By sunset they reached a hamlet of twenty huts where the guide bought flour and kneaded a dough cake with water, two inches thick and eight across. He cooked it in a brush-wood fire that a woman provided for him and, shaking off the ashes, shared it with Lawrence. They had come sixty miles from Rabegh since the evening before and still had as far again to go before they reached Feisal’s camp. Lawrence was stiff and aching, his skin blistered and his eyes weary. They stopped at the hamlet for two hours and rode on in pitch darkness up valleys and down valleys. Underfoot it seemed to be sand, for there was no noise, and the only change came from the heat of the air in the hollows and the comparative coolness of the open places. Lawrence kept on falling asleep in the saddle and being woken up again suddenly and sickeningly as he made a clutch by instinct at the saddle-post to recover his balance. Long after midnight they halted, slept for three hours and went on again under a moon. The road was among trees along another water-course with sharp pointed hills on either side, black and white in the moonlight: the air was stifling. Day came as they entered a broader part of the valley with dust spinning round here and there in the dawn wind. On the right lay another hamlet of brown and white houses looking like a dolls’ village in the shadow of a huge precipice thousands of feet high.
From the houses after a while came out a talkative old man on a camel and joined the party. The guide gave him short answers and showed that he was unwelcome, and the old man to make things easier burrowed in his saddle pouch and offered the party food. It was yesterday’s dough cake moistened with liquid butter and dusted with sugar. One made pellets of it with the fingers and ate it that way. Lawrence accepted little, but the guide and his son ate greedily, so that the old man went short: and this was as it should be, for it was considered effeminate for an Arab to carry so much food on a journey of a mere hundred miles. The old man gave news of Feisal; the day before he had been repulsed in an attack and had had a few men wounded: he gave the names of the men and details of their wounds.
They were riding over a firm pebbly ground among acacia and tamarisk trees and their long morning shadows. The valley was like a park; a quarter of a mile broad. It was walled in by precipices, a thousand feet high, of brown and dark-red with pink stains, at the base were long streaks of dark green stone. After seven miles they came to a tumbledown barrier which ran across the valley and right up the hill-sides wherever the slope was not too steep to take the wall: in the middle were two walled-in enclosures. Lawrence asked the old man what the wall meant. He answered instead that he had been in Damascus, Constantinople and Cairo and had friends among the great men of Egypt, and asked whether Lawrence knew any of the English there? He was very inquisitive about Lawrence’s intentions and tried to trip him in Egyptian phrases. Lawrence answered in the Syrian dialect of Aleppo, whereupon the old man told him of prominent Syrians whom he knew. Lawrence knew them too. The man then began to talk local politics, of the Sherif and his sons, and asked Lawrence what Feisal would do next. Lawrence as usual avoided answering, and indeed he knew nothing of Feisal’s plans. The guide came to the rescue and changed the subject. Later Lawrence found that the old man was a spy in Turkish pay who used to send frequent reports to Medina of what came past his village for Feisal’s army.
After a long morning’s travel, through two more valleys and across a saddle of hills, the party found itself in a third valley, where the old spy had told them that they would soon find Feisal. In this valley they stopped at a large village where there was a strip of clear water two hundred yards long and twelve wide, bordered with grass and flowers. Here they were given bread and dates by negro slaves—the best dates Lawrence had ever tasted—at the house of a principal man. The owner was, however, away with Feisal, and his wife and children were in tents in the hills, looking after the camels. The climate was feverish in these valleys and the Arabs only spent five months in the year in their houses: in their absence the negroes did the work for them. The black men did not mind the climate and prospered with their gardening, growing melons, marrows, cucumber, grapes, tobacco, which gave them pocket-money. They married among themselves, built their own houses and were well treated by the Arabs. Indeed so many of them had been given their freedom that there were thirteen purely negro villages in this valley alone.
After their bread and dates, the party went on farther up the valley, which was about four hundred yards broad and enclosed by bare red and black rocks with sharp edges and ridges, and soon came upon parties of Feisal’s soldiers and grazing herds of camels. The guide exchanged greetings with them and hurried his pace; they pressed towards the hamlet where Feisal was encamped. Here there were about a hundred mud houses with luxurious gardens. They were all built upon mounds of earth twenty feet high, which had been carefully piled up, basket-full by basket-full, in the course of generations. These mounds became islands in the rainy season, with the flood-water rushing between them. At the village where they had just been there were scores of similar islands, but hundreds more had been washed away and their occupants drowned in a cloudburst some years before; an eight-foot wall of water had raced down the valley and carried everything before it. The guide led on to the top of one of these mounds where they made their camels kneel by the yard-gate of a long low house. A slave with a silver-hilted sword in his hand took Lawrence to an inner court. The account of Lawrence’s meeting there with Feisal can best be given in Lawrence’s own words:
‘On the farther side of the inner court, framed between the uprights of a black doorway, stood a white figure waiting tensely for me. I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek—the leader who would bring the Arab Revolt to full glory. Feisal looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, in his long white silk robes and his brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were dropped; and his black beard and colourless face were like a mask against the strange still watchfulness of his body. His hands were crossed in front of him on his dagger.
‘I greeted him. He made way for me into the room and sat down on his carpet near the door. As my eyes grew accustomed to the shade, they saw that the little room held many silent figures, looking at me or at Feisal steadily. He remained staring down at his hands, which were twisting slowly about his dagger. At last he enquired softly how I had found the journey. I spoke of the heat and he asked how long from Rabegh, commenting that I had ridden fast for the season.
‘“And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?”
‘“Well; but it is far from Damascus.”
‘The word had fallen like a sword into their midst. There was a quiver. Then everybody present stiffened where he sat, and held his breath for a silent minute. Some, perhaps, were dreaming of far-off success: others may have thought it a reflection on their late defeat. Feisal at length lifted his eyes, smiling at me, and said, “Praise be to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.” We all smiled with him, and I rose and excused myself for the moment.’