The Egyptian laborers entertained us incessantly with their fantastic ceremonial dances. There was not room enough for all of them to dance at a time, and so they went at it in relays. Some of them danced until they collapsed on the deck from exhaustion. Fainting, to them, was merely a sign that their spirits had been transported to heaven for a few minutes’ sojourn with the Almighty.
There was no passenger accommodation, so that we had to sleep out on the deck with the donkeys and mules. I bunked beside a mouse-colored mule from Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Mark Twain. She was very pessimistic. She seemed to be worrying about something back home and didn’t sleep well. Neither did I! Mark Twain would have lost his sense of humor if he had been in my place.
We had a British officer on board who was bound for the Persian Gulf. He was laboring under the erroneous impression that he had fallen heir to the mantle of George Robey or Harry Lauder. He used to tell a story until we were almost bored to extinction. I am going to repeat one of his tales, not because I think it is funny but because I know it is not funny! I want to show you the sort of thing we had to endure. He said that he was out hunting lions once in Central Africa; none of us doubted that for he had knocked about all over the world from Kamchatka to the Kameruns. He said that one day a lion jumped at him out of the bush but that he ducked just in time, causing the lion to go right over his head. Some minutes passed, and as the lion failed to return he crawled along on his stomach to reconnoiter. Coming to an open space he peered cautiously through the tall grass, and there he saw that same lion—practising low jumps! One day we hit upon the idea of giving cigarettes to the Turkish deserters, who could understand only a few words of English, in order to get them to listen to his stories. They would laugh when he laughed, and it satisfied him and certainly relieved the rest of us.
When we finally arrived at the ancient and long deserted seaport of King Solomon at the head of the Gulf of Akaba, our ark anchored half a mile offshore. We eventually pushed off, bound for the distant fringe of palm-trees at the base of King Solomon’s Mountains on board a lighter loaded down with donkeys and mules. One unlucky donkey was kicked overboard by a nervous mule. Immediately two sharks appeared and attacked him fore and aft. One seized a front leg and the other the poor donkey’s rump, and literally they pulled him in two. We were told by the skipper of our ark that there are more sharks in the Red Sea than in any other waters of the globe.
When we grounded on the coral beach we were greeted by several thousand Bedouins, who welcomed us by blazing into the air with their rifles and pistols. This firing had begun when we were still afar off, and Mr. Chase and I thought we were arriving in the midst of a battle. So fantastic and full of color was that palm-fringed coral shore, and so picturesque were the Bedouins with their flowing beards, their gorgeous robes, their strange head-dress, and their array of ancient and modern weapons of every sort, that it all seemed like some bizarre Oriental pageant. So indeed it was, and these were some of Colonel Lawrence’s modern Arabian knights.
King Solomon’s long-forgotten port had been turned into a great base-camp, and enormous piles of supplies lay stacked in the sand and under the palms. Several of the British officers who were in charge of the receiving of supplies at Akaba took us to a near-by tent and slaked our growing thirst, and a few hours later Lawrence himself came down the Wadi Ithm, returning from one of his mysterious expeditions into the blue.
With Lawrence, no two days in the desert were ever the same, so that it would be impossible to describe a typical one. But the camp routine at the headquarters of the Arabian army, when no ghazu (raid) was in progress, followed some such program as this: At 5 a. m., as the first rays of dawn fell on the jagged peaks of Sinai, the army imam would climb the highest sand-dune and give the morning call to prayer. He was a chap with such astonishing vocal powers that his nasal chant woke every man and animal in Akaba. Immediately after he had finished calling the Arabian proletariat, Emir Feisal’s private imam would softly intone the morning call at the door of his tent: “Praise be to Allah who makes day succeed the night!”
Miss Gertrude Bell, the famous Syrian traveler, who, although a woman, served on the Intelligence Staff in the Near East during the war, has written a vivid description of the glorious intoxication of a desert morning: “To wake in the desert dawn is like waking in the heart of an opal. To my mind the saying about the Bay of Naples should run differently. See the desert on a fine morning and die—if you can.” Surely a fascinating book of adventure and romance could be written about the war-time experience of Miss Bell in the Mesopotamian Desert. As a staff officer she did everything required of any man but wear a spine-pad and shorts.
A few minutes after the call to prayer had aroused the camp, a cup of sweetened coffee would turn up, brought in by one of Feisal’s slaves. The emir had five young Abyssinian blacks; slaves who were the acme of fidelity, because the emir did not treat them as slaves, nor regard them as such. Whenever one of them desired money, Feisal ordered him to help himself to whatever he needed from his bag of gold. No matter what was taken, he never complained, and as a result, the thought of robbing never seemed to occur to them.
At 6 a. m. Lawrence was in the habit of breakfasting with Feisal in the emir’s tent, squatting Bedouin fashion on an old Baluchi prayer-rug. Breakfast on lucky days included a many-layered pastry of richly spiced puffed bread called Mecca cakes, and cooked durra, a small round white seed—rather nasty stuff. Then, of course, there were the inevitable dates. After breakfast little glasses of sweetened tea were produced. From then until 8 a. m. Lawrence would discuss the possible events of the day either with the British officers or with some of the more prominent Arab leaders. At that time Feisal worked with his secretary or talked over private affairs in his tent with Lawrence. At 8 a. m. Feisal would hold court and grant audiences in the Diwan tent. According to the regular procedure, it was customary for the emir to sit at the end of a great rug on a dais. Callers or petitioners sat in front of the tent in a half-circle until they were called up. All questions were settled summarily, and nothing was left over.