“You can get as far as Akaba in a cargo boat, but next to Timbuctoo it is the most out-of-the-way place in the world. You will find no hotel porters at the dock to receive you, and you will have to be content with a block of coral for your pillow and a date-palm for your shelter.”
In pre-war days a tramp wind-jammer returning from Borneo or the Solomon Islands with a cargo of copra would occasionally lose its way in a storm and drive up the Gulf of Akaba, but apart from rare occasions like that almost no one had visited the place for a thousand years.
“You will get nothing to eat but unleavened bread, dates, and perhaps a few fried locusts,” remarked one general, on whose advice we bought many little luxuries, including fifty bars of milk chocolate. A colonel cheerfully warned me, “If you value your lives, take plenty of cigarettes for the Bedos.” So we filled every crevice of our outfit with “gaspers,” which proved worth their weight in sovereigns. On the day we landed in Arabia the thermometer happened to register above the melting-point of chocolate, and when I opened my kit-bag I found a semifluid mass of bullets, matches, cigarettes, pencils, note-books, and chocolate.
On our way to Arabia we followed a roundabout route, sailing fifteen hundred miles up the Nile into the heart of Africa to Khartum, and then across the Nubian Desert for five hundred miles to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where we hoped to get accommodation on a tramp vessel of some sort.
Our first stop up the Nile was at Luxor, where we were given a welcome that had not been equaled since “Teddy” Roosevelt stopped there on his way back from hunting big game in East Africa. A swarm of haggard guides, who had been waiting four long years in vain for American tourists, mobbed us from sheer joy. Our welcome resembled a battle royal, and the runners from the Luxor Hotel eventually succeeded in dragging us into their ramshackle gharry, and off we careened through streets lined with deserted tourists’ shops, with the rest of the crowd howling and gyrating behind us like dancing dervishes.
Our visit to Hundred-gated Thebes, the Temple of Karnak, and the Tombs of the Kings the following day was rather spoiled by a pitiful tale that our guide poured into our ears.
“American tourist he no come no more. All we guides starve. Oh, woe! Oh, woe!” wailed this melancholy old Arab. “Me guide here thirty-five years, and so help me Allah, the only real tourist in the world is you Americans. The Inglisse [English], German, and French spend all their time counting their centimes. If American see something he want he say, ‘How much?’ You tell him and, praise be to Allah, no matter what price is, he say, ‘All right, wrap ’er up!’ All us best guides specialize on Americans. Before the war me no more bother guiding anybody but American than you bother to shoot baby elephant if you see big one. Why President Wilson no stop the war; and why,” he added in a pleading voice, “you Americans send money and food to Armenians and nothing to us poor starving guides of Egypt?”
On the first evening after our arrival in Khartum we were dining with the chief of the Central African Intelligence Department at the House of the Hippopotamus Head when suddenly I noticed his face turn pale. Glancing at the sky to the east I saw the reason. Coming straight toward Khartum was a great black wall that looked like a range of mountains moving down upon us. It was the dread huboob, a terrific African sand-storm. The dinner party broke off abruptly, and the other guests raced for their homes. Jumping on a donkey which was awaiting me in the outer court, I made a dash for the Charles Gordon Hotel, half a mile away.
It was a glorious moonlight night with stars twinkling radiantly all around to the north, west, and south, but straight ahead to the east I could see that mountain wall of sand churning toward me. It looked as though the crack o’ doom were approaching. Soon it was only a few hundred yards away, and then it broke over us.
Flying sand stung my face like needles and blinded me. Leaning forward over the neck of my diminutive mount, I tried to offer as little resistance to the storm as possible, but it was all we could do to fight our way against that whirling mass of sand and reach the hotel.
The heat indoors was so unbearable that every one tried sleeping with his windows open, and the sand threatened to bury us, beds and all. When I closed the windows the atmosphere was stifling, and the sand still swept in sheets through the crevices. The storm raged for hours. There was not a house in Khartum that the sand did not penetrate. I have been through cyclones, cloud-bursts, arctic blizzards, fierce gales in the Southern Ocean, monsoons, typhoons, and Sumatras; but none of them could hold a candle to that huboob. In Alaska when a newcomer, or cheechacko, remains in the Far North through the long dark winter he becomes a “sourdough” and is admitted to the fraternity of Arctic Pioneers. In the Sudan there is a similar saying that he who survives a huboob forthwith becomes a pucka African. But seventy below in the Yukon is preferable to one hundred above in a Sudan huboob!
