That evening Muhammad tried to give me some money. He said, ‘Abdullah Philby gave us this before he left. Here is a fifth of it, your share; we are travelling companions and should share all things alike.’
We left Laila on 7 February. We carried six skins full of water, and had with us ninety pounds of flour, fifteen pounds of rice, thirty pounds of dates, and some butter, sugar, tea, and coffee. The Amir’s son pretended that he had difficulty in buying even this small quantity of food. As we were unlikely to get anything but dates from the Murra at Jabrin, I knew that we were going to be very hungry before we reached Abu Dhabi. I reckoned that it would take us at least a month to get there. We therefore decided to ration ourselves to three pounds of flour between the five of us for our one evening meal. We could use the rice only when we were on a well and had plenty of water. We would eat the dates for breakfast, or rather they would, for by now I could no longer even stand the sight of dates. As we led our camels out of the town, some Arabs shouted to us not to come back if we failed to find the way.
My diary shows that it took us eight days to reach Jabrin, and records our marching hours, which were not really long, since only twice did we do eight hours in a day. But my recollection is of riding interminably through a glaring haze-bound wilderness, which seemed to be without beginning and without end. The weariness of our camels added to my own, making it barely tolerable, especially when their bodies jerked in flinching protest as they trod with their worn soles upon the flints which strewed alike the hollows and the ridges. Sometimes we found a path, and its smooth surface afforded them temporary relief, but I dared not follow it if it deviated from my compass course, for there were no landmarks in this desert which I could recognize to warn me if I was going wrong. I knew that I should only have to be eight or ten miles out to miss Jabrin, not much after a hundred and fifty miles. Was Jabrin shown accurately on the map? Though Cheesman and Philby were meticulously accurate in their work, both of them had fixed Jabrin after a long journey. I could not recall what method they had used. If they had fixed its position by compass-traverse a ten-mile error was possible.
In the evening we camped wherever we could find a few bushes to give us fuel. We would turn the camels loose to search for food and I would watch them hobbling away, heading back instinctively towards their homelands in the south; and as they got farther and farther away, adding yet more miles to the miles they had already covered that day, I would think wearily, ‘Now one of us will have to go and get them.’ If I started to do so, the others would jump up, saying, ‘We will get them, Umbarak’; but sometimes I would insist and, accompanied by one of them, would set off irritably in pursuit. To spare the camels, we were carrying little water, and during these days I was always thirsty and also hungry, for being thirsty I found it difficult to swallow the heavy, unappetizing bread which bin Kabina cooked. The weather was very cold, and on most nights we could see lightning and sometimes hear thunder, and I hoped it would not rain, for we would have no sort of shelter.
On previous journeys it had needed a conscious effort on my part to understand what my companions said; but now, although I still spoke Arabic haltingly, for I am a bad linguist, I could no longer withdraw into the sanctuary of my own mind, beyond reach of their disputes. I could follow their talk too easily. For one entire day bin Kabina and Muhammad argued about the money I had given them two years before at Tarim. On the ground that the camel which bin Kabina had ridden belonged to him, Muhammad had kept two-thirds of the money which I had intended for bin Kabina. Remembering how destitute bin Kabina had been at the time, I thought this mean and said so. The argument went on and on, angry shouted interruptions checking but not halting an endless flow of repetition. It only came to an end when we stopped for the night. They then sat contentedly together baking bread. Throughout another day, bin Kabina and Amair wrangled continuously about the respective merits of their grandfathers. Bin Kabina said maliciously. ‘Anyway, my grandfather never farted in public,’ and the discomfited Amair blushed for this appalling solecism on the part of a grandfather who had been dead for twenty years. When next day they started to quarrel once more about their grandfathers, I protested. They looked at me in surprise and said, ‘But it passes the time,’ which I suppose was true.
