For all that, the war in the Middle East was going badly. Attempts by the British to break through the Turkish line at Gaza had failed; the Arabs’ attempt to take Medina had led merely to a protracted and humiliating defeat; and the Arabs’ hostility toward any European presence inland meant that nobody in Cairo had a clear picture of just what Feisal’s men were doing, or what was taking place in the vast, empty desert beyond the few small ports on the Red Sea in the possession of the Allies.
Emir Ali insisted that Lawrence leave after dark, so none of the tribesmen camped in Rabegh would know that an Englishman was riding into the interior; for the same reason, he provided Lawrence with an Arab head cloth and cloak as a disguise. The kufiyya, or head cloth, held aroundthe head by a knotted agal of wool, or in the case of persons of great importance finely braided gold and colored silk thread, was (and remains) the most distinctive item of Bedouin clothing. The pattern of the cloth and the color of the agal usually identify one’s tribe, so they also serve to identify friend and foe. The Bedouin disliked the sight of European peaked caps and sun helmets, finding them at once blasphemous and comic. The sun helmets seemed all the more comic because the few British officers who adopted the kufiyya (which was convenient and protective in the desert) usually wore it over the bulky khaki solar topee, making a grotesque and ludicrous display of themselves before the natives. What looked like a huge cloth-covered beehive on the head was funnier still when the wearer was bobbing up and down on a camel. Lawrence avoided this from the first, in the interest of providing an identifiably Arab silhouette in the moonlight—besides, he had often worn a kufiyya while working in the desert as a young archaeologist before the war, and found nothing strange about it. It was cool and sensible: it protected the wearer from the sun, the loose ends could be tied around the face against wind and sandstorms, and it did not provoke the hostility of the tribesmen.
Emir Ali and his half brother Emir Zeid, the youngest of Hussein’s sons, came down to see Lawrence off, in a date palm grove on the outskirts of the camp. No doubt they had mixed emotions: neither of them can have relished being responsible for Lawrence’s safe journey. Ali also disliked from the start the whole idea of Lawrence’s journey to see Feisal, which offended his strong religious sensibilities. However, Zeid, still a “beardless” young man, was not shocked or outraged at all—his mother was Turkish, and as the third of Hussein’s three wives was a relative newcomer to the harem, so Zeid had neither Ali’s intense religious feelings, nor his father’s and half brothers’ attachment to the Arab cause; indeed Lawrence at once judged him insufficiently Arab for his purposes.
Neither Obeid nor his son carried any food with them—the first stage of their journey was to Bir el Sheikh, where Ali said they might pause for a meal, about sixty miles away; no Arab thought a journey of such a short distance required food, rest, or water. As for riding a camel, though itwas not Lawrence’s first attempt, he made no pretense of being a good or experienced rider. Unlike most Englishmen of his class and age, he was not an experienced horseman—his family’s budget had not extended to riding lessons; he and his brothers had excelled at bicycling, not horsemanship. Nor had he ever covered this kind of distance on a finely bred camel, which paced, in long, undulating strides, while the rider sat erect as in a sidesaddle, with the right leg cocked over a saddle post, and the left in the stirrup. Two years of desk work in Cairo had not prepared Lawrence for the fatigue, the saddle sores on legs unused to riding, the backache, the suffocating heat, or the monotony of riding by night, often over rough ground. Sometimes he dozed off—neither Obeid nor his son was a talker—and woke with a start to find himself slipping sideways, saved from a fall only by grabbing the saddle post quickly.
He had no fears about his companions—it was an extension of the Arab belief in the obligation of hospitality toward a guest as an absolute duty that those charged with conveying a stranger must protect him with their lives, whatever they thought of him. But Obeid was a Hawazim Harb, and the Harbs surrounding Rabegh were hardly more than lukewarm on the subject of the sharif of Mecca; also, their sheikh was known to be in touch with the Turks. Then too, as Lawrence knew from his experiences traveling, mostly on foot, through Palestine, the Sinai, and what is now Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria—where, as a young archaeologist he had separated armed, warring factions among the workers at the dig—the blood feud was an unavoidable part of Arab life. It involved not just tribe against tribe, but feuding within clans and families and between individuals—no matter how peaceful a situation might seem, you could never be protected from sudden, unexpected violence that might also engulf the stranger.
Empty, vast, and unprofitable as the desert looked to Europeans, every barren square foot of it, every wadi, every steep rocky hill, every sparse patch of thornbush, every well—however disgusting the water—was claimed by some tribe or person and would be defended to the death against trespassers. Nor was “the desert” a romantic, endless landscapeof windblown sand dunes: much of it was jagged, broken, black volcanic rock, as sharp as a razor, and fields of hardened lava that even camels had difficulty crossing. Steep valleys zigzagged to nowhere; towering, knife-edged hills rose from the sand; flat patches of bleached, glassy sand, the size of some European countries, reflected the harsh sunlight like vast mirrors at 125 degrees Fahrenheit or more, and stretched to the horizon, broken only by sudden sandstorms appearing out of nowhere. Except for remote areas where a green fuzz of short, rough grass in the brief “rainy season” was counted as rich pasturage for the great herds of camels that were the principal source of wealth for the Bedouin tribes, this was the landscape, or close to it, of Cain and Abel, of Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers, of Job—it was not a safe or kindly place to be.
Lawrence’s mind was on the fact that the path they were following was the traditional route by which pilgrims traveled from Medina to Mecca—indeed, in the Hejaz a large part of the Arabs’ feeling against the Turks came from the building of the railway from Damascus to Medina, since the Bedouin earned money by providing guides, camels, and tented camps for the pilgrims along the desert route (and also from robbery and shameless extortion at their expense). It was the local Bedouin’s ferocious hostility to this modern encroachment that had so far prevented the Turks from building a planned 280-mile extension of the railway from Medina all the way to Mecca. Lawrence, as his camel paced in the moonlight from the flat sand of the coast into the rougher going of scrub-covered sand dunes marred by potholes and tangled roots, meditated on the fact that the Arab Revolt, in order to succeed, would have to follow the “Pilgrim Road” in reverse, as he was doing, moving north toward Syria and Damascus, bringing faith in Arab nationalism and an Arab nation as they advanced, as the pilgrims brought their faith in Islam yearly to Mecca.
Perhaps in deference to the fact that he was an Englishman, not an Arab, his guides called a halt at midnight, and allowed Lawrence a few hours of sleep in a hollow in the sand, then woke him before dawn to continue, the road now climbing the length of a great field of lava, againstwhich pilgrims for untold generations had left cairns of rocks on their way south, then across a wide area of “loose stone,” then on and upward until at last they reached the first well of their journey. They were now in territory controlled by the local tribes, who favored the Turks, or whose sheikhs received payment from the Turks, and reported on the movement of strangers.