With Lawrence in Arabia

by Lowell Thomas

The chief unit of wealth in Arabia is the camel. A man is not spoken of as owning so many apartment-houses or country estates, but as owning so many camels. From biblical down to modern times, wars have been waged in the desert for the possession of camels. One tribe will swoop down upon another and steal all its camels; then that tribe will mount its horses, dash across the desert, and drive off all the camels of another tribe. So, in the course of twelve months, one camel may become the stolen property of half a dozen different tribes. The very existence of human life in the desert depends upon the camel. The Arabs use it not only as a beast of burden; they drink its milk and use its hair for making cloth, and when it becomes old they kill it and use its flesh for food. Camel steak in Arabia is regarded much as blubber is among the Eskimos, but the average European would prefer to worry along on caviar and pâté de foie gras.

The camel is practically the only animal that can exist on the scant vegetation of the desert. Its teeth are so long that it can chew cactus without the thorns pricking either its lips or the roof of its mouth. Although camels can go for long periods without water, when they do drink they more than make up for lost time. It takes a half-hour to water them, but each camel can accommodate a nice little swallow of twenty gallons. It is very irritating when suffering from thirst in the desert to hear your camel drawing on the copious reserve of water inside its body. At such times the Arabs, when in dire straits, will kill a camel and drink the water in its stomach. The water is of a greenish color and has a greenish taste, but one can’t be too fastidious when perishing from thirst.

In judging a camel, some of the many things to be considered are the length of the inside of the belly, the way the beast lifts its feet, the way it carries its head, the depth of the neck, the length of the front leg, the length of the front and back shoulders, and the girth and shape of the hump. A very long leg is particularly desirable, as is a small circumference around the waist. A camel should be neither too fat nor too thin. The hump, which should be of hard, fatless muscle, is of paramount importance. The dromedary actually seems to live on its hump, and if it be worked too hard the hump gradually disappears. If it has no hump, or a low one or a thin one or a fat one, the animal is of little value and will break down in a short time. Age is judged by the teeth, as with the horse. Camels usually live for about twenty-five years, being in their prime between the ages of four and fourteen. Over good ground first-class Arabian dromedaries can trot up to twenty-one miles an hour, canter up to twenty-eight miles an hour, and gallop up to thirty-two with their legs going like huge pistons. For a whole day’s travel, however, the most desirable pace is a jog-trot of seven miles an hour. The ordinary speed for a long journey of many days across the desert is only about four and a half miles an hour; and if the journey extends over hundreds of miles, it is advisable always to keep the camel at a walk. Lawrence’s feat in making a forced trek of three hundred miles in three days was therefore looked upon by his followers as almost a miracle. A good camel makes absolutely no sound when it walks; a trait which is of great assistance both to the Bedouins during their night raids and to desert traders who fear assault. The Arab teaches his mount not to whine, and a whole caravan may pass within twenty yards of a tent without being heard by the occupants.

The winter of 1917-18 was a severe one for the camels. Lawrence’s army was at Tafileh in January, at an altitude of five thousand feet. The snow drifted to a depth of four feet, impassable for the camels unless their riders dismounted and dug a path with their hands. Many of them, both camels and Arabs, perished from the cold.

Lawrence sent a request to headquarters, Cairo, for heavy clothing and boots for his men. Instead of receiving them, he got a wireless message telling him that Arabia was a “tropical country”!

One morning an Arab column awoke on a hillside to find that snow had drifted over their crouching camels. They dug them out with the iron spoons which are used for roasting coffee-beans, but all were dead. Lawrence and his men had to walk barefoot through the snow for miles before they reached a military encampment. Another time thirty-four men started from Akaba for Tafileh on camels, and only one man succeeded in getting through alive. The Arab army had plenty of camels at this time, thanks, partly, to Prince Zeid. Some months previous the Turks had sent a large caravan of supplies toward Medina from Hail, Ibn Rashid’s capital in Central Arabia. Zeid and his men surprised it at Hanakieh, killed thirty Turks, captured two hundred and fifty more and also three thousand camels, two thousand sheep, four mountain-guns, and several thousand rifles.

Although “the camel is an intricate animal and calls for skilled labor in the handling,” according to Colonel Lawrence, “she yields a remarkable return. We had no system of supply: each man was self-contained and carried on the saddle from the sea-base, at which the raid started, six weeks’ food for himself. The six weeks’ ration for ordinary men was a half-bag of flour, forty-five pounds in weight. Luxurious feeders carried some rice also for variety. Each man baked for himself, kneading his own flour into unleavened cakes and warming it in the ashes of a fire. We carried about a pint of drinking-water each, since the camels required to come to water on the average every three days, and there was no advantage in our being richer than our mounts. Some of us never drank between wells, but those were hardy men; most of us drank a lot at each well, and had a drink during the intermediate dry day. In the heat of summer Arabian camels will do about two hundred and fifty miles comfortably between drinks and this represents about three days’ vigorous marching.

“The country is not so dry as it is painted, and this radius was always more than we needed. Wells are seldom more than one hundred miles apart. An easy day’s march was fifty miles: an emergency march might be up to one hundred and ten miles in a day.