Nowhere, however, was this more apparent than in the Negev, the arid wilderness that stretched between the Sinai and Petra, and where, even as Mundhir was establishing his regime in Hira, vines and olives were being conjured from the sand. Take one of the paved roads—the strata—that criss-crossed the region, and in due course an entire city would materialise on the horizon, rising like a mirage above the desolation, a paradise of farmland, stone houses and baths. A miracle? Hardly. It was only through the most back-breaking labour that the ceaseless battle against the sands could hope to be won, only with the most exhaustive maintenance of cisterns, aqueducts and dams. Yet the cities of the Negev, for all that the water might sometimes taste brackish, and the scrub-flecked desert stretch away barren in every direction, did truly serve as outposts of the wider world beyond. Even in the most remote, an isolated settlement by the name of Nessana that served pilgrims on the road to Sinai as a final way-stop, there were bureaucrats who wrote in Greek and would-be lawyers who studied Latin. More than two centuries after Constantine had filched the Palladium for his new capital, there was even a copy of the Aeneid in the local library. In Nessana, time, as well as distance, might be dissolved: for the myths of which Virgil had sung were older by far than himself, older even than Rome. On frayed papyri in the depths of a lonely desert, the halls of Mount Olympus—where the gods of Greece had reclined on exquisite couches, partnered by ox-eyed goddesses, and served wine by eternally beautiful youths—still preserved a spectral hold.
Given enough time, then, it seemed that even “the wolves of Arabia”77 might be domesticated into lawyers or literary critics. Certainly, from the perspective of such cities as Nessana—where the prodigious array of hydraulic works was accompanied by a quite striking absence of fortifications—it did genuinely appear as though the desert had been tamed. A comforting reassurance, perhaps—except that, in truth, the imperial authorities had no desire to see every last Saracen de-fanged. Along the limits of the empire, where Mundhir’s Lakhmids were conducting ever more audacious raids, there was an urgent need for attack-dogs of their own. Many a Roman base might boast an encampment of Saracens: a hira. Other concentrations of Arab foederati—entire cities of tents, thronged with a shifting population of warriors, horses and camels—lay under the command of tribal chieftains rather than Roman officers. The reign of Justinian would see the largest of these—a teeming settlement east of the Golan Heights called Jabiya—become to Syria and Palestine what Hira was to Ctesiphon: a key defensive stronghold. The tribesmen who lived there—the Banu Ghassan—were recognisably the mirror-image of the Lakhmids: for the “Sons of Ghassan” combined a ferocious loyalty to their imperial patrons with a haughty Arab chauvinism. Certainly, the Latin spoken in Jabiya owed little to the study of Virgil. The phrases familiar to the Arabs of the frontier derived not from poets but from the army. Over the course of the previous centuries, the sheer awesome immensity of Rome’s military apparatus had stamped itself indelibly upon the language spoken by the foederati. So it was, for instance, that the camps of the frontier-system—the castra—had provided the Arabs with their own word for fortress: qasr. So it was too that the strata, the paved roads built by Roman military engineers to link each camp along the frontier, had bequeathed their name to the entire desert south of Palmyra. Indeed, such was their impact upon the foederati that sirat—the form that the original Latin word had come to take in Arabic—could signify almost any kind of path.78 The strata, those great gashes of gravel and stone scored in straight lines across even the most unforgiving of landscapes, had become for the Arabs the very quintessence of a highway.
Not that they themselves, of course, had much need of paving stones. What would their record of banditry have been, after all, without a talent for going off-road? In early 529, when Mundhir suddenly appeared in northern Syria, looting and burning almost to the walls of Antioch, the leaden-footed response of the provincial authorities was little different to that of some hapless farmer finding his sheep-pen being cleaned out. “For with such speed did he move, and with such ruthless calculation, that invariably he would be gone with his loot before the military authorities could even discover what was going on, let alone arrive to stop it.”79 Fire of this order could only hope to be fought with fire; and Justinian knew it. A few months after Mundhir’s rampage through Syria, he crowned an Arab all of his own. His choice, predictably enough, had fallen upon the chieftain of the Banu Ghassan, a youthful but already seasoned warlord by the name of al-Harith—or, as he was known by his patrons, Arethas. Summoned from Jabiya to Constantinople, the Ghassanid prince was splendidly arrayed in the white silken cloak of Roman monarchy and a bejewelled coronet.80 His promotion bore witness to Justinian’s customary eye for talent. Arethas, no less than Mundhir, was a man of boldness, charisma and vision. What was more, he positively revelled in a blood feud. Before long, the two warlords’ struggle had come to possess its own furious and deadly rhythm, as relentless as it was personal. To no one’s great surprise, the signing in 532 of a treaty between Justinian and Khusrow, for all its ambition to establish “an eternal peace”81 between the two empires, did little to dampen the mutual hatred of their respective Arab clients. Ghassanid and Lakhmid: both, across the desert sands, continued to eyeball each other.
Nor was it merely their political loyalties, or even their personal vanities, that rendered their mutual hatreds so unblinking. Neither Arethas nor Mundhir had any doubt that they were engaged in a conflict that was more than earthly. If Christians saw in the desert the ultimate arena, where athletes of God might test themselves to the limits of their endurance against entire armies of demonic adversaries, then it certainly needed no baptism for an Arab to recognise in it a realm alive with spirits. Many of these—whether borne on a scorching wind or haunting a bone-littered salt flat—were malevolent in the extreme; but not all were, by any means. Some—such as the owls that rose from the heads of men slain in battle—served as the guardians of individual warriors, while others stood watch over particular places. The favour of the divine might be experienced wherever there was water, or shade, or merely a landscape of startling beauty. The Arabs had little need of idols, let alone temples, to alert those who approached a god of his presence. Focus of their awe was much more likely to be a natural feature: if not a tree, as at Mamre, then a spring, or a mountain-peak, or a rock. Always, however, there was only the one certain measure of holiness. A god could be reckoned no god who did not on occasion keep his sanctuary free of violence. At certain times, in certain places, tribes who might otherwise have slaughtered one another with ferocious abandon would assemble upon ground staked out as hallowed—haram—and there join in festivities quite as joyous and peaceable as those staged every summer at Mamre. Of the Arabs’ major shrine, which lay surrounded by palm trees somewhere in the desert south of Palestine, and where the local people were reported to gather twice a year for a whole month or more at a time, it was rumoured “that even the wild beasts live in peace with men, and among themselves.”82 Not, however, that pacifism was necessarily on the agenda the whole year round. The gods of the desert, away from their shrines, rarely objected to bloodshed. On occasion, they might positively demand it. At Hira, for instance, there stood two stones sacred to a god named Dushara, which his worshippers would regularly make sticky with gore.83 A second deity, al-’Uzza—the “Mighty Queen”—was graced with an even more spectacular draught of blood when, in 527, Mundhir sacrificed no fewer than four hundred Christian virgins in her honour. Such a goddess—one able to consecrate the soil of the Lakhmid capital as haram while simultaneously sponsoring the most flamboyant atrocities—could hardly have been better suited to the warlord’s needs.