Bell of the Desert

by Alan Gold

  They were no more than three hour’s camel ride from Ragibh, halfway between Mecca and Medina, and yet they could have been riding for weeks through the wilderness. Gertrude had told him about the Nefud and the other great deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, and he thought he was used to deserts, but he’d experienced nothing like this.

  He and the prince and their entourage were hundreds of miles from these other anvils of the Earth, these other hellish deserts, yet even in this place, relatively civilized compared to the very worst of Arabian deserts, Lawrence felt the sun as never before. It burned through the keffiyeh he wore, through his thick khaki uniform, through the socks and the boots. It burned into his bones and even felt as though it was boiling his blood. It was enervating yet somehow strangely comforting, like riding within a gigantic womb. It was as if all the conflicts of his life, all the problems of his past, his physical stature and lisp and limp, were all of such little importance, all so negligible, that he was suddenly just like every other man struggling to survive in this alien landscape.

  He took his fob watch out of the top pocket of his uniform. The steel back felt hot in his hand as he unhinged the front. It was only mid-morning, yet it seemed as though they had been riding for the entire day. And then he noticed the prince was far ahead of him. Lawrence realized he was riding slower, more painfully than the others. His pride made him kick the camel’s flanks and whip its backside so it flared its lips, growled, belched and suddenly bolted forward to join the other men, jolting him into renewed consciousness.

  He rode up level with the prince, who looked at him in concern. “You don’t have to prove you are a man of the desert, Mr. Lawrence. You are an Englishman, used to the green highways and byways of Surry and Middlesex. This is not your environment. If you’re having difficulties in keeping up with men who were born in the sand, simply say and we’ll slow down.”

  “Thank you, Highness,” Lawrence said, his voice rasping and dry, “but I am not feeling too much of a strain. I’m quite sure I can keep pace with you and your men.”

  The prince rode onwards, Lawrence by his side. After ten or so minutes of silence, broken only by some of the camels growling in complaint, Prince Faisal said, “I’m interested in why you declined my offer of one of the women servants last night. Was it really because of your English reserve, or was there another reason. In the time I’ve known you, you have never appeared to have an eye for women, or men for that matter. Are you one of those very proper Englishmen who are so reserved they’re incapable of enjoying life, or is there something about your, shall we say, personal life you wish to keep to yourself?”

  “An Englishman is always reserved, Highness. And part of that reserve is never to talk about matters of the body in polite company. We are only just now recovering from perhaps the most restrictive of all ages the English have ever known, supervised by our glorious Queen Victoria. During her reign, sexuality was an unfit topic for thought, let alone discussion.”

  “You are joking, of course Mr. Lawrence. What about Oscar Wilde? The underside of London? The prostitutes, both male and female, children and adult? The lewd theaters and music halls? Come, Mr. Lawrence, proper English society might not have discussed it, but sexuality was rampant during the reign of the queen. And Victoria’s son, your former king, the late King Edward, is known to have had mistresses in almost every great house in the country. The aristocracy kept their daughters under lock and key when he was in the area. We in Arabia might be a . . . what were the words you used recently? Oh yes, ‘nothing but an enslaved people, divided into a hundred minor principalities’, but we are honest and open about our bodies and our needs. Our women are happy to please their men.”

  “Then why cover them head to toe in clothes which hide their very real beauty?”

  “We were told by the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, to prize modesty. The women in Arabia are the possessions of the men. We men must guard our possessions carefully so no other man covets them.”

  Lawrence become angry at the prince’s words, but restrained himself.

  “But you still haven’t told me of your own pleasures. Why can’t you just be honest, and assist me in your likes and dislikes, so I can assist you in fulfilling your desires. Is it women or men you prefer? Boys or girls? Camels, horses, goats . . . ?”

  Captain Lawrence burst out laughing. “Sir, might we not discuss other subjects than my unworthy needs?”

  The prince looked at him curiously. Softly, he asked, “Are you a virgin, Mr. Lawrence.”

