The next phase of the journey would take them to Arfaja in the Wadi Sirhan and hard by the great Nefud. Lawrence asked Auda for the opportunity to cross a small portion of the desert, just as all the famous desert explorers had done. At this Auda merely sneered: “What? Only fools and raiders cross the Anvil, and only raiders out of necessity. And I, Auda abu Tayi, would never raid on this mangy tottering animal.”2
Auda’s wise leadership had the caravan riding over the less risky, though more monotonous terrain of glittering sand and gleaming mud called Giaan. In the distance, the ground looked black and polished like onyx and reflected the sun with a mirror’s intensity. The sun beat down upon the riders from above, doing double duty in its rebounding reflection from the stone below. By now, Lawrence and the men had developed the ability to ride in a near trancelike state to cope with the heat and exhaustion. Only the camels—and Auda—seemed to maintain sensory vigilance.
After a brief halt, Auda decided to change course and follow a tiptoe route through the plain of Biseita and avoid the flint daggers.
BY MAY 24, many of the men were walking their camels for fear the animals would be dead by nightfall. The column was now straggling badly, with Auda and Nasir doing their best to maintain a manageable pace through the remnants of the sandstorm. Lawrence was in the rear, trying to rally the stragglers, when he noticed that Gasim was missing. After riding forward to the main body, he found Gasim’s riderless camel bearing only saddlebags and rifle: Gasim appeared to be missing and probably lost. In the mirage and shroud of the desert heat, it was impossible to see clearly beyond a distance of a mile. If Gasim was beyond that range, he would see nothing but shimmering desert.
Lawrence at once sought out Mohammed, Gasim’s kinsman, to have him track down his wayward fellow. But it became immediately evident to Lawrence that Mohammed’s own camel was shot and would barely make the night’s encampment. Lawrence hesitated: “If I send him, it would be murder. This shifts the difficulty to my shoulders. The Howeitat would help me, but they are away somewhere in the mirage aiding Auda’s path-finding. Ibn Dgheithir’s Ageyl are so clannish that they would not put themselves out except for one another. Besides Gasim had become one of my men and upon me lay the responsibility of him.”
Lawrence glanced at the men straggling past, wondering briefly if he could send one of them out instead: “My shirking the duty would be understood, because I’m a foreigner—but that’s precisely the plea I dare not set up. How can I, if I’m here to help these Arabs in their own revolt? It’s hard anyway for a strange leader to influence another people’s national movement, and doubly hard for a Christian, and an amateur at that, to sway Moslem nomads. I’d simply make it impossible in my own mind, if I claimed the privileges of both societies.”3
At that last thought, Lawrence turned his bleating camel around and without a word headed through the mirage. His mind filled with the regret of letting a ne’er-do-well like Gasim join his bodyguard. Throughout the trek, he had demonstrated his worthlessness to the cause. In the irony, Lawrence wondered at the thought that the revolt might now lose his own contribution over a single skulking malingerer like Gasim.
In twenty minutes, the straggling caravan was out of sight, consumed by the wall of shimmering heat. The desert now seemed more desolate than ever: the glimpse of every passing hoof- and footprint mocked Lawrence’s decision to rescue Gasim. The wind slowly brushed away his own tracks, so Lawrence was forced to leave his trail by riding through patches of samh, a desert wildflower. The sun was now mercifully at his back.
After riding for over an hour, Lawrence saw a black object through sand-encrusted eyes. Was it a bush? A man? A mirage? The shimmering heat obscured size and distance, though the object appeared to be moving at a tangent to the caravan’s path. Lawrence urged his camel on, and at last the mirage parted to reveal the lost Gasim, nearly mad with thirst and blind from the pounding sun. He stood before Lawrence in a pathetic stance: arms outstretched, mouth agape, tears streaming. Lawrence handed him his water skin—the last of the water among the Ageyli. Gasim spilled the water insanely over his seared face and chest in eagerness to quench his thirst. After finally regaining his senses, he regaled his rescuer with a tale of woes.