One afternoon a representative from the British Intelligence Office took me a few miles distant from Khartum to call on “the holiest man in the Sudan.” So rich had the natives grown from the war that they were refusing to sell their grain supplies, which were badly needed by the armies in Palestine and Arabia. I had expressed a desire to meet this holy man, and it occurred to the authorities that a visit from a foreigner might flatter him and put him in a sufficiently pleasant frame of mind to enable them to wheedle him into selling his store of grain, which would cause the other natives to follow suit.
We set out in the governor’s gharry, a picturesque victoria drawn by high-spirited white horses. Our driver was a wild-eyed fuzzy-wuzzy with a mop of crinkly hair full of mutton fat, with long wooden skewers sticking out at all angles. Off we galloped across the desert to the village of Berri, where we found Shereef Yusef el Hindi, the holy man, awaiting us at the gate of his mud-brick palace. The shereef, a tall, thin-faced, distinguished-looking Arab with hypnotic eyes, garbed in sandals, a robe of green and white silk, and green turban, ushered us into his garden, where we were invited to review the most bewildering array of drinks that I had ever seen. There were concoctions of everything from pomegranate-juice to sloe gin and from rose-water to a horse’s neck. They were of every shade from mauve to taupe. They were served in every sort of container from cut-glass tumblers to silver goblets. Fortunately, custom only required us to take a sip of each; otherwise the result would have been catastrophic for many were of subtle potency.
I remember that afternoon call as a series of surprises, of which the first was the beauty of the garden inside the ugly adobe outer walls of the shereef’s palace. The second was the variety of fluid refreshment placed before us. Surely Shereef Yusef el Hindi must have one of the genii from “The Arabian Nights” mixing drinks in his palace. Even in preprohibition days, when assigned to cover a national college fraternity convention, never was I invited to pass through such an ordeal by drink as I faced at Shereef Yusef el Hindi’s oasis. The third surprise came when I saw the attractive interior of his palace as we passed through on our way to a Moorish balcony near the roof, where we were confronted with another relay of drinks. But the climax came when I discovered that my host instead of being an African witch-doctor was a savant of wide learning. His library even contained Arabic translations of the speeches of Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. In fact I found that this Sudanese holy man knew more about the history of my own country than I did!
We discussed religion, and I was impressed by his spirit of tolerance. “I believe, as do all Moslems who deserve to be called educated,” said he, “that the fundamental principles underlying the world’s greatest religions—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism—are the same; that there is but on God and that he is supreme; that we should be tolerant of the opinions of others; that all men should live together as brothers and do unto others as we would have others do unto us.”
It was not difficult to understand why Shereef Yusef el Hindi was looked upon as a holy man by his ignorant, half-civilized fellow-countrymen. His princely manners, his digni
ty and poise, his musical bell-like voice, his large, lustrous, hypnotic brown eyes, and his wisdom would have won him distinction in any country. He is not an Ethiopian but is a descendant of the Arabian tribe of Koreish to which Mohammed belonged.
Being a holy man in the Sudan is a lucrative profession. Shereef Yusef el Hindi spends most of his time naming babies. When a child is born the father comes running to him, prostrates himself at the shereef’s feet, and says, “O noble one, what name shall I bestow upon my child?”
Whereupon the holy man replies: “O faithful one, arise! Go thy way and return again upon the morrow.”
Then, when the father returns the next day, the shereef intones: “Allah be praised. In a vision last night the Prophet appeared and revealed to me that your faith should be rewarded and your child blessed with the name of his own daughter, Fatima. Five dollars, please!”
