of the tactical situation, abdulla made very little, pretending pettishly that it was feisal’s business. he had come to wadi ais to please his younger brother, and there he would stay. he would not go on raids himself, and hardly encouraged those who did. i detected jealousy of feisal in this, as if he wished ostentatiously to neglect military operations to prevent unbecoming comparison with his brother’s performance. had shakir not helped me in the first instance, i might have had delay and difficulty in getting started, though abdulla would have ceded in time and graciously permitted anything not calling directly upon his own energies. however, there were now two parties on the railway, with reliefs enough to do a demolition of some sort every day or so. much less interference than this would suffice to wreck the working of trains, and by making the maintenance of the turkish garrison at medina just a shade less difficult than its evacuation would serve the interests of british and arab alike. so i judged my work in wadi ais sufficiently done, and well done.
i longed to get north again quit of this relaxing camp. abdulla might let me do all i wanted, but would do nothing of his own: whereas for me the best value of the revolt lay in the things which the arabs attempted without our aid. feisal was the working enthusiast with the one idea of making his ancient race justify its renown by winning freedom with its own hands. his lieutenants nasir or sharraf or ali ibn el hussein seconded his plans with head and heart, so that my part became only synthetic. i combined their loose showers of sparks into a firm flame: transformed their series of unrelated incidents into a conscious operation.
we left on the morning of april the tenth, after pleasant farewells from abdulla. my three ageyl were again with me; and arslan, the little syrian punch-figure, very conscious of arab dress, and of the droll outlook and manners of all bedouins. he rode disgracefully and endured sorrow the whole way at the uneasy steps of his camels: but he salved his self-respect by pointing out that in damascus no decent man would ride a camel, and his humour by showing that in arabia no one but a damascene would ride so bad a camel as his. mohammed el kadhi was our guide, with six juheina.
we marched up wadi tleih as we had come, but branched off to the right, avoiding the lava. we had brought no food, so stopped at some tents for hospitality of their rice and millet. this springtime in the hills was the time of plenty for the arabs, whose tents were full of sheep-milk and goat-milk and camel-milk, with everyone well fed and well looking. afterwards we rode, in weather like a summer’s day in england, for five hours down a narrow, flood-swept valley, wadi osman, which turned and twisted in the hills hut gave an easy road. the last part of the march was after dark, and when we stopped, arslan was missing. we fired volleys and lit fires hoping he would come upon us; but till dawn there was no sign, and the juheina ran back and forward in doubting search. however, he was only a mile behind, fast asleep under a tree.
a short hour later we stopped at the tents of a wife of dakhil-allah, for a meal. mohammed allowed himself a bath, a fresh braiding of his luxuriant hair, and clean clothes. they took very long about the food, and it was not till near noon that at last it came: a great bowl of saffron-rice, with a broken lamb littered over it. mohammed, who felt it his duty in my honour to be dainty in service, arrested the main dish, and took from it the fill of a small copper basin for him and me. then he waved the rest of the camp on to the large supply. mohammed’s mother knew herself old enough to be curious about me. she questioned me about the women of the tribe of christians and their way of life, marvelling at my white skin, and the horrible blue eyes which looked, she said, like the sky shining through the eye-sockets of an empty skull.
wadi osman to-day was less irregular in course, and broadened slowly. after two hours and a half it twisted suddenly to the right through a gap, and we found ourselves in hamdh, in a narrow, cliff-walled gorge. as usual, the edges of the bed of hard sand were bare; and the middle bristled with hamdla-asla trees, in grey, salty, bulging scabs. before us were flood-pools of sweet water, the largest of them nearly three hundred feet long, and sharply deep. its narrow bed was cut into the light impervious clay. mohammed said its water would remain till the year’s end, but would soon turn salt and useless.
after drinks we bathed in it, and found it full of little silver fish like sardines: all ravenous. we loitered after bathing, prolonging our bodily pleasure; and remounting in the dark, rode for six miles, till sleepy. then we turned away to higher ground for the night’s camp. wadi hamdh differed from the other wild valleys of hejaz, in its chill air. this was, of course, most obvious at night, when a white mist, glazing the valley with a salt sweat, lifted itself some feet up and stood over it motionless. but even by day, and in sunshine the hamdh felt damp and raw and unnatural.