  Like an Arabic woman before her husband, Lawrence cast his eyes towards the ground in embarrassment and deference. The Englishman’s silence gave the prince his answer. Yet despite his oddity, he felt strangely drawn to this complex, attractive, enigmatic young Englishman.

  EIGHT

  Basrah, Mesopotamia, March, 1916

  The rain was torrential, hanging like a shroud, falling as gray fingers from a dead sky. Major Thomas Lawrence left his ship to enter a land in which he’d only once in the past set foot, and his first thought was how oddly out of place such a deluge was for a desert country.

  But then again, maybe it wasn’t. This, after all, was the place where the original story of the deluge had been dreamed by an ancient people. It was where Noah, the rescuer and progenitor of life on Earth was the first to see God’s symbol, the rainbow, as the cosmic link between heaven and Earth signifying mankind’s cleansing and return to supremacy. This place was the origin of so much of humankind’s creativity. Here was written the Epic of Gilgamesh. It was here that Gula, the Goddess of Medicine, first healed those who worshipped her. This was where Abram journeyed to find the one God who would eventually rename him as Abraham, the father of many. Here was where, for the first time in mankind’s history, the epic battles between the gods who controlled the Earth, the seasons, the crops, and the weather fought against those gods who had control of the sun and the moon and the stars—where people first wrote the most exquisite words about how their lives were ruled by the whims of unseeable and unknowable deities which they represented by crude clay idols.

  And it was here that Thomas Lawrence’s favourite deity legend was born—that of Mithras, which was originally Persian, but which spread throughout the Middle East and eventually became one of the Roman’s favourites. Mithras was the origin of the Christ in Christianity. According to the legend, Mithras was born hundreds of years before Jesus, and on Mithras’ birthday, December 25th, three wise men from Persia came to visit him, bringing him gifts of gold, myrrh and frankincense. He was born of a virgin, and during his life acquired twelve disciples who represented the twelve signs of the zodiac. Before he was executed on a cross, he celebrated a last supper with his disciples who were among the first to form a celibate priesthood around his worship. And the final nail in Christianity’s coffin, as the one true religion, was Mithras’ ascension into heaven during the same time as the Jewish Passover, a time when there is equal night and day.

  When, he wondered, would the self-righteous Christian and Jewish and Muslim priests acknowledge that not only were their religions not the word of some non-existent God, but nothing more than inventions of frightened ancient minds who created myths proving their deities weren’t deities at all, but explanations of natural phenomena which their pre-scientific minds couldn’t explain.

  He looked out from the deck of the ship which had just docked. The sight before him led his mind into a hundred different by-roads. He often pondered the myths and legends and the extraordinary diversity of the people in the Middle East as he thought of the distinctions between his own Christian religion and that of Islam.

  Christianity was such an arrogant religion, Lawrence thought, as his feet settled on the solid ground which was the dock. He surveyed the melee around him . . . why did Christian priests think they had all the right answers when almost all of the stories in the Testament were merely appropriations and adaptations of what had been told and retold to countless generations during the
millennia which led to the birth of Jesus? Why did Westerners treat the Arabs with such contempt, when so much of Western thought and myths and philosophies had derived from this desert people? He shook his head and relished the joy of being where he was.

  But his joy lasted only for a short while. Soaked to the skin, exhausted from walking through the deluge, Lawrence had only been in Basrah for a couple of hours, but yearned for the heat and dryness of the desert. If ever he needed an ark to save him from this particular cosmic destruction, this downpour of biblical proportions, it was now. After his ship had landed, it had taken him two hours to walk from the dockside of Basrah to the headquarters of the Chief Political Officer for Mesopotamia, Sir Percy Cox. First of all, he had taken a taxi, but when he’d been sitting in it for half an hour and it hadn’t even left the dock due to the congestion at the port’s entrance, he paid the fare for the two hundred or so yards he’d traveled, picked up his kitbag, and decided to walk the remaining distance despite the drenching he knew he’d get.