Without a word, Lawrence grabbed the unfortunate man and tossed him on the rump of the life-preserving camel and set an azimuth with his compass in the direction of the caravan. As the two set out, the camel seemed to sense some great achievement, for she carried the men in an easy shuffle into the sun. The beast’s renewed spirit sparked joy in Lawrence’s own heart, so he ignored the ragged moaning of Gasim. Yet the farther the pair went, the louder he became, bouncing down hard on the camel and causing Lawrence to fear that Gasim’s recoil would induce the animal to founder. At this danger, Lawrence reached behind and cracked Gasim over the shoulder and back with his riding crop. After a final pathetic whimper, Gasim settled down, clamping a life-and-death grip on the saddle.
A half an hour or more into the rescue, Lawrence saw another black blob dancing and shimmering amid the mirage ahead. The dark amoeba split into three gobbets, and Lawrence wondered if these were the desperate raiders Auda had warned of, coming out of the fiery Nefud. A few moments later, the bubbled images dissolved to reveal the toothless grin of Auda with two of Nasir’s riders. Lawrence, to hide his great relief, mocked Auda for leaving a comrade to die alone in the desert. Auda pointed to the miserable figure of Gasim and said, “For that thing? He’s not worth a camel price.” At that, he struck Gasim over the head for emphasis.
After a hard ride, the five rejoined the column, to be greeted by a vexed Nesib. He chided Lawrence for endangering the mission for a man of dubious quality and imperiling Auda and the others. Auda, though, enjoyed the opportunity to demonstrate the difference between the town Arab and the desert Arab. He said to Nesib, “But here we have the collective responsibility and group brotherhood of the desert; while you townsmen with your cutthroat existence live in isolation.”4
The caravan at last reached Arfaja in the pleasant Sirhan valley. All the riders marched in exhausted; and to his exhaustion Lawrence melded his sense of exultation at being alive and at meeting the challenge of leadership: some might question Lawrence’s choice over the age-old dilemma of whether the mission came before the men. In Western militaries, the mission always superseded the man. In his mind, the question was knocked in a cocked hat. In the desert culture, men came first; let the effete stand with the mission, for in the end, without the soldier, what does the mission matter?
ARRIVAL AT ARFAJA meant at last meeting the eastern Howeitat and the beginning of recruitment for the final push on Aqaba. After a long night of fasting, for the men had no water with which to eat and cook, they spent the day in a state of happy recovery. The wells around Arfaja were at least eighteen feet deep, containing the strong brackish desert water. Abundant grazing was at hand for the exhausted camels, too.
Enemy riders encountered the camp the next morning but seemed passive and rode off. The afternoon lulled everyone into a lazy, detached stupor. Coffee was brewed at the campfire, and Lawrence spent the time with Mohammed el Dheilan. After Auda, Mohammed was second in influence among the abu Tayi clan and had even more followers than Auda himself. Mohammed was the true brain behind the clan, the political and strategic counterpoint to Auda the tactician. Lawrence was fond of Mohammed’s serious and critical outlook on military matters and sought to use him as an effective mouthpiece for his own ideas at the forthcoming tribal councils.
The perilous journey had now created a powerful cohesive force among the raiders. The men were thus musing as the coffeemaker strained the brew through a palm fiber mat when shots suddenly rang out from behind the dark dunes to the east. Assaf, the Ageyli fighter, screamed and pitched forward into the fire, spewing fire and ash all around. He was stone dead.
Mohammed was the first to react, leaping up and dragging a heavy foot through the sand into the sputtering fire to extinguish it. The caravan’s outri
ders immediately returned fire. Auda’s cousin Zaal ran out on cat’s feet to assess the enemy’s strength. Half an hour later, he returned and reported casually that the enemy had been defeated and left.
After passing a sleepless night, the men rose before dawn to bury Assaf, the party’s first casualty, according to Muslim tradition. Lawrence peered at the white-shrouded body and realized the dying had begun and wondered how long it would continue.
Auda led the group a day’s journey farther north into the heart of the Sirhan. It was clear to the leaders that if they hung around the contested wells at Arfaja, they would end up killing more fellow Arabs than the hated Turks. At midday on May 27, dark riders from the east pounded hard for the caravan. The sharp-eyed Zaal dismissed the moment of drama by calling out, “Howeitat!” The men had at last arrived at the core of the Howeitat encampment, stretching from Isawiya to Nebk. The first part of their strategic mission had been accomplished. The caravan moved fast to Isawiya and the tent of Ali abu Fitna, one of Auda’s chiefs. Ali was old and seemed to have a chronic allergy, a rare malady in the desert. His nose dripped like a leaky faucet into his beard, and despite the heavy watering, his beard remained scraggly. With every word he sniffled and snuffled, dripped and dropped, making the riders suddenly thirsty.
