and Daud hobbled up to Lawrence, where he was discussing the march with Auda and Nasir, and said that they were for his service. Lawrence said that he wanted no servants and that anyhow after their beating they could not ride. Daud turned away defeated and angry, but Farraj went to Nasir, knelt humbly and begged him to persuade Lawrence to take them on: which he did.

Sharraf came and reassured them about water, which had been an anxiety; there were pools of new fallen rainwater farther on their road. They set out then and had not gone far before they met five riders coming from the railway. Lawrence riding in front with Auda had the thrill ‘Friend or enemy?’ of meeting strangers in the desert, but soon they saw that the riders were friendly Arabs, and riding in front was a fair-haired, shaggy-bearded Englishman in tattered uniform. Lawrence knew that this must be Hornby, Newcombe’s pupil who vied with him in smashing the railway. The persistent pair would cling for weeks to the railway with few helpers and often with no food, blowing up bridges and rails until they had exhausted their explosives or their camels and had to return for more. Newcombe was hard on his camels, whom he worked at the trot and who quickly wore out in that thirsty district; the men with him had either to leave him on the road—a lasting disgrace in the desert—or founder their own beasts. They used to complain: ‘Newcombe is like fire, he burns friend and enemy.’ Lawrence was told that Newcombe would not sleep except with his head on the rails, and that when there was no gun-cotton left, Hornby would worry the metals with his teeth. This was exaggerated, but gave a sense of their destructive energy which kept four Turkish labour battalions constantly busy patching up after them.

After greetings and exchange of news Hornby passed on and Lawrence’s party continued the march over the lava desert. On this eighth day of their journey they camped in a damp valley full of thorny brushwood which was, however, too bitter for the camels to feed on. But they ran about tearing up the bushes and heaping them on a big bonfire, where they baked bread. When the fire was hot, out wriggled a large black snake which must have been gathered, torpid, with the twigs. The ninth day’s journey was still over long miles of lava broken with sandstone, a dead, weary, ghostly land without pasture. The camels were nearly spent.

At last the lava ended and they came to an open plain of fine scrub and golden sand with green bushes scattered over it. There were a few water-holes scooped by someone after the rainstorm of three weeks before. By these they camped, and drove the unloaded camels out to feed. There was an alarm when a dozen mounted men rode up from the direction of the railway and began firing at the herdsmen, but the party at the camp ran at once to the nearest mounds and rocks, shouting, and began firing too. The raiders, whoever they were, galloped off in alarm. Auda thought that they were a patrol of the Shammar tribe. They rode on again over the plain through a fantastic valley in which were red sandstone pillars of all shapes and all sizes from ten to sixty feet in height, with narrow sand paths between, then over a plateau strewn with black basalt, and finally reached the water-pools of which Sharraf had spoken. Hornby and Newcombe had evidently camped here: there were empty sardine-tins lying about.

Daud and Farraj were proving good servants; they were brave and cheerful, rode well, worked willingly. They spent much time attending to Lawrence’s camel which had the mange very badly on its face; having no proper ointment they rubbed in butter, which was a slight relief for the intolerable itch. This tenth day’s journey brought the party to the railway which they had to cross near a station called Dizad. It ran in a long valley. They happened on a deserted stretch of line and were much relieved, because Sharraf had warned them of constant Turkish patrols of mule-mounted men, camel-corps and trolleys carrying machine-guns. There was good pasture on both sides of the line, and the riding-camels were allowed to graze for a few minutes while Lawrence and the Ageyl began fixing gun-cotton and gelatine charges to the rails. The camels were then caught again and taken on to safety while the fuses of the charges were lighted in proper order: the hollow valley echoed with the bursts. This was Auda’s first experience of dynamite, and he improvised some verses in praise of its power and glory. Then they cut three telegraph-wires, tied the free ends to the saddles of six riding-camels and drove the astonished team far across the valley with the growing weight of twanging wire and snapped poles dragging after them. When the camels could pull no more, the tangle was cut loose. They rode on in the growing dusk until the country, with its switchback of rock ridges, was too difficult to be crossed safely in the dark by weak camels. They halted, but no fire was lit for fear of alarming the Turks who, roused by the noise of the explosions, could be heard in the block-houses all along the line shouting loudly and shooting at shadows.