  The roads, once compacted earth and gravel baked by the sun during months of dry weather, were now as sticky as toffee in the deluge and he was in danger of falling flat on his face in the mud and slime, which seemed to creep up his shoes and into his leggings, making them squelch and making him feel miserable. And the rain weighed down the khaki of his uniform and made it feel as heavy and stiff as canvas.

  Just ten days ago, he’d been sweltering in the deserts of Hejaz. There were times when the Englishman thought he’d fry in the merciless burning heat, but his constitution seemed to acclimatize quickly and it took him only a few days to become as one with the others with whom he was riding. He thought he was sufficiently experienced in desert conditions from his time in Egypt to be used to almost anything, but the Egyptian desert was a civilized and almost fruitful land compared to the deserts of the Hejaz.

  No matter the hardships he’d suffered, it had all been very well worth it. He and Prince Faisal had reached more than a political accommodation, more than an understanding—they’d gained a deep friendship, an intimacy which only true male friends could begin to comprehend. He was now as close and intimate with Faisal as he’d been with his friends when he was up at Oxford. He and the prince had ridden together, eaten together, bathed together at the oasis of Ain el Hadid, slaughtered a lamb together and had each eaten one of the eyes, the greatest compliment a host could pay a visitor. They had discussed the most intimate aspects of their lives, their upbringing, their triumphs and disappointments. It was only when the prince tried to uncover the details of Lawrence’s loves and preferences and experiences that a strain developed between them.

  In the evening, the prince had always ended the day by visiting Lawrence’s tent, where they had discussed philosophy and archaeology, and Lawrence had read to him from the poetical works of Browning and Shelley and Keats. And for his part, the prince had told Lawrence of the joys of being a ruler in a feudal land which wasn’t particularly enamoured of the Western notions of democracy, where he and his father and brothers had the power of life and death in their hands and at a whim could banish some enemy to his certain death in the lands of ibn Sa’ud or ibn Rashid, or where they could chose to lie with any woman or man who took their fancy.

  Were the women—or men—who were so chosen to be the lovers of the rulers, ever hurt or insulted by such droits des seigneurs? The prince was amazed that Lawrence could even think such an event could hurt or insult some inhabitant of the city. After all, there was no greater honor than being chosen to pleasure one of Hejaz’s rulers.

  It had been an educative experience for Lawrence, but it had come to an abrupt end. He and Prince Faisal had been riding to Medina to convince the local leaders to rise up against the Turks when suddenly a messenger, appearing out of the desert in a column of sand and dust and arriving with the warlike fury of an avenging angel, suddenly thrust a letter in Lawrence’s hands. It contained instructions from Military Headquarters in Cairo, dated a few days beforehand, to make all haste for Jeddah, where he was to pick up a ship to sail to Basrah.

  Waiting on the ship was a Lieutenant Colonel, originally stationed in Jerusalem, who’d been instructed by Cairo to deliver Lawrence’s sealed orders. The colonel, who had recently been transferred from Shanghai to Egypt, found it discomforting that he had to kowtow to a junior officer, but everybody had told him Major Lawrence was a rum one, very odd, and that he had the ear of the top brass in Cairo and London. So the colonel determined to enjoy the sea trip and not to let Lawrence’s rudeness in not disclosing the orders ruffle his feathers. When they arrived in Basrah, the colonel had looked in disgust at the Arabic town, turned up his nose at the stench from the marketplaces, and declared he preferred to remain aboard in his cabin and wait for the following day and his return to Suez.

  And now Lawrence was in Basrah. He’d first been here in 1911 when he’d taken a walking tour through northern Mesopotamia. It was somehow comforting to be back in the land where true civilization had begun. There were those who were now saying that human life had begun in the jungles of Africa, where man had developed from apes and had emerged from the trees to inhabit the land as a competitor to lions and elephants. But this was where early man, truly civilized man, had first fashioned those putative forms and patterns which, when fully developed by European civilization, had enabled him to conquer the Earth.