Two days before we reached Jabrin we crossed the Dahana sands, here about fifteen miles wide. This belt of crescent dunes links the sands of the Empty Quarter with the great Nafud sands in northern Arabia. Rain had fallen two months earlier and had penetrated three feet into the Sands, which were touched with a bloom of newly sprung seedlings. To me the unexpected hint of spring in the drab monotony of those days was very welcome. On the eighth morning we climbed a final ridge. I had calculated that if we were ever to see Jabrin we should see it now; and there it lay, straight in front of us, the splashes of the palm-groves dark on the khaki plain. I sat down on a tumulus to rest, for I was very tired, while the others broke into excited talk. Later, we went down into the plain and found a well near a grove of acacias.
We watered the camels and turned them loose. They would no doubt find something, although even the acacias were leafless from the long drought. Only twice during the past eight days had I noticed anything which I thought they could eat, but I suppose they must have found something more during those shuffling quests which took them so far afield. Bin Kabina may have noticed the compassion in my eyes, for he said, ‘Their patience is very wonderful. What other creature is as patient as a camel? That is the quality which above all else endears them to us Arabs.’
The well was shallow and the water sweet. My companions stripped off their shirts and poured buckets of water over each other, but I shrank from this bitter washing in the cold wind despite their gibes and encouragement. ‘Come on, Umbarak,’ called out bin Ghabaisha, and denied that it was cold, although I could hear him gasp each time Amair threw water over him. He still wore his loin-cloth, but the water moulded it to him like draperies on a statue; all Arabs dislike uncovering themselves in public, but here this modesty seemed exaggerated. I contrasted it with the behaviour of other Bedu with whom I had bathed in the Euphrates, who had chased each other naked along the river bank.
Later, Muhammad and Amair went off to look for the Murra. We had been in the territory of this tribe since we had crossed the Dahana, and Muhammad was still confident that we should find some of them in this oasis. The Murra, one of the great tribes of the Najd, number between five and ten thousand persons and live in an area as large as France. They guided Philby across the Empty Quarter, but their knowledge of it is limited to parts of the central and Western Sand, and they do not range anything like as widely as the Rashid, who may be met with from the borders of the Yemen to Oman, and from Dhaufar to Riyadh, the Hasa, and the Trucial Coast.
The Murra have a great reputation in Saudi Arabia as trackers, and are widely employed by the government for tracking down criminals and identifying them from their footprints. The Murra who was friendly to us in Sulaiyil was so employed.
While the others were away we cooked a large meal of rice against their return, and then, while we lay idly round the fire, bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha tried to teach me a game, rather like draughts, which they played with camel-droppings in the sand, but either their explanations were too involved or the –game was too complicated, for I never understood it.
When the others came back at sunset they told us that they had found neither Arabs nor fresh tracks. They asked me how much farther I could guide them. Between here and Abu Dhabi, my map showed only a single well called Dhiby, which Thomas had located at the end of his great journey across the Sands. It was about a hundred and fifty miles away in a depression to the south of the Qatar peninsula. Sixty miles to the east of it were the salt-flats of the Sabkhat Mutti, which, starting on the coast, run southward into the desert. AI Auf had once told me that camels were sometimes inextricably bogged in the Sabkhat Mutti after rain, but that they would never be engulfed as in the Umm al Samim.
I to
ld the others that I could take them as far as Sabkhat Mutti, but that I neither knew whether I could find Dhiby well nor whether its water would be drinkable. I vaguely remembered Hamad telling me the year before, when we were in Dhafara, that all the water near the Sabkhat Mutti was brackish. However, Muhammad said that if I could guide as far as the Sabkhat Mutti he could then guide us to Abu Dhabi. I was doubtful about this, but we had to go on, since we should starve if we stayed where we were. The others reassured me by saying that we were certain to encounter some of the Murra before we got to the Sabkhat Mutti.