The next morning they left the rocky country behind and found themselves on a great plain: it was a country unknown to Europeans, and old Auda told Lawrence the names of this valley or that peak, bidding him mark them on his map. Lawrence said that he did not want to pander to the curiosity of geographers in an unspoiled country. Auda was pleased and began to give Lawrence instead personal notes and news about the chiefs in the party or ahead on the line of march. This whiled away dreary hours of slow march across this waste of sand and rotten sandstone slabs. There were no signs of life in this desert, which was named ‘The Desolate,’ no tracks of gazelle, no lizards, rats or even birds. There was a hot wind blowing with a furnace-taste and, as the day went on and the sun rose, it blew stronger. By noon it was half a gale. The Arabs drew their headcloths tightly across their faces to keep the stinging sand from wearing open the sun-chapped skin into painful wounds. Lawrence’s throat was so dry that he could not eat for three days after without pain. By sunset they had gone fifty miles and came then to a valley full of scrub as dry as dead wood. The party dismounted wearily and gathered armfuls to build a great fire to show the rest of the party, from whom they had got separated the previous day after crossing the railway, where they were halting. When there was a fine heap gathered together they found that nobody had any matches. However, the main body came up an hour later, and that night they set sentries to watch because it was a district over which raiding parties frequently passed. They gave the camels the whole night for their grazing.

Noon of the twelfth day brought them to the place towards which they had been heading, an ancient stone well about thirty feet deep. The water was plentiful but rather brackish and soon grew foul when kept in a water-skin. On the thirteenth day out the sun was hotter than ever: at midday Auda and his nephew Zaal rode out hunting towards a green-looking stretch of country while the rest of the party rested in the shade under some cliffs. The hunters soon returned, each with a gazelle. Bread had been baked the day before at the well, and they had water in their skins, so they made a feast of it. On the fourteenth day they came in view of the great desert of sand-dunes called Nefudh which Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Gertrude Bell and other famous travellers had crossed. Lawrence wanted to cut across a corner of it but old Auda refused, saying that men went to Nefudh only out of necessity when raiding, and that the son of his father did not raid on a mangy, tottering camel. Their business was to reach the next place, Arfaja, alive.

They rode over monotonous glittering sand and over worse stretches of polished mud, often miles square and white as paper, which reflected back the sun until the eyes were tortured even through closed eyelids. It was not a steady pain but ebbed and flowed, piling up to an agony until the rider nearly swooned; then, falling away for a moment, gave him time to get a new capacity for suffering. That night they baked bread; Lawrence gave half his share to his camel which was very tired and hungry. She was a pedigree camel given to Feisal by his father who had her as a gift from the Emir Ibn Saud of the Central Oases. The best camels were she-camels: they were better tempered, less noisy and more comfortable to ride. They would go on marching long after they were worn out, indeed until they fell dead in their tracks of exhaustion: whereas the males when they grew tired would roar and fling themselves down, and die unnecessarily from sheer rage.

The fifteenth day was an anxious one: there was no water left, and another hot wind would delay them a third day in the desert. They had therefore started long before dawn over a huge plain strewn with brown flints which cut the camels’ feet badly and soon set them limping. In the distance they saw puffs of dust. Auda said ‘Ostriches,’ and presently a man rode up with two great eggs. They decided to breakfast on these, but there was no more fuel than a wisp or two of grass. However, Lawrence opened a packet of blasting gelatine and shredded it carefully on the lighted grass, over which the eggs were propped on stones. Nasir and Nesib the Syrian stopped to scoff. Auda took his silver-hilted dagger and chipped the top of the first egg. A terrible stink arose and every one ran out of range. The second egg was fresh enough and hard as a stone. They dug out the meat with the dagger, using flints for plates. Even Nasir, who never before in his life had fallen so low as to eat eggs—eggs were counted as paupers’ food in Arabia—was persuaded to take his share. Later oryx were seen, the rare Arabian deer, with long slender horns and white bellies, which are the origin of the unicorn legend. Auda’s men stalked them: they ran a little but, being unaccustomed to man, stopped still out of curiosity, and only ran away again when it was too late.

