Another great blow to Turkish morale, though, had been delivered by Sharif ‘Abdallah, who, on 13 January, while on the march to Wadi Ais with 5,000 Bedu, had run into a Turkish column under the former assassin Ashraf Bey, near the oasis of Khaybar. ‘Abdallah, who even Feisal admitted could act with lightning decision when necessary, had sent in his horsemen so swiftly that the Turkish machine-gunners had only managed to get off sixty rounds before being swamped. He had captured the entire column, including Ashraf himself, together with Ј20,000 in gold, carpets, clothes, a machine-gun, howitzers, and boxes of pistols. ‘Abdallah had then crossed the railway in the Wadi Hamdh and had left a letter for Fakhri Pasha between the rails, informing him that the Arabs had Ashraf Bey, and making all manner of dire threats. ‘Abdallah had sent a messenger to Feisal with Ashraf Bey’s own jewelled dagger as a present, while he and Lawrence were encamped at Harrat Ghalib on the coast. There had been great feasting and rejoicing: the tribal bard, Lawrence wrote, had composed an ode to the victory ‘within sixteen minutes’. The Arabs had lingered an extra day at Abu Zeraybat in the Wadi Hamdh to celebrate, and it was this delay, rather than lack of water, which had cost them the rendezvous at Wejh.

The capture of Ashraf on 13 January, together with news of the march on Wejh, ended Fakhri Pasha’s designs on Rabegh. In the Wadi Safra, the Harb were harassing his caravans, not for the sake of the Hashemites, but simply for their own benefit: his supply-lines were dangerously over-extended, and lay through hostile country. The British had air superiority in Rabegh, since the Turkish flight in Medina was grounded, and Ross’s aircraft had several times buzzed Medina itself. The Turks were also weakened by a new and even more subversive enemy – the cholera bacillus – which was claiming twenty soldiers a day. News that the Arabs were operating north of Medina was the final straw. On 18 January, five days after the loss of Ashraf, and six days before the fall of Wejh, Fakhri ordered his battalions back to Medina and the railway. The threat to Rabegh had evaporated, and the Turks never stirred again from Medina for the duration of the war.

14. I Do Not Suppose Any Englishman Before Ever Had Such a Place

Wadi’Ais and Wadi Hamdh March-April 1917

We sighted Aba an-Na’am station an hour before sunset, when the saltbush and tamarisk were throwing elastic shadows like exclamation marks across the hard grey shingle on the valley floor. From afar, glimpsed through the folios of thorn-trees, the station buildings were a nest of dark geometrical symmetry amid the fractal patterns of nature, tiny against the gleaming granite walls of Jabal Unsayl, which towered behind it. This was the Wadi Hamdh – the frontier of Juhayna and Billi country – but my driver, Mifleh, was Bani Salem and considered it a foreign district. I had tried to find a camel, to make the pilgrimage to the places where Lawrence had first attacked the Hejaz railway in the slow and leisurely manner they deserved, but in Saudi Arabia today there are no riding-camels. Sadly, I had been obliged to hire a Land-Cruiser at Medina. All afternoon we had been following the line of the railway. The rails and sleepers had long ago been removed, and in places it was scarcely identifiable but for its embankment, a low shelf cutting through sand and shale. The stations had been placed roughly at thirteen-mile intervals, and in 1917 it had been the custom of the Turks to patrol the line every day, using a clockwork system, which had made their movements predictable to Lawrence’s demolition parties. A patrol from each station would clear exactly half the distance to the next station, then, having encountered their neighbours, and exchanged talk and cigarettes, would retreat back down the line. There were six stations between Medina and Abu an-Na’am, and almost all of them brought an image from the Lawrence story – Muhit, where in June 1916 ‘Ali and Feisal had been forced back and attacked in the rear by Fakhri Pasha; Hafira and Buwat, which Feisal had planned to attack in force with his Juhayna; al-Buwayr, where a complete locomotive still stood, rusted to its rails and covered in painted

graffiti, in the station yard; Istabl ‘Antar, where ‘Abdallah had crossed the line on his way to Wadi Ais, standing under a mountain with distinct double-fanged peaks, supposed in Bedu folklore to be the place where the hero ‘Antar ibn Shaddad tethered his gigantic horse. It was Abu an-Na’am which claimed my interest most, though, for it was here that Lawrence had fought his first engagement with the Turks, and ‘fingered the thrilling rails’ of the Hejaz railway for the first time. The mouth of Wadi ‘Ais was visible to the west, and the low ridges of the Dhula – before which Sharif Shakir had laid his artillery, to bombard the station from 2,000 yards. Hamdh, ‘The Sour Wadi’, had a wooded feel, almost African – in Lawrence’s day there were leopard, hyena and ibex here, and at some time in the past there must have been ostrich also, for the name Aba an-Na’am means ‘Place of the Ostrich’.¹ Mifleh thought there were still hyena and ibex, and perhaps even the odd leopard, though he didn’t know anyone who had seen a leopard in recent years. No one he had spoken to, not even the old men, had ever seen an ostrich in Hamdh. We passed a patch of wild colocynth melons, small yellow-green globes, with a camouflage pattern, joined by succulent runners. Mifleh stopped to collect some, saying that you could make a medicine from them which was good for diabetes. The melons were poisonous to humans, but donkeys would eat them boiled, and the Bedu had once made tar from their seeds which they used for proofing water-skins. Like the Bedu, they were superbly adapted to aridity: when the sun dried them into husks, the wind would bowl them through the desert scattering the seeds as they went.

Aba an-Na’am was built on a similar pattern to the other stations we had seen and consisted of three main buildings – a substantial fort, the station itself, and an oval water tower – not circular as Lawrence had described it. To the west stood a tiny mosque and a well-house. The buildings were made of black basalt blocks, and the upper storey of the fort and part of the water-tower had clearly been rebuilt after the Arabs’ bombardment. Mifleh and I explored the fort, which was solidly constructed – rooms opening off a central yard buried under generations of guano, a steel ladder leading down into an underground water-cistern, a staircase taking you to the upper floors, with walkways and battlements. With binoculars, I swept the wadi towards the line of broken outcrops which guarded the entrance to Wadi ‘Ais. The valley was full of rimth sedge set in low, golden clusters like islands, and there was a knot of camels grazing peacefully on the saltbush. I wondered what the Turkish commander of the fort had seen and felt as he stood here on the morning of 30 March 1917, hearing the first, terrifying report of Sharif Shakir’s guns, just before the building began to fall in on him. There had been no fewer than 400 troops defending the station then, sleeping in tents pitched around it, and the place had been encircled with barbed wire. The Turks had been aware that there were Arab patrols in the area, and had been anticipating an attack, because on the evening of the 28th Lawrence’s men had fired a few rounds at the fort, to make sure the troops stayed inside. Later, opposite the door, Mifleh showed me the twisted iron chassis of a railway-wagon, with its bogeys a little way off, half buried in sand. The metal was hot to the touch. This was probably another relic of Lawrence’s attack – for one of Shakir’s shells had hit the first of six wagons attached to a locomotive standing in the siding, detonating its highly flammable cargo which had erupted in flames. The engine had steamed off south directly towards the place where Lawrence had laid his first mine.