9. The Insurance People Have Nailed Me Down
Sinai, Syria, Britain 1914
At the end of December 1913, Woolley received a telegram from Sir Frederick Kenyon at the British Museum, requesting him and Lawrence to join an officer of the Royal Engineers for an archaeological survey of the Negev and northern Sinai under the aegis of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Its objectives were to trace an ancient caravan route from Palestine to Egypt and identify some of the sites associated with the forty years’ wandering of the Children of Israel. Lawrence guessed at once that these objectives were a red herring. The real purpose of the survey was military – an espionage mission inside Ottoman territory. Though Turkey had long been an ally of Britain, the far-sighted Lord Kitchener – British Agent in Egypt – suspected that in the event of a war with Germany the Ottomans would take the German side. Sinai protected the British Empire’s jugular – the Suez Canal – and beyond Sinai lay Palestine. It was, Kitchener thought, vital to the future of the canal that the area be thoroughly surveyed.
On 10 January they met the expedition leader, Captain Stewart Newcombe, at Beersheba. Newcombe was nonplussed to find them so young. ‘British Museum’ had evoked a vision of cobwebby old greybeards with fifteen tons of camp furniture, but instead Woolley and Lawrence travelled light and ‘looked about twenty-four and eighteen years of age respectively’. 1Newcombe decided that his letters had been too deferential and that deference should stop immediately. He dispatched them into the desert with instructions to rendezvous at Qusayma – a desert post across the Egyptian border – in a few days’ time, and they promptly disappeared. When they failed to turn up on the appointed day, Newcombe grew worried. He sent a detachment of Egyptian Police Camel Corps looking for them, and the troopers returned having rounded up their camels, but having found no trace of the missing men. The result was wild telephoning back and forth across the border, and a squadron of Turkish border-guards was alerted on the Ottoman side. The local Bedu were suspected of having taken them prisoner and forty tribesmen were arrested as hostages. A day later, though, Woolley, Lawrence and Dahoum arrived at Qusayma, somewhat footsore, and were amazed to discover that the Camel Corps were hunting them. Lawrence explained that the camels had simply gone crazy and rushed off in the night. They had walked to Qadesh Barnea expecting to find the camels there, and had inadvertently taken a path through the hills which no camel could follow: this was why the Camel Corps had not found them: ‘It shows how easy it is,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘in an absolutely deserted country to defy a government.’ 2It was a lesson he would not forget. They remained at Qadesh Barnea – perhaps once the desert capital of the Children of Israel – for a few days and parted, Woolley for the Dead Sea, Lawrence for Aqaba where he was to meet Newcombe. Five days later he arrived at the head of the escarpment, and saw the Gulf of Aqaba for the first time.
Today, the head of the escarpment stands on the Egypt-Israel border, and in order to reach it you have to make the steep ascent from the Israeli resort of Eilat. Passing through Eilat on my way back to Egypt, I decided to spend a day inspecting the old Pilgrim Road from which Lawrence had first glimpsed the Rift Valley, hiring a mountain bike for the trip, which proved to be an even harder climb than that of Safed – a gradient of one in three and a half, as Lawrence himself recorded. The day was a very hot one, and, certain that there would be some kind of refreshment-stall on the way, I had neglected to bring any water. The road took me through Eilat’s ‘neighbourhoods’ and then up abruptly into a desert of arid rock, marbled abutments of granite, sharp sabre-toothed peaks, broken peduncles, cloven hoofs. I halted breathlessly on a curve to take in the stunning sight of the Gulf of Aqaba, and the great Wadi ‘Araba, where the African Rift surfaces from beneath the Red Sea, with its vast walls of cream-coloured limestone and sea-green granite, the perfect, crescent-shaped bay with its fuzz of palm-trees, and the neat crystal-porcelain wedge of Aqaba town lying to one side. I continued, pedalling and sweating, and the day grew hotter and hotter, and my mouth drier and drier. There were no people, no houses up here, nor even any traffic. There were few trees, little vegetation of any kind – just naked flint burning in the sun. At last I came to a signpost which pointed to a fissure in the rock, and read ‘ Ein Netafim’. ‘Einmeant water of some kind, so I turned off the road and bounced for a mile down a stony track, only just stopping myself from plunging over a sheer drop into a ravine of 500 feet. Ein Netafim,it seemed, lay under the rock overhang, and to get there you had to climb down a perilous rock chimney. I was already shattered after my pedalling, but thirst was burning in my throat, and I knew I had to get down at any cost. The chimney was slippery and narrow, and I climbed down hand over hand: in places the rock had actually been polished glossy from the passage of people over the years. The wadi bed was clogged with broken blocks – the parings and crumblings of millennia – and the spring was no more than a wet seam where the rock wall touched the valley floor. Someone had made a tiny catch-basin to collect the liquid, which was full of bright green algae and mosquito larvae. I leaned over and scooped it into my mouth, larvae, algae and alclass="underline" I cannot say that it was the best water I have ever tasted, only that I was so incredibly thirsty that I did not taste it at all. Then I collapsed in the shade of a rock, and listened to the calling and whistling of birds, which seemed deafening. I realized suddenly that this trickle was probably the only water-source in the entire area. I could have kicked myself for neglecting to take water in the desert, but the hardship involved in getting a drink had been, I thought, a salutary and timely lesson in respect. I climbed up the chimney and pushed my bike back to the road. A little farther on I came across a stretch of cobbled track, and a sign which read ‘Stop. Border beyond this point.’ It struck me that I was on one of the oldest roads in history: the Hyksos shepherd-kings had come this way in their chariots to invade Egypt 4,000 years ago: Cambyses III, King of Persia, had come here with his army in 525 BC and so introduced the camel into North Africa. The present road was hewn and blasted out by Selim the Grim – the Turkish Sultan who had finally smashed Mamluk power in the Middle East – in order to get his artillery up the escarpment during his invasion of Egypt in 1517. Down this road Muslim pilgrims had plodded for centuries on their way to Mecca and Medina, and down this road T. E. Lawrence had come in March 1914, taking just three hours from the plateau to the beach.
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Eilat’s McDonald’s now stands amid traffic lights at almost exactly the point where the old Pilgrim Road touches the strand, but in 1914 there was no town called Eilat nor a nation called Israel. Instead of opulent hotels, ice-cream stalls, funfairs and bikini-clad girls lounging on the beach, Lawrence discovered only scrub and sand, a few dom palms, and a score of reed-built fishermen’s huts. In Aqaba, a couple of miles further on, he also discovered a disgruntled Newcombe. The local Governor had forbidden any mapping, Newcombe said, and though Lawrence was all for ignoring the order, the following day Newcombe rode twenty miles to receive a phone call from Lord Kitchener in person, who warned him strongly against precipitate action. Lawrence grasped the reason for the ban at once. Aqaba was the only major Turkish port at the head of the Red Sea, and thus of vital significance to any future operations which might take place inland. Automatically, he shifted into his attack-defence mode. Aqaba could be taken from the sea, of course, but any troops there, he saw, would easily have been able to retreat a few miles back to the sweeping mountains which hemmed in the port on both sides. An enemy force making a beach-head at Aqaba would be pinned down and would find it very difficult to advance. The key route to Aqaba was the Wadi Ithm, a great chasm of granite opening to the north-east of the port, so narrow and boulder-blocked in places that even camels could only pass in single file. He who held the Wadi Ithm held the key to Aqaba, Lawrence thought.