The Ageyl were dismounted and leading their camels for fear that if the wind blew stronger some of them would be dead before evening. Lawrence suddenly noticed that one of his men, a yellow-faced fellow called Gasim from the town of Maan, who had fled to the desert after killing a Turkish tax-gatherer, was not with the rest. The Ageyl thought that he was with Auda’s Howeitat, but when Lawrence went forward he found Gasim’s camel riderless, with Gasim’s rifle and food on it: it dawned on the party that Gasim was lost, probably miles back. He could not keep up with the caravan on foot, and the heat-mirage was so bad that the caravan was invisible two miles away, and the ground was so hard that it left no tracks. The Ageyl did not care much what happened to Gasim; he was a stranger and surly, lazy and ill-natured. Possibly someone in the party had owed him a grudge and paid it; or possibly he had dozed in the saddle and fallen off. His road-companion, a Syrian peasant called Mohammed, whose duty it was to look after him, had a foundered camel and knew nothing of the desert; it would be death for him to turn back. The Howeitat would have gone in search, but they were lost in the mirage, hunting or scouting. The Ageyl were so clannish that they would only put themselves out for each other. Lawrence had to go himself. If he shirked the duty it would make a bad impression on the men.

He turned his camel round and forced her grunting and moaning with unhappiness past the long line of her friends, into the emptiness behind. He was in no heroic temper; he was furious with his other servants for their indifference, and particularly with Gasim, a grumbling brutal fellow whose engagement he had much regretted. It seemed absurd to risk his life and all it meant to the Arab Revolt for a single worthless man. He had been keeping direction throughout the march with an oil-compass and hoped by its help to return nearly to that day’s starting-place seventeen miles behind. He passed some shallow pits with sand in them and rode across these so that the camel tracks would show in them and mark the way for his return. After an hour and a half’s ride he saw a figure, or a bush, or at least something black ahead of him in the mirage. He turned his camel’s head towards it, and saw that it was Gasim. He called and Gasim stood confusedly, nearly blinded and silly, with his arms held out to Lawrence and his black mouth gaping. Lawrence gave him water, a gift of the Ageyl, the last that they had, and he spilled it madly over his face and breast in his haste to drink. He stopped babbling and began to wail out his sorrows. Lawrence sat him, pillion, on the camel’s rump and turned about. The camel seemed relieved at the turn and moved forward well.

Lawrence went back by his compass course so accurately that he often found the old tracks that he had made in the pits. The camel began to stride forward freely, and he was glad at this sign of her reserve strength. Gasim was moaning about the pain and terror and thirst; Lawrence told him to stop, but he would not and sat huddled loosely so that at each step of the camel he bumped down on her hind-quarters. This and his crying spurred her to greater speed. Lawrence was afraid that she might founder, and again told him to stop, but Gasim only screamed the louder. Then Lawrence struck him and swore that if he made another sound he would be pushed off and abandoned. He kept quiet then. After four miles a black bubble appeared in the mirage, bouncing about. Later it broke into three and Lawrence wondered if they were enemies. A minute later he recognized Auda with two of Nasir’s men, who had come back to look for him. Lawrence yelled jests and scoffs at them for abandoning a friend in the desert. Auda pulled at his beard and grumbled that had he been present Lawrence would never have gone back. Gasim was transferred to another rider’s camel with insults. As they went forward Auda said, ‘For that thing not worth the price of a camel....’ Lawrence interrupted: ‘Not worth half a crown,’ and Auda, laughing, rode up to Gasim, struck him sharply and made him, like a parrot, repeat his price. What had happened, apparently, was that Gasim had dismounted for something or other that morning, and sitting down had gone to sleep.