Ali had prepared a great homecoming feast in the Bedouin tradition that would take hours to prepare. While waiting, the command group—Lawrence, Auda, Nasir, and Nesib—met to discuss a matter of some political delicacy: how much money to give Nuri Shaalan, the emir of the region. Lawrence recalled that Nuri was the fourth most powerful leader among the desert Arabs, after Hussein, ibn Saud, and ibn Rashid. Nuri was the leader of the powerful Ruwalla and also a good friend of Auda’s. It was therefore decided that Auda should carry the gift of six thousand British pounds to the emir on the morrow.
The huge dinner found the men the most relaxed and at ease they had been in over two weeks. Much had been accomplished: the raiders had cohered into a cohesive fighting force with a common motivation and understanding of the mission; they had developed an esprit and genuine fondness for one another. Yet the whole process was more of luck than by design. The desert march was a true test of that luck, but an even greater test was still to come.
Lawrence considered all this as he looked across at the happy Auda—though hapless at being toothless—as he gummed the roast mutton into submission. Perhaps, Lawrence thought, the good troops make their own luck. With men like Auda and Nasir, at least, the dice were cocked.
Auda went off to Nuri with six sacks of gold heavy in his saddlebags. As he rode, Auda painstakingly went over in his mind the passage from Wejh to the Howeitat encampment. The details were necessary in order to extend and refine the legend he had been weaving all his life. His mind’s epic would now have to be recounted anew for his host, Nuri. In distilled form, the story of the passage had taken the caravan on an eighteen-day journey through Abu Raga, Diraa, across the Hejaz railway, the Desolation, and the western flank of the great Nefud, Fejr, and finally to Arfaja, the gateway into Wadi Sirhan and the great Howeitat encampment.
On a map, though, the journey seemed oddly conceived. If the objective was Aqaba, why take such an eccentric route? Where Auda now rode, he was still two hundred miles from his goal. Of course, the answer revolved around the necessity to mobilize and recruit Auda’s clans in order to generate additional combat power for the final strike on Aqaba. To Auda’s mind, these strategic and operational essentials were mere cumbersome details that distracted from the central narrative of Auda’s life epic, its recrafting and its retelling.
While Auda was on his mission to Nuri, the rest of the caravan enjoyed a desert cornucopia of three days of feasting. Twice a day, the riders were treated to the limitless beneficence of Bedouin hospitality.
On May 30, Ali abu Fitna’s entire camp suddenly detached itself from the earth and began to move. As one mind, the clan embarked in complete unison, losing all its manifest chaos. Like a perambulating flea market, the untented nomads gathered everything and withdrew with a silent renewed sense of purpose. Lawrence and his riders blended in readily with the desert migration. The move was an easy march to a more central campsite better designed to facilitate the arrival of Auda with his recruits. The redeployment took them farther along a northwesterly line deeper into the Sirhan valley to Abu Tarfeiyat.
To Lawrence, the displacement would become a memorable encounter with terror. For some unknown reason—perhaps because of an overabundance of seasonal rain—the wadi was utterly infested with every known variety of desert snake: horned viper, puff adder, cobra, and lizard. Movement by night was especially perilous, and the party had to beat the brush as they warily trod about with bare feet. The infestation was particularly dense around the watering areas, where the reptiles naturally stalked their thirsty prey. In the heat of the day, the snakes became especially bold, wandering into the circle of men huddled around the brewing coffee and tea. The riders killed forty snakes by the end of the two days, losing three men to the deadly strikes. The nightmare was made all the worse for Lawrence thanks to the pranks of Daud and Farraj, who found creative ways to adorn the Englishman’s sleeping form with the colorful snakes, both dead and alive. The two paid for their impudence by serving daily kitchen duty with the women.
The caravan also had to endure the prolonged culinary assault to their digestive tracts: the long trek across the desert had essentially shut down all normal gastric reflexes. In a week, the fifty men had consumed as many sheep. Now they were all paying a heavy price in fast trots through the knots of snakes to seek relief.