  Mesopotamia! Was it pouring with rain when Nebuchadnezzar had brought the Jews back as slaves half a millennium before Jesus, after despoiling their lands and sacking their temple in Jerusalem? Was it as torrential as this when the Tigris and the Euphrates had been tamed by ancient engineers and walls and channels and dams had been built to ensure irrigation throughout the year? And was it like this when a once-great and magnificent community of poets and philosophers and mathematicians had somehow slipped off their perch of industry and achievement and for over a millennium had become nothing more than illiterate desert brigands?

  As he slithered and fell for the umpteenth time over a muddy rut into a deep water-filled pothole, Lawrence stopped wondering how he was going to clean his uniform in order to present himself to Sir Percy Cox, and started thinking about the nature of his mission. He had been given two jobs. The first was to secure the release of many thousands of British soldiers trapped in Kut al Amara. He’d been authorised to give the Turkish commander up to a million gold sovereigns.

  And his second task was to find a replacement in Mesopotamia for Gertrude Bell, and bring her back with him to Cairo so the two of them could work together on the maps and dispositions of the Arabian Peninsula and assist in encouraging the Arabs to revolt against the Turks. The revolt was becoming increasingly important to British interests, both because the Turks were proving to be a more formidable enemy than first anticipated, and because being able to field a million or more Arab fighters against Turkey would prevent Britain and the Allies from moving men away from the battlefields of Europe.

  Within sight of the British Indian Army’s headquarters in Basrah, Lawrence stiffened himself for the final lunge. He had only about fifty yards to go between the street corner on which he stood, and the entryway to the HQ. He started his run, but his first step landed him in a water-filled gutter which hid a monstrous crevasse that had opened up in the road, and he plunged headlong onto his belly, propelled forward like a penguin on ice and stopping only when he was in the middle of the road.

  “Lawrence?” asked a voice which he could barely hear above the tympany of the rain on the nearby tin rooftops.

  Major Lawrence looked up and towards the shops on the side of the road. He saw the shape of a woman . . . an Englishwoman. He knew she was English because unlike the other men and women dressed in the clothes of Arabia, through the downpour he was just able to determine that this woman was dressed in a flowered hat, a long skirt, laced up boots and had the pinched waist of a Western lady.

  “Lawrence, is that you?” the voice asked louder.

  “Gertie?”
r />   “For God’s sake, dear boy, you look like a drowned rat. Here, get up, and take my arm. You look awful.”

  He stood, and looked at her. She, too, was soaked, but unlike Lawrence, who looked as though he’d just been swimming fully clothed in a mud bath, Gertrude still managed to look fresh and womanly.

  She helped him up from the street and guided him underneath a waterlogged awning, where she promptly burst out laughing. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more pathetic specimen of humanity than you,” she told him. Then she threw her arms around him, and hugged him.

  “Gertie,” he said. “I’m terribly wet. You’ll get yourself muddy.”

  “As if that matters, my love.”

  “Gertie,” he said. “It’s so awfully good to see you.”

  “And you too, poor boy, even though you look as though you’ve got half the mud of Basrah on your clothes. You can’t possibly see Percy like that. I live five minutes from here . . . come over to my house, and I’ll get you bathed and my servants will clean and press your uniform.”

  An hour later, he was seated sipping tea on the veranda in one of her silk bathrobes, looking out over the tops of the houses towards the port. The rain was still torrential, yet he felt comforted and warm being in her house, in her company. As she sipped her tea, she looked fondly at him. She wore an almost permanent smile at the pleasure of being with Lawrence again.

  “I’ve missed you, Gertie. Missed you terribly. You were the only person I could ever talk to in Egypt. I learned so much from you, you know. And you were the only one who was kind. The others were beastly in the way they treated me.”

  “And they were often cruel and horrible to me, too. At least you’re a man, and you could go to the Officer’s Club and drink with the fellows. Me? I spent all day working, then I dined with a small group of friends who couldn’t wait to leave me after port and cigars so they could all go to their club and stand around the piano and sing and drink. Imagine how it was for me, being a woman, all alone, with no military rank and no way of getting on the inside.”