An hour later they caught up the caravan and towards evening they reached Sirhan, the chain of pastures and wells running up towards Syria. There among sandhills grown with tamarisk they halted. They had no water yet, but ‘The Desolate’ was crossed and they knew that they would get some the next day, so they rested the whole night and lit bonfires for the Emir of the Ruwalla’s slave who had been with the caravan and had disappeared the same day. Nobody was anxious for him, for he had a camel and knew the country. He might be riding direct to Jauf, the capital of the Emir Nuri, to earn the reward of first news that the party was coming with gifts. However, he did not ride in that night or next day, and months afterwards the Emir told Lawrence that the man’s dried body had lately been found lying beside his unplundered camel far out in the wilderness. He must have got lost in the mirage and wandered until his camel broke down, and there died of thirst and heat. Not a long death—the very strongest man would die on the second day in this summer season—but very painful. Fear and panic tore at the brain, and in an hour or two reduced the bravest man to a babbling lunatic; then the sun killed him. Lawrence himself learned to stand thirst as well as any of the Bedouin. He noticed that they did not drink on the march and learned to do as they did—to drink deeply at the wells and make it last, if need be, for two or three days. Only once in all his journeys did he get really ill from thirst.

The next day, the sixteenth of their journey, they came to the wells of Arfaja, grown about with a sweet-smelling bush after which the place was named. The water was creamy to the touch, with a strong smell and brackish taste: it soon went bad in the water-skins. There was plenty of grazing for the camels, so they stayed a day and sent scouts to the southernmost well of Sirhan to inquire for news of Auda’s Howeitat, in search of whom they came. If they were not in that direction they would be to the north, and by marching up Sirhan the party could not fail to find them.

There was an alarm at the wells when a Shammar patrol of three men was seen hiding among the bushes. Mohammed el Dheilan, Auda’s cousin and second man of the clan, went after them with a few men, but did not press the chase because of the weakness of his camels. He was about thirty-eight years old, tall, strong and active; richer because less generous than Auda, with landed property and a little house at Maan. Under his influence the Howeitat war-parties would ride out delicately with sunshades and bottles of mineral-water. He was the brain of the clan and directed its politics.

Lawrence was taking coffee that night, sitting at the camp-fire with the Ageyl and Mohammed el Dheilan. While the coffee-beans were being pounded in the mortar (with three grains of cardamom seed for flavouring) and boiled and strained through a palm-fibre mat, and they were talking about the Revolt, suddenly a volley rang out and one of the Ageyl fell screaming. Instantly Mohammed el Dheilan quenched the fire with a kick of his foot that covered it with sand. The coffee party scattered to collect rifles and shot back vigorously. The raiders, a party of perhaps twenty, were surprised at the resistance and made off. The wounded man soon died. It was most disheartening to be troubled by inter-Arab warfare when all efforts should be concentrated on fighting the Turks.

The seventeenth and eighteenth days passed without danger as they rode from oasis to oasis. Nesib and Zeki the Syrians were planning works of plantation and reclamation here for the Arab Government to undertake when it was at last established. It was typical of Syrian townsmen to plan wonderful schemes far ahead and leave present responsibilities to others. Some days before, Lawrence had said: ‘Zeki, your camel is mangy.’ ‘Alas,’ he agreed, ‘but in the evening we shall make haste to dress her skin with ointment.’ The following day Lawrence mentioned mange again and Zeki said that it had given him an idea. When Damascus was in Arab hands, he would have a Government Veterinary Department for the care of camels, horses, donkeys, even sheep and goats, with a staff of skilled surgeons. Central hospitals with students learning the business would be founded in four districts. There would be travelling inspectors, research laboratories and so on.... But his camel had not been treated yet.

The next day the talk went back to mange and Lawrence chaffed them about their schemes: but they began talking of stud-farms for improving the breeds of animals. On the sixth day the camel died. Zeki said: ‘Yes, because you did not dress her.’ Auda, Nasir and the rest kept their beasts going by constant care: they might perhaps survive until they reached a tribe that had proper remedies.

AUDA AND HIS KINSMEN
(His son Mohammed is seated on the left)

Copyright American Colony Stores, Jerusalem

On this eighteenth day they met a Howeitat herdsman who guided them to the camp of one of the chiefs. The first part of the journey was happily over and the gold and explosives were safe. A council was held and it was decided to present six thousand pounds to Nuri by whose permission the Howeitat were here in Sirhan; Nuri would probably allow them to stop a few days longer and enrol volunteers, and when they moved off would protect the Howeitat families and tents and herds. Auda decided to go to Nuri on this embassy, because he was a friend. Nuri was too near and too powerful a neighbour for Auda to quarrel with, however great his delight in war, and the two men bore with each other’s oddities in patient friendliness. Auda would explain to Nuri what he, Nasir and Lawrence hoped to do, and say that Feisal wished him to make a public demonstration of goodwill towards the Turks. Only by these means could he cover the advance to Akaba while still keeping the Turks favourably disposed. Feisal knew that Nuri was at the Turks’ mercy still; they could blockade his province from the north. So Auda went off with six bags of gold and said that he would rouse all his clan, the Abu Tayi Howeitat, on the way. He would be back soon.