The easy march continued through Ghutti to Ageila, where Auda, who had received the blessings of Nuri to proceed, waited with the rest of the Howeitat contingent. Auda was in his huge tribal tent. Lawrence and Nasir settled in and immediately began receiving pledges of allegiance from the tribesmen. As sheikh and Feisal’s formal representative, Nasir received the oaths on Feisal’s behalf. The ceremony would take several more days, as the visitors queued through the tent to find carefully brewed coffee as a token of thanks for their oaths of allegiance.
The enrollment of the eastern Howeitat clans under Auda meant a significant expansion of the Arab Revolt, for it opened up a whole new front against the eastern flank of the Turkish forces in Jordan and Syria. What had been just a political hope for Lawrence and Feisal had now become a strategic reality. The question yet to be answered was, how best to unsheathe and strike with this new weapon?
DURING THE NEXT few days, Auda and Nasir continued the enrollment of the various clans at the more central location of Nebk. The area had fewer snakes and was also better watered, holding the Blaidat, or “salt hamlets.” Meanwhile, Lawrence spent his time with Nesib and Zeki, Feisal’s two Syrian political advisers. The long traveling adventure of men and earth that had brought a measure of fragile coherence to the caravan soon came under challenge during the period of leisure and recovery. Nesib began to express his personal agenda, which in Lawrence’s view was purely delusional—and dangerous.
Nesib started to concoct a plan whereby the group would strike out, not against Aqaba as planned, but at the far glittering prize of Damascus. Nesib argued that he could enroll the Syrian tribes of the Shaalans, the Druzes, and others. As for the Turks, they would be completely unprepared for such a gambit: “We must seize Damascus!” The eagerness and force of Nesib’s argument disturbed Lawrence, who rejoined: “My dear Nesib, truly you must be mad: Feisal is still in Wejh, of no help to us or Damascus; the British are on the wrong side of Gaza and the Turks are amassing a new army at Aleppo.” Nesib, perhaps now seeing himself more as a Syrian liberator and less as an Arab revolutionary, rejected Lawrence’s arguments. Still, Lawrence persisted with Nesib and Zeki. “If we seize Damascus, it would be impossible to hold it for more than six weeks at the utmost. There is no way General Murray could organize an offensive against the Turks on such short notice. Nor would he be able to have the necessary amphibious transport to
land a force at Beirut to link up with us in Damascus. And when we lose Damascus—for surely we will—we will lose all the support and momentum for the revolt that we have so painstakingly built up.” Nesib dismissed Lawrence’s concerns as irrelevant, saying that he knew the Syrians best and what they might accomplish.
At length, Lawrence withdrew from the conversation. It was clear that Nesib’s mind was made up and he was determined to pursue his harebrained scheme aimed at Damascus. Lawrence had by now detected a delusional component to Nesib’s character but at first had imagined it simply as an aspect of his Syrian nature. Now he began to wonder if Nesib’s euphoria had some deeper psychological root. In any case, the argument was far from over; he would have to seek out Auda and Nasir and apprise them of the situation.
He quickly briefed the two on the new internal challenge to the Aqaba mission. Both immediately scoffed at Nesib’s impertinence. Lawrence, however, insisted that the issue be confronted directly with a strong cogent argument based on fundamental strategic principles. He reiterated his views on Aqaba, now from a strictly Arab perspective, which consisted of two key propositions. First, the revolt needed Aqaba to broaden, in time and space, the military front against the Turks. Second, this meant in turn the opportunity of linking up with the British in Palestine. Securing Aqaba implied securing the Sinai and would be viewed by Sir Archibald Murray with gratitude as a positive contribution by the irregular force and the Arab Revolt as a whole. If the Arab army was in direct physical contact with the British right wing, that would facilitate immensely operational coordination and cooperation between the two forces. This further meant direct aid in food, gold, guns, and advisers. At the mention of gold, Auda’s eyes glowed bright with anticipation. Nasir nodded as he grasped the tenor of Lawrence’s argument.
But now Lawrence clinched his position with an even stronger reason: “I want contact with the British as their right wing and the right wing of the Allies. This gives us the fundamental right as Arabs to make the claim that we had fought with the main fight against the Turks for freedom—and with our own hands and blood. If we are not part of the main fight, we will simply remain a side-show of a sideshow—and reap rewards accordingly.”5 Lawrence had convinced them both.
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