From the canter he urged the camel into a gallop. The size was right; the shape—but whence the robes, the headcloth, even the headropes, of such dazzling whiteness? They had been mired in mud for months, he had not thought ever to see white robes until spring.
It was. His heart leapt with joy. It was! The figure was near enough to see features now; and it was not to be mistaken for any other. Aurens!
He reined his camel in beside the white stallion, and the beast did not even shy, it simply halted, though Aurens made no move to stop it. He raised his hand, and the mob at his back fell respectfully silent.
Ali looked down at his friend; Aurens looked up, and there was a strange fire in those blue eyes, a burning that made Ali rein his camel back a pace. There was something there that Ali had never seen before, something that raised the hair on the back of his neck and left him trembling between the wish to flee and the wish to fall from his camel’s back and grovel at the Englishman’s feet.
“Lawrence?” Ali said, using the English name, rather than the one they all called him. As if by using that name, he could drive that strangeness from Aurens’ eyes. “Lawrence? How did you escape from the Turks?”
The blue eyes burned brighter, and the robes he wore seemed to glow. “Lawrence is dead,” he said. “The Turks slew him. There is only Aurens. Aurens, and the will of Allah.”
Ali’s blood ran hot and cold by turns as he stared down into those strange, unhuman blue eyes. “And what,” he whispered, as he would whisper in a mosque, “is the will of Allah?”
At last the eyes released him, leaving him shivering with reaction, and with the feeling that he had gazed into something he could not, and would never, understand.
“The will of Allah,” said Aurens, gazing toward Deraa, toward Damascus, and beyond, “Is this.”
Silence, in which not even the camels stirred.
“There will be jihad.”
General Allenby swore, losing the last of his composure. “He’s where?” the commander of the British forces in the Middle East shouted, as his aides winced and the messenger kept his upper lip appropriately stiff in the face of the general’s anger.
“Outside of Damascus, sir,” he repeated. “I caught up with him there.” He paused for a moment, for if this much of the message had the general in a rage, the rest of it would send him through the roof. He was sweatingly grateful that it was no longer the custom to slay the bearer of bad news. “He sent me to tell you, sir, that if you wish to witness the taking of Damascus, you had best find yourself an aeroplane.”
The general did, indeed, go through the roof. Fortunately, early on in the tirade, Allenby said something that the messenger could take as a dismissal, and he took himself out.
There was a mob lying in wait for him in the officers’ mess.
“What did he say?” “What did he do?” “Is it true he’s gone native?” “Is it—”
The messenger held up his hands. “Chaps! One at a time! Or else, let me tell it once, from the beginning.”
The hubbub cooled then, and he was allowed to take a seat, a throne, rather, while the rest of them gathered around him, as attentive as students upon a Greek philosopher.
Or as Aurens’ men upon his word. The similarity did not escape him. What he wondered now, was how he had escaped that powerful personality. Or had he been permitted to escape, because it suited Aurens’ will to have him take those words back to Jerusalem?
First must come how he had found Aurens—he could no more think of the man as “T. E. Lawrence” than he could think of the Pope as “Binky.” There was nothing of Britain in the man he had spoken to, save only the perfect English, and the clipped, precise accent. Not even the blue eyes—they had held something more alien than all the mysteries of the east.
“I was told he had last been seen at Deraa, so that was where I went to look for him. He wasn’t there; but his garrison was.”
“His garrison! These wogs couldn’t garrison a stable!” There was an avalanche of comments about that particular term; most disparaging. Kirkbride waited until the comments had subsided.
“I tell, you, it was a garrison.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it. As wild as you like, tribesmen riding like devils in their games outside, the Turkish headquarters wrecked and looted—but everything outside that, untouched. The Turks, prisoners, housed and fed and clean—the guards on the town, as disciplined as—” He lacked words. The contrast had been so great, he could hardly believe it. But more than that, the town had been held by men from a dozen different tribes, or more—and yet there was no serious quarreling, no feuding. When he ventured to ask questions, it had been “Aurens said,” and “Aurens commanded,” as though Aurens spoke for Allah.
Aurens, it appeared, was on the road to Damascus, sweeping all before him.
“They gave me a guide, and sent me off camel-back, and what was the oddest, I would have sworn that they knew I was coming and were only waiting for me.” That had been totally uncanny. The moment he had appeared, he had been escorted to the head of the garrison, some Sheik or other, then sent immediately out to the waiting guide and saddled camel. And the only answer to his question of “Where are you taking me?” was “Aurens commands.”
Deraa had been amazing. The situation outside Damascus was beyond imagination.
As he described it for his listeners, he could not fault them for their expressions of disbelief. He would not have believed it, if he had not seen it. Massed before Damascus was the greatest Arab army the world had ever seen. Kirkbride had been an Oxford scholar in History, and he could not imagine that such a gathering had ever occurred even at the height of the Crusades. Tribe after feuding tribe was gathered there, together, in the full strength of fighters. Boys as young as their early teens, and scarred old greybeards. There was order; there was discipline. Not the “discipline” of the British regulars, of drill and salute, of uniforms and ranks—a discipline of a peculiarly Eastern kind, in which individual and tribal differences were forgotten, submerged in favor of a goal that engaged every mind gathered here in a kind of white-hot fervor. Kirkbride had recognized Bedouins that were known to be half-pagan alongside Druses, alongside King Hussein’s own devout guard from Mecca—
That had brought him up short, and in answer to his stammered question, his guide had only smiled whitely. “You shall see,” he said only. “When we reach Aurens.”
Reach Aurens they did, and he was brought into the tent as though into the Presence. He was announced, and the figure in the spotlessly white robes turned his eyes on the messenger.
His listeners stilled, as some of his own awe communicated itself to them. He had no doubt, at that moment, that Aurens was a Presence. The blue eyes were unhuman; something burned in them that Kirkbride had never seen in all of his life. The face was as still as marble, but stronger than tempered steel. There was no weakness in this man, anywhere.
Aurens would have terrified him at that moment, except that he remembered the garrison holding Deraa. The Turks there were cared for, honorably. Their wounded were getting better treatment than their own commanders gave them. Somewhere, behind the burning eyes, there was mercy as well.
It took him a moment to realize that the men clustered about Aurens, as disciples about a master, included King Hussein, side-by-side, and apparently reconciled, with his son Feisal. King Hussein, pried out of Mecca at last—