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.