Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  Instantly, Nasir gave the order to march, and the Arabs threw their saddle-bags across the camels’ backs and rode off at once with their fresh-baked bread still in their hands. All night they rode across the basalt, wormwood-strewn plateau of Shirah, and when dawn came Lawrence dismounted to take in the entrancing view of the Guweira plain, thousands of feet below them, soft golden-red in the new sun, traced with a map of drainage channels, and bounded by the great weathered massifs of the Wadi Ithm and the Wadi Rum. Gasim Abu Dumayk and his Howaytat, still bloody from their fight with the Turks, were waiting for them near Aba 1-Lissan, with the news that the Turkish battalion, encamped in the natural depression around the spring, was still asleep. Cautiously, making use of the curves and contours of the ground, the Arab snipers encircled them. Once in position, they opened fire suddenly, bringing the Turkish sentries to full alert. Za’al Abu Tayyi and a cavalry detachment galloped away to cut the telegraph line to Ma an. The Turks rallied, wiping sleep from their eyes, and blazed back salvoes of musketry into the hills. Soon their mountain-gun was puffing whoffs of smoke and shells were ripping out of the hollow, exploding far beyond the Arab lines. The Arab snipers ran, rolled and fired, moving too quickly for the Turks, who were blinded by the sun and confused by the shadows, and were unable to judge their range. The Turkish artillerymen had only twenty rounds, which were soon exhausted. That day the sun was demonic. On the plateau the Arab snipers baked slowly among the rocks, whose hot surface sheared off their skin in strips, and there was no water to ease their raging thirst. It was so hot by late afternoon that Lawrence crept into a cleft where he had located a dirty trickle of water and sucked some from the sleeve of his shirt. He was quickly joined by Nasir, panting through cracked lips. Auda, who came upon them lying there, sneered at the two of them, saying: ‘Well, how is it with the Howaytat? All talk and no work!’ Lawrence rounded on him, declaring that the Howaytat shot a great deal but hit nothing. Auda turned pale with rage and stalked off. Lawrence and Nasir called for their camels and rushed after him, just in time to see Auda, at the head of fifty Howaytat horsemen, charging straight downhill towards the Turkish lines with their carbines cracking and their sabres flashing. The enemy were braced together under a cliff, and let off an uncertain tattoo of bullets. A few horsemen fell and Auda’s horse went down under him – but the momentum of the downhill charge could not be halted. Many of the Arabs had no stirrups, and could not check their mounts at full gallop even if they wanted to. The tiny wedge of horsemen smashed through the Turkish ranks like a battering-ram. The enemy broke up in confusion. Lawrence and Nasir, watching from the crest of a hill to the east, at the head of 400 camelry, saw a chance to cut off the enemy retreat. Lawrence felt the blood rushing to his head. This was the moment he had feared all his life: close contact with an enemy intent on killing him. But it was too late for doubt. Nasir screamed ‘Yallah! and the entire troop, with Lawrence in the van, plunged over the hilltop and raced downwards like a whirlwind into the retreating Turks. Four hundred camels, fully caparisoned, with their great swan-necks arched out and their huge limbs working, ridden by long-haired Bedu with savage, snarling faces, were too much for the Turks. They let fly a few unaimed shots, screeched in terror and rushed off. In an instant the whirlwind shivered into their flank, and Lawrence, still cantering, fired wildly about him with his revolver. There was a dreadful mix of bodies, heaving, screaming and swaying. Then, suddenly, Lawrence’s camel went down like a dead weight, hurling him from the saddle. He hit the ground with such force that the breath was knocked out of his body, and his world went black. When he recovered a few moments later, the battle was already over: the Arabs were advancing shoulder to shoulder cutting down the last knot of Turks. The entire Turkish relief battalion had been wiped out or had surrendered, the OC had been taken prisoner and the mountain-gun captured. Hundreds of corpses were strewn across the ground in low heaps. Lawrence later discovered that he had shot his own camel in the back of the head.