From Khartum we crossed the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Here, as we had hoped, we found a tramp steamer bound for the Arabian coast. She was a much torpedoed cargo-boat which had been transferred from the British Indian coastal service to the Mediterranean, where during the first years of the war she had survived several harrowing years serving as a target for the kaiser’s U-boats. On board with us were 226 Sudanese sheep, 150 horses and mules from America and Australia, sixty-seven donkeys from Abyssinia, ninety-eight deserters from the Turkish army, eighty-two Egyptian fellaheen laborers, thirty-four Gordon Highlanders, six British officers, and two obsolete aëroplanes. Our crew consisted of Hindus, Javanese, Somalis, Berberines, and fuzzy-wuzzies The skipper of this modern ark was a rotund, jovial Scotch-Irishman by the name of Rose. I doubt whether Captain Kidd in the palmiest days of Caribbean piracy ever put to sea with such a motley cargo and crew.
The different nationalities on board segregated themselves into little racial colonies and did their own cooking in various parts of the main deck. It would be impossible to imagine what the good ship Ozarda looked like after we had been at sea for a few days— and what she smelled like! Some of the Sudanese were from the Nubian Desert, where it is difficult enough to get water for drinking purposes, to say nothing of water for bathing; some of them had never had a real bath in their lives. But there was one of them whom the Highlanders nicknamed Bathing Bert. This man insisted on having his tub out of a bucket five times each day.
The Egyptian laborers entertained us incessantly with their fantastic ceremonial dances. There was not room enough for all of them to dance at a time, and so they went at it in relays. Some of them danced until they collapsed on the deck from exhaustion. Fainting, to them, was merely a sign that their spirits had been transported to heaven for a few minutes’ sojourn with the Almighty.
There was no passenger accommodation, so that we had to sleep out on the deck with the donkeys and mules. I bunked beside a mouse-colored mule from Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Mark Twain. She was very pessimistic. She seemed to be worrying about something back home and didn’t sleep well. Neither did I! Mark Twain would have lost his sense of humor if he had been in my place.
We had a British officer on board who was bound for the Persian Gulf. He was laboring under the erroneous impression that he had fallen heir to the mantle of George Robey or Harry Lauder. He used to tell a story until we were almost bored to extinction. I am going to repeat one of his tales, not because I think it is funny but because I know it is not funny! I want to show you the sort of thing we had to endure. He said that he was out hunting lions once in Central Africa; none of us doubted that for he had knocked about all over the world from Kamchatka to the Kameruns. He said that one day a lion jumped at him out of the bush but that he ducked just in time, causing the lion to go right over his head. Some minutes passed, and as the lion failed to return he crawled along on his stomach to recon-noiter. Coming to an open space he peered cautiously through the tall grass, and there he saw that same lion—practising low jumps! One day we hit upon the idea of giving cigarettes to the Turkish deserters, who could understand only a few words of English, in order to get them to listen to his stories They would laugh when he laughed, and it satisfied him and certainly relieved the rest of us.
When we finally arrived at the ancient and long deserted seaport of King Solomon at the head of the Gulf of Akaba, our ark anchored half a mile offshore. We eventually pushed off, bound for the distant fringe of palm-trees at the base of King Solomon’s Mountains on board a lighter loaded down with donkeys and mules. One unlucky donkey was kicked overboard by a nervous mule. Immediately two sharks appeared and attacked him fore and aft. One seized a front leg and the other the poor donkey’s rump, and literally they pulled him in two. We were told by the skipper of our ark that there are more sharks in the Red Sea than in any other waters of the globe.
When we grounded on the coral beach we were greeted by several thousand Bedouins, who welcomed us by blazing into the air with their rifles and pistols. This firing had begun when we were still afar off, and Mr. Chase and I thought we were arriving in the midst of a battle. So fantastic and full of color was that palm-fringed coral shore, and so picturesque were the Bedouins with their flowing beards, their gorgeous robes, their strange head-dress, and their array of ancient and modern weapons of every sort, that it all seemed like some bizarre Oriental pageant. So indeed it was, and these were some of Colonel Lawrence’s modern Arabian knights.