next morning we started early and passed large pools in the valley; but only a few were fit to drink: the rest had gone green and brackish with the little white fish floating, dead and pickled, in them. afterwards we crossed the bed, and struck northward over the plain of ugila, where ross, our flight commander from wejh, had lately made an aerodrome. arab guards were sitting by his petrol, and we breakfasted from them, and afterwards went along wadi methar to a shady tree, where we slept four hours.
in the afternoon everyone was fresh, and the juheina began to match their camels against one another. at first it was two and two, but the others joined, till they were six abreast. the road was bad, and finally, one lad cantered his animal into a heap of stones. she slipped, so that he crashed off and broke an arm. it was a misfortune: but mohammed coolly tied him up with rags and camel-girths, and left him at ease under a tree to rest a little before riding back to ugila for the night. the arabs were casual about broken bones. in a tent at wadi ais i had seen a youth whose forearm had set crookedly; realizing this, he had dug into himself with a dagger till he had bared the bone, re-broken it, and set it straight; and there he lay, philosophically enduring the flies, with his left forearm huge under healing mosses and clay, waiting for it to be well.
in the morning we pushed on to khauthila, a well, where we watered the camels. the water was impure and purged them. we rode again in the evening for another eight miles, intending to race straight through to wejh in a long last day. so we got up soon after midnight, and before daylight were coming down the long slope from raal into the plain, which extended across the mouths of hamdh into the sea. the ground was scarred with motor tracks, exciting a lively ambition in the juheina to hurry on and see the new wonders of feisal’s army. fired by this, we did a straight march of eight hours, unusually long for these hejaz bedouin.
we were then reasonably tired, both men and camels, since we had had no food after breakfast the day before. therefore it seemed fit to the boy mohammed to run races. he jumped from his camel, took off his clothes, and challenged us to race to the clump of thorns up the slope in front, for a pound english. everybody took the offer, and the camels set off in a mob. the distance, about three-quarters of a mile, uphill, over heavy sand, proved probably more than mohammed had bargained for. however, he showed surprising strength and won, though by inches: then he promptly collapsed, bleeding from mouth and nose. some of our camels were good, and they went their fastest when pitted against one another.
the air here was very hot and heavy for natives of the hills, and i feared there might be consequences of mohammed’s exhaustion: but after we had rested an hour and made him a cup of coffee he got going again and did the six remaining hours into wejh as cheerfully as ever; continuing to play the little pranks which had brightened our long march from abu markha. if one man rode quietly behind another’s camel, poked his stick suddenly up its rump, and screeched, it mistook him for an excited male, and plunged off at a mad gallop, very disconcerting to the rider. a second good game was to cannon one galloping camel with another, and crash it into a near tree. either the tree went down (valley trees in the light hejaz soil were notably unstable things) or the rider was scratched and torn; or, best of all, he was swept quite out of his saddle, and left impaled on a thorny branch, if not dropped violently to the ground. this counted as a bull, and was very popular with everyone but him.
the bedu were odd people. for an englishman, sojourning with them was unsatisfactory unless he had patience wide and deep as the sea. they were absolute slaves of their appetite, with no stamina of mind, drunkards for coffee, milk or water, gluttons for stewed meat, shameless beggars of tobacco. they dreamed for weeks before and after their rare sexual exercises, and spent the intervening days titillating themselves and their hearers with bawdy tales. had the circumstances of their lives given them opportunity they would have been sheer sensualists. their strength was the strength of men geographically beyond temptation: the poverty of arabia made them simple, continent, enduring. if forced into civilized life they would have succumbed like any savage race to its diseases, meanness, luxury, cruelty, crooked dealing, artifice; and, like savages, they would have suffered them exaggeratedly for lack of inoculation.
if they suspected that we wanted to drive them either they were mulish or they went away. if we comprehended them, and gave time and trouble to make things tempting to them, then they would go to great pains for our pleasure. whether the results achieved were worth the effort, no man could tell. englishmen, accustomed to greater returns, would not, and, indeed, could not, have spent the time, thought and tact lavished every day by sheikhs and emirs for such meagre ends. arab processes were clear, arab minds moved logically as our own, with nothing radically incomprehensible or different, except the premiss: there was no excuse or reason, except our laziness and ignorance, whereby we could call them inscrutable or oriental, or leave them misunderstood.
they would follow us, if we endured with them, and played the game according to their rules. the pity was, that we often began to do so, and broke down with exasperation and threw them over, blaming them for what was a fault in our own selves. such strictures like a general’s complaint of bad troops, were in reality a confession of our faulty foresight, often made falsely out of mock modesty to show that, though mistaken, we had at least the wit to know our fault.