We decided to fill the ten water-skins which we had with us. This would mean that our baggage camels would again be heavily loaded, but we were quite prepared to sacrifice them in order to save our riding camels and ourselves. Three of them and Muhammad’s mount had developed deep, evil-smelling ulcers on their humps and withers, where the saddle-swellings had burst and the skin sloughed away. Amair cut off lumps of mortifying fat and flesh, which he said it was better to remove. They paid little heed to this operation, so I hoped it did not hurt them too much. My companions were always prepared to endure discomfort and even hardship to save their camels, but inevitably the hardness of their lives made them callous to all pain. Desert people can be as callous about their own sufferings as they are about the sufferings of others and of animals. I remember I once hired a camel in Tibesti. Its owner was to come with me on foot, but as we started I noticed that he was limping. I asked him what was the matter and he showed me his bare feet. He had worn through the soles on a recent journey to Kufra and was now walking on the raw flesh. The mere thought of his pain made me feel sick, and yet, because he needed the money, he proposed to walk across the mountains. But if Arabs are callous they are never deliberately cruel. It would have been inconceivable to my companions that anyone could derive pleasure from inflicting pain. Although, to avenge a death, any of them would have knifed an unarmed herdsboy, not one of them would ever have tortured him. Many of the R.A.F. stationed at Aden believed that they would be castrated by Arabs if they came down in the desert, but I am convinced that no Arab tribesman would do this; the very idea would revolt him. Once when I was telling my companions about the Danakil, I mentioned that they castrated the men they had killed. They were really shocked, and Amair said disgustedly, ‘They must be animals; no human being would do a thing like that.’
The next day we crossed some salt-flats to the far side of the Jabrin depression, where we found a few bushes which had been touched to life by a shower of rain, and there we stopped to let our camels feed. I was again surprised how local were many of these showers, wetting only a few score acres. In the afternoon we rode across a gravel plain marked with many tracks. Towards evening a grey haze from the north came down, blotting out the emptiness that lay beyond.
After dinner Muhammad insisted that we must have more to eat. I suggested facetiously that he should go off and buy some flour, and also a goat while he was about it, but he grumbled that they could none of them go on unless they had more food. I maintained that our supplies would barely last us, and that it would be idiotic to increase our rations, and asked him what we should do when our flour was finished. He said, ‘God will provide!’, but I, not having Elija’s faith, doubted this. We argued angrily, and finally I got up, telling them that they had better finish the flour that evening and then we should know exactly where we were, and went off to bed in a temper, thinking indignantly, ‘I am just as hungry as they are but less improvident.’ Next day we ate the same ration as before and nothing more was said about it.
We travelled for eight and a half hours until we reached the western edge of the Jaub depression, which I hoped would lead us to Dhiby. It was a burning hot day. For the past ten days clouds had banked up each evening and there had been distant thunder and lightning; now it rained almost continuously for three days and intermittently for the next four, often with thunderstorms, especially at night.
They were miserable days. It was maddening to ride along drenched to the skin and watch the driving rain soak into the sand, for although I was bitterly cold I was also thirsty. We had no idea where we should find more water, and were again rationing ourselves to a pint a day. We had nothing with us, except a few small pots, in which to catch the rain, not that we could afford the time to stop. My companions were worried about the camels, and warned me that we might wake up any morning and find some of them dead, killed in their weakened state by the ulcers which were eating into them. Each morning I looked anxiously to see if they were still alive.
One night there was a terrific storm, which started soon after dark and revolved around us until dawn. On that bare plain there was no sort of shelter. We could only lie cowering on the ground while the lightning slashed through the darkness of driven clouds, and the thunder crashed about our ears. I had placed my rug and sheepskin over my sleeping-bag. On other nights these had kept me fairly dry, but tonight the weight of water was too great to be turned aside. It flowed over me like an icy torrent. Sometimes the rain stopped and I peered out to see, silhouetted against the night by the almost continuous flashes of lightning, the dark shapes where the others lay beneath their coverings, like grave-mounds on a wet seashore; and the group of sodden animals, squatting tail to storm. Then I would hear the muffled drumming of the rain as it came down once more. I was certain that some of our camels would die that night, but in the morning they were still alive.