King Solomon’s long-forgotten port had been turned into a great base-camp, and enormous piles of supplies lay stacked in the sand and under the palms. Several of the British officers who were in charge of the receiving of supplies at Akaba took us to a near-by tent and slaked our growing thirst, and a few hours later Lawrence himself came down the Wadi Ithm, returning from one of his mysterious expeditions into the blue.
With Lawrence, no two days in the desert were ever the same, so that it would be impossible to describe a typical one. But the camp routine at the headquarters of the Arabian army, when no ghazu (raid) was in progress, followed some such program as this: At 5 A. M., as the first rays of dawn fell on the jagged peaks of Sinai, the army imam would climb the highest sand-dune and give the morning call to prayer. He was a chap with such astonishing vocal powers that his nasal chant woke every man and animal in Akaba. Immediately after he had finished calling the Arabian proletariat, Emir Feisal’s private imam would softly intone the morning call at the door of his tent: “Praise be to Allah who makes day succeed the night!”
Miss Gertrude Bell, the famous Syrian traveler, who, although a woman, served on the Intelligence Staff in the Near East during the war, has written a vivid description of the glorious intoxication of a desert morning: “To wake in the desert dawn is like waking in the heart of an opal. To my mind the saying about the Bay of Naples should run differently. See the desert on a fine morning and die if you can.” Surely a fascinating book of adventure and romance could be written about the war-time experience of Miss Bell in the Mesopotamian Desert. As a staff officer she did everything required of any man but wear a spine-pad and shorts.
A few minutes after the call to prayer had aroused the camp, a cup of sweetened coffee would turn up, brought in by one of Feisal’s slaves. The emir had five young Abyssinian blacks; slaves who were the acme of fidelity, because the emir did not treat them as slaves, nor regard them as such. Whenever one of them desired money, Feisal ordered him to help himself to whatever he needed from his bag of gold. No matter what was taken, he never complained, and as a result, the thought of robbing never seemed to occur to them.
At 6 A. M. Lawrence was in the habit of breakfasting with Feisal in the emir’s tent, squatting Bedouin fashion on an old Baluchi prayer-rug. Breakfast on lucky days included a many-layered pastry of richly spiced puffed bread called Mecca cakes, and cooked durra, a small round white seed—rather nasty stuff. Then, of course, there were the inevitable dates. After breakfast little glasses of sweetened tea were produced. From then until 8 A. M. Lawrence would discuss the possible events of the day either with the British offic
ers or with some of the more prominent Arab leaders. At that time Feisal worked with his secretary or talked over private affairs in his tent with Lawrence. At 8 A. M. Feisal would hold court and grant audiences in the Diwan tent. According to the regular procedure, it was customary for the emir to sit at the end of a great rug on a dais. Callers or petitioners sat in front of the tent in a half-circle until they were called up. All questions were settled summarily, and nothing was left over.
One morning I was in the tent with Lawrence when a young Bedouin was hauled in charged with having the evil eye. Feisal was not present. Lawrence ordered the offender to sit at the opposite side of the tent and look at him. Then for ten minutes he regarded him with steady gaze, his steel-blue eyes seeming to bore a hole into the culprit’s very soul. At the end of the ten minutes, Lawrence dismissed the Bedouin. The evil spell had been driven off! By the grace of Allah.
Another day a member of Lawrence’s body-guard came to him with the complaint that one of his companions possessed the evil eye. Said he, “O sea of justice, yonder fellow looked at my camel, and straightway it went lame.” Lawrence settled this difficulty by putting the man charged with the evil eye on the lame camel and giving the defendant’s camel to the man who brought up the charge.
Blue eyes terrify the average Arab. Lawrence possesses two that are bluer than the waters of the Mediterranean, and so the Bedouins decided there was something superhuman about him. They themselves nearly all have eyes like black velvet.
Whenever Feisal was present, Lawrence would step aside and decline to decide disputes. He had no ambition to become the ruler of Arabia himself, and he knew that it would be far better for the future of the Arabs and for Emir Feisal if their differences were handled in the usual way by one of their own people. In fact, Lawrence never did anything himself that he could delegate to an Arab who was capable of handling it successfully.
With Lawrence in Arabia Page 10