Meanwhile the local families promised unlimited hospitality and Nasir, Lawrence, Nesib, Zeki and the rest were bound to accept it. Every morning they had to go to a different guest-tent and eat an enormous meal. About fifty men were present at each of these feasts and the food was always served on the same enormous copper dish, five feet across, which was lent from host to host and belonged really to Auda. It was always the same boiled mutton and rice, two or three whole sheep making a pyramid of meat in the middle with an embankment of rice all round, a foot wide and six inches deep, filled with legs and ribs of mutton. In the very centre were the boiled sheeps’ heads propped upright with flapping ears and jaws pulled open to show the teeth. Cauldrons of boiling fat, full of bits of liver, intestines, skin, odd scraps of meat, were poured over the great dish until it began to overflow on the ground; and at this sign the host called them all to eat. They would rise with good-mannered shyness and crowd about the bowl, twenty-two at a time, each man kneeling on one knee.

Taking their time from Nasir, the most honourable man of the company, they rolled up their right sleeves, said grace and dipped together with their fingers. Only the right hand might be used, for good manners. Lawrence always dipped cautiously; his fingers could hardly bear the hot fat. Nobody was allowed to talk, for it was an insult to the host not to appear to be very hungry indeed, eating at top speed. The host himself stood by and encouraged their appetites as they dipped, tore and gobbled. At last eating gradually slackened and each man crouched with his elbow on his knee, the hand hanging down from the wrist to drip over the edge of the tray. When all had finished Nasir cleared his throat for a signal and they rose together in haste, muttering, ‘God requite it to you, host,’ and then made room for the next twenty-two men. The more dainty eaters wiped the grease off their hands on a flap of the roof-cloth intended for this purpose. Then sighingly all sat down on carpets, while slaves splashed water over their hands and the tribal cake of soap went round. When the last man had eaten and coffee had been served, the guests remounted with a quiet blessing. Instantly the children would rush for what was left, and tear the gnawed bones from one another; some would escape with valuable pieces, to eat them safely behind a distant bush. The dogs yapping about finishing what was left. Nesib and Zeki soon broke down under this continual feeding, not being used to desert hospitality, so Nasir and Lawrence had to go out twice a day for a week and eat for the honour of Feisal.

On May the thirtieth they went forward again in company with the whole of the Abu Tayi; it was the first time that Lawrence had ever taken part in the march routine of a Bedouin tribe. There was no apparent order, but the caravan advanced simultaneously on a wide front, each family making a self-contained party. The men were on riding-camels; the black goat-hair tents and the howdahs in which the women were hidden were carried on the baggage-camels. Farraj and Daud were behaving with more than usual mischief in this care-free atmosphere. They rode about leaving a trail of practical jokes behind them. Particularly they made jokes about snakes. Sirhan was visited that summer by a plague of snakes—horned vipers, puff-adders, cobras and black snakes. By night movement was dangerous and at last the party learned to beat the bushes with sticks as they walked. It was dangerous to draw water after dark, for snakes swam in the pools or gathered in clusters on their brinks. Twice puff-adders invaded the coffee-hearth, twisting among the seated men.

Lawrence’s party of fifty killed about twenty snakes daily. Seven men were bitten. Three died, four recovered after great fear and pain. The Howeitat treatment was to bind up the bite with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the patient until he died. They also pulled on thick blue-tasselled red ankle-boots from Damascus over their feet when they went out at night. The snakes loved warmth and at night would lie beside the sleepers under or on the blankets: so great care was taken in getting up each morning. The constant danger was getting on everyone’s nerves except Farraj’s and Daud’s. They thought it very witty to raise false alarms and give furious beatings to harmless twigs and roots: at last Lawrence at a noonday halt forbade them ever again to call out ‘Snakes!’ About an hour later, sitting on the sand, he noticed them smiling and nudging one another. His glance idly followed theirs to a bush close by where lay coiled a brown snake, about to strike at him.

