XV
He returned on June the sixteenth and found Nasir and Auda still at Nebk; the final preparations for the march to Akaba had been made. Auda bought a small flock of sheep from a drover and gave a farewell feast, the greatest of the whole series. Hundreds of men were present and five fills of the great tray were eaten up as fast as they were cooked and carried in. After the feast the whole party lay round the coffee-hearth outside the tent in the starlight while Auda and others told stories. Lawrence happened to remark that he had looked for Mohammed el Dheilan in his tent that afternoon to thank him for the present of a milch camel, but had not found him. Auda began to laugh out loud until every one looked at him to know what the joke was. Auda pointed to Mohammed sitting gloomily beside the coffee-mortar and said to the company, ‘Ho! shall I tell you why Mohammed has for fifteen days not slept in his tent?’ To every one’s delight he told how Mohammed had bought in the bazaar at Wejh a costly string of pearls and had not given it to any of his wives, so that they all began to quarrel and only agreed in one thing, to keep him out of the tent. This was Auda’s usual mischievous invention and Mohammed, whose wives in the tent near by had come up close to the partition-curtain to listen, was much confused and appealed to Lawrence to witness that Auda lied.
Lawrence began his answer with the phrase that introduces a formal tale in Arabia. ‘In the name of God the merciful, the loving-kind. We were six in Wejh. There were Auda and Mohammed and Zaal, Gasim, Mufaddhi and the poor man’ (which meant Lawrence himself). ‘And one night just before dawn Auda said, “Let us make a raid upon the market.” And we said, “In the name of God.” And we went; Auda in a white robe and a red headcloth, and Kasim sandals of pieced leather. Mohammed in a silken tunic of “seven kings”[3] and barefoot. Zaal ... I forget Zaal. Gasim wore cotton and Mufaddhi was in silk of blue stripe with an embroidered headcloth. Your servant was as he now is.’
He paused, and the Howeitat sat dead-silent. Lawrence was mimicking Auda’s epic style, also the wave of his hand, the booming voice and the accentuation of the points or what he thought were the points of his pointless stories. Parody was an unknown art among the Bedouin, and Lawrence’s beginning had a tremendous effect on them. He went on to tell how they left the tents (giving a list of them) and walked down the village, describing all the passers-by and the ridges ‘all bare of grazing, for by God, that country was barren. And we marched: and after we had marched the time of a smoked cigarette, we heard something, and Auda stopped and said, “Lads, I hear something.” And Mohammed stopped and said, “Lads, I hear something.” And Zaal said, “By God, you are right.” And we stopped to listen, and there was nothing, and the poor man said, “By God, I hear nothing.” And Zaal said, “By God, I hear nothing,” and Mohammed said, “By God, I hear nothing.” And Auda said, “By God, you are right!” And we marched and marched and the land was barren and we heard nothing. And on our right came a man, a negro, on a donkey. The donkey was grey with black ears and one black foot and on its shoulder was a brand like this’ (here Lawrence made a scribble in the air) ‘and its tail moved and its legs. Auda saw it and said, “By God, a donkey.” And Mohammed said, “By the very God, a donkey and a slave.”’
Lawrence continued this Arab version of the ‘Three Jovial Welshmen’ with ‘And we marched. And there was a ridge, not a great ridge but a ridge as great as from here to the what-do-you-call-it yonder; and we marched to the ridge and it was barren. The land was barren: barren: barren. And we marched; and beyond the what-do-you-call-it was a thing-um-bob as far as from this very place here to that actual spot there and afterwards a ridge; and we came to that ridge: it was barren, all that land was barren: and as we came up that ridge and were by the head of that ridge and came to the end of the head of that ridge, by God, by my God, by the very God, the sun rose upon us.’
This brought down the house. Every one knew the repetitions and linked phrases that Auda used to bring some sort of excitement into the dull story of a raid in which nothing happened, and they knew of old the terrible bathos of the sunrise which ended the story. But the walk to the market at Wejh was one also that many of them had taken. So they howled with laughter, rolling on the ground.
Auda laughed the loudest and longest, for he loved a joke against himself, and Lawrence’s parody had only proved to him how fine a story-teller he really was. So he went over to Mohammed, embraced him, and confessed that the necklace story was an invention. Mohammed in gratitude invited the whole camp to breakfast the next morning: they would have a sucking camel-calf boiled in sour milk.
The next day they rode off making for Bair, sixty miles away in the direction of Akaba. There were five hundred in the party now and every one was happy and confident. The country was limestone strewn with black flints, and in the distance were three white chalk hills. The leaders had a treat of rice that night, the chiefs of the Abu Tayi coming in to share it. At coffee-drinking Auda began provoking Lawrence with talk of the stars. ‘Why are the Westerners always wanting everything?’ he asked when Lawrence had said that astronomers every year make more and more powerful telescopes to map the heavens out more and more accurately, adding thousands to the number of known stars. ‘Behind our few stars we can see God, who is not behind your millions,’ said Auda. ‘We want the World’s End,’ answered Lawrence. ‘But that is God’s,’ said Zaal, half angry. Auda said that if the end of wisdom was to add star to star, the foolishness of the Arabs pleased him better.
He took Lawrence ahead next day: he wished to visit the grave of his favourite son, Annad, which was at Bair. Annad had been waylaid by his cousins of the Motalga tribe and fought them, one against five, until he was killed; Auda was bringing Lawrence to hear him mourn for the dead. As they rode down a slope to the grave, they were astonished to see smoke wreathing about the wells. They rode up carefully and found that the well-top had been shattered: looking down they found that the stone sides had been stripped and split and the shaft choked. Auda said, ‘This is done by the Jazi.’ They went to see another well beyond: it was also ruined. So was a third. There was a smell of dynamite in the air. It was clear that the Turks had got wind of their coming, and had possibly also raided the wells at Jefer where they had planned to concentrate before the attack. But in any case they could not reach Jefer without the Bair water. There was still, however, a fourth well some way off. They visited this rather hopelessly, and were delighted to find it undamaged. It was a well belonging to the Jazi tribe and that it had been spared seemed to prove that Auda was right. But one well was not enough for five hundred camels. So it was necessary to open the least damaged of the others. Lawrence went down in a bucket and found that a set of charges fixed lower in the shaft had not all been exploded: the Turkish engineers had evidently been surprised before they had time to finish their work. So he carefully unpacked the charges and took them up with him. Soon they had two fit wells and a clear profit of thirty pounds of Nobel dynamite.