At dawn there was no wood dry enough to light a fire. We exchanged once more the sodden misery of the night for the cold, dripping discomfort of the day, as we forced the unwilling camels forward into the wind and stinging rain. Nothing grew here but occasional matted growths of salt-bush, whose juicy green foliage gave an irritating illusion of fertility to depressions which were really more sterile than the surrounding sands. That evening the starving camels, finding nothing else, ate these bushes and suffered next day from the inevitable diarrhoea. We tied their tails sideways to our saddlery to prevent them from flicking messily over our clothes. There was no food in their stomachs, but this loss of liquid would entail immediate thirst. Luckily we came on a well, a shallow hole in hard sand, discernible from a distance only by the carpet of camel-droppings that surrounded it. We tasted the water, but it was too brackish to drink; the thirsty camels, however drank as if they could never have enough. While we watered them a gleam of pale sunlight flooded across the wet plain, like slow, sad music. Then it started to rain again. Bin Kabina coaxed a fire to burn, and cooked a large meal of rice in water from the well, but it tasted horrible and most of it remained uneaten.
Next day was fine and sunny and our spirit rose as the sun dried our clothes and warmed our bodies. My companions sang as we rode across sands which looked as if they had been uncovered by an outgoing tide. They were Bedu and it had rained, not scattered showers, but downpours which might well have covered all the desert. ‘God’s bounty’ they called it, and rejoiced at the prospect of rich grazing that would last for years. As I rode across these interminable naked sands it seemed incredible that in three months’ time they would be covered with flowering shrubs. Eskimos enduring the cold and the darkness of the arctic winter can count the days till the sun appears, but here in southern Arabia the Bedu have no certainty of spring. Often there is no rain, and even if there is, it may fall at any time of the year. Generally the bitter winters turn to blazing summers over a parched and lifeless land. Bin Kabina told me now that he only remembered three springs in his life. Occasional spring times such as these were all the Bedu ever knew of the gentleness of life. A few years’ relief from the anxiety of want was the most they ever hoped for. It seemed to me pathetically little and yet I knew that magnificently it was enough.
As we rode along, the others spoke of years when it had rained, and bin Kabina told me that never in his life had he known such rain as this. Then inevitably they spoke of the great flood in Dhaufar of sixty years ago. I had myself seen palm-trunks which had been jammed by this flood eighteen feet u
p among the rocks in the cliffs of the Wadi Aidam, where the valley was more man a thousand yards wide. We speculated as to how many days it must have rained to produce this flood, which had occurred in summer when it was warm. I wondered how long a man could survive such rain in winter before he died of exposure. It rained again in the evening and continued to do so intermittently for the next three days.
On the afternoon of the eighth day since we had left Jabrin I reckoned that we must be near Dhiby well, and my calculation was confirmed by the ’bearings which I took on two rocky peaks in a low escarpment to the north of us. An hour later, after again checking our position, I said that we were near the well. Bin Ghabaisha went on to look for it and found it a quarter of a mile away in a hollow in the sands. He came back and said, ‘By God, Umbarak, you are a guide!’, but my justifiable satisfaction was spoilt when the water proved too brackish to drink. The camels, however, were thirsty and drank it greedily.
Near the well there was a little fresh qassis which I hoped foretold that we were on the edge of grazing, but the next day we marched twenty-eight miles and found nothing all day. It rained again throughout the night. I was too cold and wet to sleep, too worried about what we should do. We had decided to go on to the Sabkhat Mutti, still hoping to find Arabs, but as we had found no trace of any so far I saw no reason why we should. My map marked only Abu Dhabi about two hundred and fifty miles farther on and our water was nearly finished.
We woke to a grey, lowering day, heavy with massed clouds, threatening rain. With cold, numbed fingers we loaded our camels and then walked dispiritedly beside them trying to bring some warmth into our bodies, while our long shirts flapped damply round our legs. I felt sure that the camels could not survive another day. Then unbelievably we came on grazing. It covered only a few square miles, and we walked straight into it. The camels hardly moved. They just ate and ate. We stood and watched them and bin Ghabaisha said to me, ‘This grazing has saved our lives.’
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