He threw himself to one side and called out to another of his men, who jumped at the snake with a riding-cane and killed it. Lawrence then told him to give the boys half a dozen strokes with the cane to teach them not to take things too literally at his expense. Nasir, dozing beside Lawrence, woke up shouting: ‘And six more from me!’ Nesib and Zeki and the rest who had all suffered from the boys’ bad sense of humour called out for more punishment still. However, Lawrence saved Farraj and Daud from the full weight of their companions’ anger; instead he proclaimed them moral outcasts and set them to gather sticks and draw water under the charge of the women, the greatest disgrace for sixteen-year-olds who counted themselves men.

The tribe moved on from well to well—the water always brackish—through a landscape of barren palms and bushes which were no use for grazing or firewood and only served to harbour snakes. At last they reached a place called Ageila where they came on a village of tents, and out rode Auda to meet them. He had a strong escort with him of Ruwalla horsemen, which showed that he had had success with Nuri. The Ruwalla, bareheaded and yelling, with brandished spears and wild firing of rifles and revolvers, welcomed the party to Nuri’s empty house.

Here they stopped, pitched their tents, and received deputations from the clans and gifts of ostrich eggs, Damascus dainties, camels and scraggy horses. Three men were set to make coffee for the visitors, who came in to Nasir as Feisal’s deputy and took the oath of allegiance to the Arab movement, promising to obey Nasir and follow him. Their presents included an unintentional one of lice; so that long before sunset Nasir and Lawrence were nearly mad with irritation. Auda had a stiff left arm due to an old wound, but experience had taught him how to poke a camel-stick up his left sleeve and turn it round and round against his ribs, which relieved the itch a good deal.

Nebk was the place decided upon for a rallying ground; it had plentiful water and some grazing. Here Nasir and Auda sat down for days to discuss together how to enrol the volunteers and prepare the road to Akaba, now about a hundred and eighty miles to the west. This left Nesib, Zeki and Lawrence at leisure. As usual the Syrians let their imagination run ahead of them. In their enthusiasm they forgot all about Akaba and their immediate purpose, and spoke of marching straight to Damascus, rousing the Druse and Shaalan Arabs on the way. The Turks would be taken by surprise and the final objective won without troubling about the steps between.

This was absurd. There was a Turkish army massing at Aleppo to recover Mesopotamia, which could be rushed down to Damascus. Feisal was still in Wejh. The British were held up on the wrong side of Gaza. If Damascus should be taken now by Nasir he would be left unsupported, without resources or organization, without even a line of communication with his friends. But Nesib was infatuated with his idea, and Lawrence could only stop him by intrigue. So he went to Auda and told him that if Damascus were made the new objective, the credit and spoils would go to Nuri and not him; he went to Nasir and used the friendship between them to keep him on the Akaba plan and also flattered Nasir’s distinguished birth at the expense of Nesib’s, a Damascene of doubtful ancestry. This was sordid but necessary. For Damascus, even if captured by surprise, could not be held six weeks; the British at Gaza could not attack at a moment’s notice, nor would transport be available for a landing at Beyrout. And a set-back at Damascus would end the rebellion: rebellions that stand still or go back are always doomed. Akaba must be taken first.

Fortunately, Auda and Nasir listened to Lawrence but Nesib decided to go off with Zeki to the Druse mountains to prepare the way for his great Damascus scheme. The gold that Feisal had shared out to him was not enough for his purpose, so he asked Lawrence for a promise of more if he raised a separate movement in Syria under his own leadership. Lawrence knew that he could not do this, so promised Nesib that, if he now lent Nasir some of his gold to help him reach Akaba, funds would be got together there for the Syrian movement. He agreed, and Nasir was glad of two unexpected bags of gold for the payment of new volunteers. Nesib went off optimistically: Lawrence knew that he could do no harm with the little money that he had with him, and by talking too much might mislead the Turks into thinking that an immediate attack really was intended on Damascus.