Sunset came, and it was time for Lawrence to face the unpleasant task of searching for the buried trigger mechanism in pitch darkness. If ignited by accident, he reckoned, the two charges would lacerate the line for seventy yards, and anyone within that distance would almost certainly be blown to bits. To make matters worse, the whole force of Juhayna insisted on accompanying him for moral support, and as he groped for the firing mechanism with tremulous fingers, he had dreadful visions of blowing up not only himself but the entire patrol. It took him an hour to locate it, and at once he understood why it had failed to ignite: it had subsided a fraction of an inch, due to the soft ground or his own faulty laying. He quickly reset the mechanism, and then he and his party ran for their camels and rode north towards the bluffs behind which Mudahrij was hidden, laying charges as they went. The Juhayna in Lawrence’s party were all Garland-trained dynamiters, and they scurried about like ants in the darkness, setting charges on a four-arched culvert and on the rails. Lawrence shinned up a telegraph pole and cut the wires. Within a few moments, the silence of the night was torn apart violently as the charges went off almost in unison, cutting dozens of rails and shearing the head off the bridge. As soon as it was done, the Arabs dashed for their camels and rode back to their base-camp at a canter, so wildly, in fact, that they were mistaken for the enemy by their own machine-gunners, who let fly half a belt at them in the darkness. Fortunately no one was hit, and Lawrence slept contentedly, to be woken at 7.30 by the distant thud of his mine going off. Two scouts he had left behind to watch the track reported that a train carrying 300 troops from the Repair Battalions, and stacks of replacement rails, had set off the mine, the charges going off fore and aft of its wheels. Though the damage was not as great as he would have liked, Lawrence was satisfied that the mine had worked, and that his party had done enough damage to close down the railway. He had learned that Garland mines were almost impossible to detect, and that the Turkish garrisons on the railway were nervous and trigger-happy. His keen mind, ever questing for principles, had absorbed profound lessons about the Bedu, too. They were, he concluded, ‘Odd people’: ‘Travelling with them is unsatisfactory for an Englishman,’ he wrote in his report, ‘unless he had patience as deep and wide as the sea.’¹⁷ He called them slaves of their appetites with no stamina of mind – addicted to coffee, milk and water, gluttonous consumers of mutton and smokers of tobacco. They would dream constantly about sex, he said, and titillated each other continually with bawdy tales. It was, he concluded, only the hardship of their lives which made them continent: given lush circumstances they would be pure sensualists. If they suspected one of driving them, they would resist or run away, but if one had the patience to present things from their own point of view, they would ‘do one’s pleasure’. ‘Their processes are clear,’ he wrote, ‘their minds moving as [ours] move, with nothing incomprehensible or radically different, and they will follow us, if we can endure with them, and play their game.’¹⁸ He had survived his first major action under enemy fire, had risked his life in groping for a hair-trigger igniter, and had not been found wanting. Now, the thrill of war, the intensity of balancing on the edge of the abyss almost every moment of the day, gave him a sense of connection and purpose which he had never experienced before. This, Lawrence suddenly understood, was what he had been destined for: the years of wandering had all been preparation for this.

The party rode back through the Wadi Hamdh, singing, and two days later they arrived back in ‘Abdallah’s camp at Abu Markha, where Lawrence found a letter from Feisal which demonstrated once and for all the esteem in which he was held in the Sharif’s camp: ‘My Dear Affectionate Friend,’ the letter ran, ‘… I want to see you very much because I have many things to tell you. The destruction of the railway is easy. Major Garland has arrived and we can send him for this purpose. You are much needed here more than the destruction of the line because I am in a very great complication which I never expected …’¹⁹ In fact, as Lawrence later reported, the Sharif was annoyed that he had stayed away so long, and was in a nervous and exhausted state. After receiving ‘Abdallah’s assurance that he would launch attacks on the railway on a nightly basis, he set out with Mohammad al-Qadi and three ‘Agayl and arrived in Wejh on 14 April, to encounter a man with whom his fate was inextricably linked: the near-legendary warrior-chief of the Howaytat, Auda Abu Tayyi.

15. It is Not Known What are the Present Whereabouts of Captain Lawrence

Auda Abu Tayyi was the most feared fighting-man in Arabia. Tall, lean, predatory, with a nose like the hooked beak of an eagle, and eyes that had grown into slits from peering at the sun, his very presence carried with it the aura of danger. Auda seemed to be possessed by a demon which might today be described as psychopathy – a tendency to fall into a blind rage which could only be assuaged by violence. He had no control over his mouth, and would openly insult people by telling scandalous lies about them in public, daring them to challenge him. He claimed to have killed seventy-five men in battle, many at close quarters, and was reputed to have torn out and eaten the hearts of several of his enemies.¹ In 1909 he had opened fire on a party of Turkish gendarmes who had descended on his camp to demand taxes, killing two and sending the others packing. Ever since, he had been on the run from the Ottoman government, which had declared him an outlaw and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Auda had not been born to the sheikhdom of his tribe, which traditionally belonged to the ibn Jazi section of the Howaytat. In Bedu custom the authority of a hereditary Sheikh simply ceased when it was no longer acknowledged by the tribe – so the Howaytat Sheikh ‘Ar’ar ibn Jazi had been deserted by his people, first for Harb Abu Tayyi and later for Auda, who retained authority by dint of his reputation for courage, energy, cruelty and generosity. He was not rich, no well-respected Bedui ever could be, for the Bedu revered open-handedness rather than wealth, and stood in awe of the man who acquired much and gave most of it away. Even in a land where people prided themselves on their munificence, Auda’s hospitality was legendary. Under his leadership, and the guidance of his cousin Mohammad adh-Dhaylan, the Towayha section of the Howaytat had been transformed within one generation from a clan of nomad-farmers to the most efficient force of raiders in the entire peninsula, known to strike as far north as Aleppo and as far south as Wadi Dawaasir on the borders of the Empty Quarter. Inspired by Auda’s truculence, they had acquired an йlan, a ruthlessness and a persistence which had led them into so many encounters that their numbers had been reduced in a few decades from over 1,000 fighting men to only 500. Unruly, anarchistic, uncompromising, the Howaytat had eccentricities which displayed the shortness of their history as nomadic camel-breeders and raiders: they were disorganized on the march and would argue incessantly over where to camp, they owned land, they carried parasols and bottles of mineral water on raids, and they had a reputation for treachery, for ignoring blood-ties, and for flouting the Bedu code. Lawrence later characterized the Howaytat as ‘true’ Bedu – in fact they were despised as parvenus by the great Bedu tribes of the desert such as the Rwalla and the Shammar, yet none of these could ignore their ferocity, and even Sheikhs such as the powerful Nuri ibn ash-Sha alan, Emir of the Rwalla, pretended friendship to Auda Abu Tayyi.