  It had not been the war of ghosts which he had envisaged, but it had been an astonishingly successful action. The Arab irregulars had engaged a trained enemy of slightly superior numbers, and had killed 300 and taken 160 prisoner at a cost of only two men dead. Auda was delighted: two bullets had smashed his binoculars, one had pierced his revolver-holster, three had struck the blade of his scimitar, his horse had been shot from under him, and still he had survived. Aba 1-Lissan was the crucial battle in the capture of Aqaba, for the pass of Nagb ash-Shtar was now open to them. Standing on that crest, where Lawrence and Nasir had stood at that crucial moment in the Revolt, eighty years on, though, I saw plainly how the Arabs had won. The hollow of Aba 1-Lissan, now occupied by a village, is a natural amphitheatre, which would have been impossible to defend. Once the Turks had occupied the spring and failed to send out pickets to cover the heights around, the battle was as good as lost. They could not see the enemy hidden behind the hills, could not attack effectively uphill, and could only, perhaps, have retreated back to Ma an. The topographer in Lawrence must have known that the ground had favoured them intensely, and that not all battles would be won so easily. However, for now the bulk of the fighting was over, and that night Lawrence did a curious thing: he walked round the battlefield alone by moonlight, inspecting the corpses, moving them and arranging them in regular rows. His masochism pushed him forwards to look death, his ultimate fear, literally in the face. He later made an oddly surreal and strangely emotionless sketch of himself arranging the matchstick bodies: ‘I put them in order, one by one,’ he wrote, Very wearied myself, and longing to be one of these quiet ones.’30

  Three more Turkish posts lay between them and Aqaba, but the garrison at Guweira – 120 strong – had already surrendered to the local Howaytat Sheikh, ibn Jad, who had waited to see which side would win at Aba 1-Lissan before declaring for the Hashemites. Leaving the next post, Kathira, for ibn Jad’s men to assault in the darkness of the lunar eclipse due that night, Lawrence’s party pushed on down the Wadi Ithm, and found post after post abandoned. The Turks had fled to Khadra at the mouth of the wadi – the last bastion standing between the Arabs and the sea. The following night hundreds of Howaytat and Haywat tribesmen joined the Hashemite force, swelling their numbers to over 1,000 men. In the morning, Khadra surrendered without a fight. A British gunboat – later identified as Slieve Foy – had lain off the Gulf at dawn and had put a couple of shells into the hills. Lawrence and Nasir rode fast out of Ithm and across the great Wadi Araba, where they glimpsed the blue of the sea through a powerful haze, but Slieve Foy had weighed anchor and was gone. They would have to take the news of the victory to Cairo themselves, by camel.31 They found Aqaba town ruined and deserted – smashed to bits by the shellfire of British gunships weeks before. The Hashemite patrol which had marched 600 miles through smouldering deserts to get here took possession of its prize without a single shot being fired.

  16. An Amateurish Buffalo-Billy Sort of Performance

  Crossing Sinai: The Mudowwara Raid July – September 1917

  Of all Lawrence’s camel-treks, the one I most wanted to reconstruct was his classic traverse of Sinai in forty-nine hours, to take the news of the capture of Aqaba to the British at Suez. The Howaytat I met in Wadi Rum insisted that it was impossible, so I brought one of them, Sabah ibn ‘lid, to Sinai to make the crossing with me, and prove to them that it was not. Sabah’s grandfather had ridden with Lawrence on several of his raids, but the Bedu of Jordan had grown used to four-wheel drive vehicles, I thought, and no longer knew what camels and men were capable of. Unlike them, the tribes of Sinai still rode their camels, and I bought four of the best mounts I could find from the Nuwayba’ Tarabin. Though I had Lawrence’s own map, copied from the Royal Geographical Society archives, reconstructing the route proved far more difficult than I had anticipated. For a start, Aqaba and Sinai were now separated by the narrow strip of Israel, and the border at Ras an-Naqab (called Nagb Akaba in Lawrence’s day) – between Israel and Egypt – was closed.
I had to find an alternative route up the escarpment which approximated to the one Lawrence had taken, and which would take us to Ras an-Naqab. An old camel-man of the Tarabin named Furrayj showed me Wadi Tuwayba – a tortuous way running parallel with Lawrence’s pilgrim route, but starting at Taba on the Egyptian side of the border. Furrayj would accompany us as guide and rafiq for the first part of the journey: another rafiq of the Haywat would be waiting for us at Themed. My wife, Mariantonietta – an experienced camel-rider and fluent Arabic speaker – made up the party of four.

