The hardest facet of Bedu life for a stranger to grasp was not its physical aspect, but its spiritual one. The Bedu lived in a different space-time continuum from the European – a world which was flat, a world in which the sun crossed the sky, a world in which the stars were merely lights in the heavens, a world which could not be measured by kilometres or miles. They inhabited a world in which everything – every tree, stone or pool – had its individual spirit, but in which everything was related in God: in which a man must accept what befell him because it was the will of God. The Bedu had no lust to explain, no thought to solve, no notion to improve – the answer to every question lay not in reason but in faith. They lived in a world without physical security, where death – from raiders, thirst, hunger, accident or disease – might strike at any moment. Yet they possessed existential security – like the medieval European, they had an absolute knowledge of who they were, a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning, a sense that God moved everything for the best, a sense of belonging to the earth and to the universe, which modern Europeans had lost.

Johan Lutwig Burckhardt and Richard Burton had penetrated Mecca and Medina disguised as Muslims in the first half of the nineteenth century, and Charles Doughty had travelled in forma pauperis in Arabia in the 1870s. Yet of the land itself, little was known to the outside world: ‘Up to 1914,’ David Hogarth would tell the Royal Geographical Society in 1920, ‘our best knowledge of the Peninsula of Arabia was everywhere sketchy, and of more than half of its great area… it scarcely amounted to anything worth mention. The virtually unknown regions lay in the centre – especially on its western half … The greater part of this last region had been barred as a Holy Land to European explorers unless they would risk themselves in furtive disguise which hindered, if it did not absolutely preclude, them from observing and recording facts and features of geographical interest.’¹ The Tihama, or Red Sea coast of the Hejaz, was still as little mapped as the Antarctic. The British had no reliable map of the interior, could not say for certain how far the Hejaz railway lay from the coast, and could not even enumerate its stations south of al-‘Ula. For the 200-mile stretch between there and Mecca, they could not fix the longitude of any given point, and indeed, did not know exactly where Medina lay nor what it looked like. The only plan they had of the town was a sketch made by Burton seventy years previously. When Lawrence stepped ashore at Jeddah on 19 October 1916, he was aware that he was entering terra incognita.

The revolt was then four months old, and dangerously near crisis. The initiative had been regained by the Turks. It seemed to the British that the Sharif had acted precipitately, though Hussain himself had seen no other choice. In January 1916 he had sent his son Feisal to Damascus, accompanied by a bodyguard of forty tribesmen, to foment mutiny among Arab Divisions of the Ottoman army in Syria and Mesopotamia. To his dismay, Feisal had found that there were no longer any Arab Divisions in Syria, for the resourceful Jamal Pasha – the Military Governor – had sent them off to other fronts and replaced them with Osmanli Divisions. Jamal’s new policy was repressive. In April, he had ordered the public hanging of twenty-one Arab nationalists – including prominent magistrates, writers and intellectuals – in Damascus and Beirut. He was also on the point of dispatching Khairy Bey with an additional 3,500 specially picked and trained soldiers to the Hejaz, ostensibly on their way to the Yemen, to escort a German field mission under Baron Othmar von Stotzingen, but actually to strengthen his hold on the Hejaz. Hussain recognized that the executions symbolized a new confidence on the part of the Turks, encouraged by their successes in Gallipoli and Kut, and suspected that the true purpose of the Khairy Bey mission was to depose him. He knew that he must act before the fresh troops reached Medina. He had already taken the Sheikhs of the Harb, the ‘Utayba, the Juhayna and others into his confidence, and knew he could count on Bedu levies. He had his own trained and blooded camelry of ‘Agayl mercenaries and his Bishah tribal police – highlanders from the hills of the fertile Assir – but virtually no regular troops and no modern equipment, particularly machine-guns or artillery. Nevertheless, Hussain felt confident of his Bedu troops, and only one factor stayed his hand: his son Feisal was still in Syria, and would be seized by jamal as soon as word of hostilities leaked out. Feisal solved the problem cleverly by gulling Jamal into believing that he was returning to the Hejaz only to bring back a force of volunteers for the Turkish army. On 16 May he left Damascus, putting his forty men under the command of his friend Nasib al-Bakri of al-Fatat, with instructions to flee as soon as they received a coded password. By the third week in May he was back in Medina, and the Sharif was free to strike.

At first light on 10 June, the voice of a single muezzin rang out from the minaret of the Grand Mosque at Mecca. It was still cool at that hour, but already the sky was clear as a burning-glass and the eddyless air held the threat of furnace heat. There were dark figures in the streets, Bedu wrapped in cloaks and mantles, with their headcloths tightly knotted across their faces, mingling, hardly noticed, with townsmen hurrying to perform their prayers. At the Jirwal barracks on the Jeddah road, where the garrison commander had spent the night, the Turks slept on, confident in the belief that they were protected by the sentries and guns of the Jiyad fortress – a massive, many-towered redoubt squatting on a stump of shale above the town. The troops were few – less than 1,500 men – for during the sweltering summer season, the Governor moved to cooler quarters in Ta’if with the bulk of the garrison. In the Hamdiyya building, which housed the Ottoman Government Offices, the Vice-Governor, who was already awake and making his ablutions, paused for an instant to take in the beauty of the muezzin’s song. Not far away, in the Hashemite palace, Sharif Hussain was listening carefully to the same clear notes, gazing out of the window, and observing the slowly milling figures in the streets. The Call to Prayers finished abruptly, and for a second there was silence. Then the Sharif picked up his rifle, and, with slow deliberation, fired from the window the shot which officially opened the Arab Revolt.

It was the signal the tribesmen had been waiting for. Instantly, they threw off their cloaks, and let rip a hail of bullets at the three Turkish fortresses, the barracks, the guard-posts and the offices. The troops at the Jirwal awoke to find bullets buzzing through their windows like flies, and, rolling out of bed, the Commander looked about him in confusion. He was under attack, but he had no idea by whom. He listened attentively for the boom of artillery or the rattle of machine-guns which would have accompanied an Allied assault, but heard only the coarser crack and thump of musketry. Glancing out of the window, he saw a scarlet flag flying from the Hashemite palace, but did not distinguish it as the Hashemite emblem, for the Imperial Ottoman banner was also scarlet. Quickly, he cranked the telephone and spoke to the Commander of the battery in the Jiyad fort. Almost at once a terse order brought the gunners to their posts. Puffs of smoke appeared at the gun-ports of the fortress, followed by the crashing roar of shells bursting in the streets. To the Bedu attackers, the guns sounded like thunder-demons. They were armed only with muzzle-loading muskets, and had never heard artillery before. At the Jirwal barracks the Turks had recovered from their initial surprise, and, emboldened by the artillery barrage, were now firing back vigorously. The Commander next telephoned the Sharif: ‘We are under attack by the Bedu,’ he reported. ‘Can you do something about it?’ ‘Certainly,’ Hussain replied calmly, and gave the signal for a renewed attack.