  As the day loomed nearer, I began to grasp more clearly the magnitude of the task we had undertaken. At first sight, a ride of forty-nine hours was a flea-bite compared with the 271 days it had taken Mariantonietta and me to cross the Sahara’s 4,500 miles. But to stay in the saddle for two full days and two full nights virtually without rest suddenly seemed an effort of a shorter duration but an equally demanding order. Lawrence had had great incentive, of course: not only had he won a startling victory, he had also left a Hashemite force at Aqaba so short of food that it was eating its own transport. According to the Oxford version of Seven Pillars, he had left Aqaba on the afternoon of 7 July, the day after capturing the town, and arrived at Suez on the afternoon of the 9th, ‘49 hours out of Aqaba’. He felt that this was ‘a fair time’, considering that both men and camels had been exhausted before they started: ‘Unfortunately the camels by now had done 1,000 miles in five weeks, and were all jaded,’ he wrote in a report for The Times soon after the war, ‘so that it took the men two days to get to Suez.’1 This was not modesty but litotes, and it was mischievous, for Lawrence well knew that his non-stop trek was a record – it was celebrated in his own life as one of the great camel-dashes of all time: ‘The great sagas sung throughout the desert, of phenomenal rides dating back to the time of Harun ar-Rashid,’ wrote Frank Stirling, ‘have all been eclipsed by Lawrence’s achievements …Such endurance… is almost incredible.’2

  Our start was marked with a violent argument with the Taba Bedu who surrounded our tiny nest of camels as we saddled up. We had with us a rafiq from the Tarabin, they argued, but Tuwayba was Haywat territory and we must take another from the Haywat. We finally managed to placate them, and trudged up the steep track, dragging the camels after us by the headstalls. As we climbed the Gulf of Aqaba came into view beneath us, a translucent, shimmering blue, with the jagged edges of the Midian hills in the Hejaz beyond. Sunset came on us as we cleared the top of the escarpment, a zig-zag of gold etched into a scroll of dark cloud. It had taken us roughly four hours to make the ascent, which cannot have been far off Lawrence’s time: however, we were still fresh, and Mariantonietta pointed out the anomaly that Lawrence’s men and camels had been ‘trembling with fatigue’. I put this down to the fact that his animals had been weak before they had started, and that the men had just fought a battle at Aba 1-Lissan.

  It was a moonless night, and the darkness closed in around us, locking us in an endlessly long tunnel from which there was no escape but morning. A bitter wind, bone-chilling as only a desert wind can be, was blasting in our faces. We were on the plateau of Sinai, the ‘great and terrible wilderness’, a vast shelterless plain of stone, whose great winds could freeze a man to death, and whose dust-storms could suck the body dry. The breathtaking force of the wind, the weight of the darkness, numbed our senses as if we were travelling in a dream. The camels pressed together haunch to haunch for comfort in the dark, and paced out bravely, their pads clicking on the rubble of rocks. We talked less and less, spinning away in our private universes, and between smatters of talk there was nothing but the sound of our saddles creaking and the familiar rhythmic slap of water in our jerry-cans. Furrayj smoked cigarettes furiously. Sabah began to sing a camel-song, a verse repeated again and again and again, but I was glad, for the sound of it kept us awake and anchored in reality. I knew from long experience that hallucination could be a far more dangerous enemy in the desert than bodily fatigue. We rode on for hour after hour, and slowly sleep began to stalk us. Sabah said that he could make out mountain peaks in the shadows where there were none, and at one point I looked over my shoulder to see another camel-rider following us, and only realized after minutes that no one was there. Even Lawrence had written of the ‘silence of the night so intense that we turned round in the saddles at fancied noises away there by the cloak of stars’.3 The world was so dim and silent, indeed, that it would not have surprised me to have come upon Lawrence’s party. We came, instead, upon a rich vein of thornscrub – presumably the one in which Lawrence and his eight Howaytat had halted for an hour to let their camels browse. Sabah kindled a fire quickly and efficiently and Mariantonietta made coffee. It was now ten o’clock, and we had been travelling for a solid seven hours without a break. Themed, the only watering place on the route, lay at least thirty-five miles away. Yet Lawrence claimed to have reached Themed by midnight on the first day. I acknowledged that he might have had better camels than ours – though his insistence that they were tired out before the start of the journey tended to neutralize that fact – but, even so, was it possible that he could have been so far ahead? Sunset had come upon him at the top of the escarpment – as it had for us. How, then, had he jumped forward to Themed in five or six hours? The only explanation I could think of was that his party had been running their camels. At a fast canter, they could just about have covered the distance in the time. But Lawrence had specifically stated that they had walked them: ‘If we rode hard,’ he wrote, ‘they might break down with exhaustion …we agreed to keep them at a walk, however tempting the surface.’4

  The night seemed endless. The wind gusted stronger and more chilling, and Furrayj, who was seventy years old, became almost frozen to the saddle. Unlike us younger ones, he did not have the luxury of dropping down to the desert floor and stamping off the cold at a walk. In the saddle we would be overcome by that terrifying feeling of losing touch with the real world and drifting into the dimension of nightmare – or of falling asleep entirely and dropping from the camels’ backs on to the sharp stones. On foot, though, I was haunted by another fear which by day I had shrugged off, but which, as the night drew on, grew stronger and stronger: the fear of blundering into a minefield. There were live mines in Sinai – plenty of them – left over from the Six Day War in 1967, and though the Bedu declared that they knew where the mines lay, no one could be absolutely certain. In the saddle, high above the desert, I felt more confident, but as we tramped on on foot, I had unnerving visions of an unexpected crack and puff of smoke, and one of us lying in the cold desert with his or her leg blown off. The hours passed by with agonizing slowness as we rode and tramped. Themed, which Lawrence claimed to have reached at midnight, was still far ahead – in my mind as far away as the north pole. Somewhere, in the early hours of the morning, there arose in my frozen and exhausted head the first faint possibility that Lawrence might not have been telling the truth.

  An hour before dawn we stopped and made a fire to warm Furrayj, who looked deathly pale by the light of my torch, and who was now quaking so visibly with cold that I was afraid he would die of exposure. With great gallantry, Sabah threw his own sheepskin-lined cloak around the old man’s bony shoulders. But he continued to shake, and we had to lift him on to his camel. He was saved only by the sun, which came up in a blaze behind us, sending pulses of golden light and unshrouding suddenly the stark immensity of the wilderness. We had reached the end of the tunnel. The night had closed us in a space a few yards square; now we were suddenly ants in an infinity of apricot-coloured rock, broken only by sharp crests like lone fangs, falling away into the depression of Wadi Themed. The sun warmed us gently as we followed dry water-courses where there were scattered sedges for the camels to graze. Furrayj lost his paleness and began to breathe steadily again. Presently we came to the road, which wound down into a deep dustbowl, out of sight.

  Themed well, where Lawrence had watered his camels, was still there, standing by a single building in the shade of a t
horn-tree. On the shoulder of the wadi side I saw the ruin of the Sinai Police barracks which had been deserted on that day in 1917 when Lawrence had arrived. We couched our camels and slid heavily off. Old Furrayj wrapped himself in a blanket and fell asleep under a bush. We sat down in the shade to make tea. Sabah’s leg was badly bruised from the saddle, and the soles of Mariantonietta’s shoes were worn right through. It was already ten o’clock in the morning, which meant that Lawrence had arrived here ten hours earlier. That added ten hours to our journey at least: instead of staying awake for forty-nine hours – already a difficult task – we were now faced with the prospect of staying awake for fifty-nine hours – probably much more, since our pace would slow down as we tired. I judged this almost impossible, and decided, to my bitter disappointment, that we must give up the expedition at that point.

  I flew back to London, troubled: this was, I felt, a serious defeat. I had been travelling in the desert for almost twenty years, and had covered almost 16,000 miles by camel. In fact, I was far more experienced than Lawrence had been when he had crossed Sinai in 1917. He had then been twenty-nine years old and had made his first real journey by camel only nine months earlier. I was able to conceive that Lawrence might have been minutes ahead, but after two decades of riding camels I refused to accept that the discrepancy could amount to ten hours. Even if Lawrence and his men were hardier than we were – a point I was perfectly willing to concede – how was it possible for debilitated camels to have travelled so much faster than ours, yet still kept to a walk? It was the magnitude of the difference which affected me. I knew we had done our best. We had not delayed but slogged on solidly for an afternoon, an entire night and most of the next morning, covering sixty miles at a walk, averaging three to four miles an hour – a pretty good time by most standards. Our failure to keep up with Lawrence – or within a reasonable margin – threw my whole life’s experience into doubt.