‘Ali and Othman were only two of a new contingent of ‘Agayl Lawrence’s column borrowed from Sharif Sharraf at Abu Ragha, bringing their numbers up to thirty-five. On 16 May, the day Lawrence acquired his new servants, he reported himself ‘still waiting and still savage’.¹³ The following day, though, much to his relief, the enlarged patrol finally mounted their camels and drew off across volcanic harra – a maze of basalt clinkers so thick and angular that the camels were obliged to travel in single file. Lawrence’s internal desolation was now matched by the surreal strangeness of the landscape: it was as if they had passed into another dimension. Nothing here was reassuring or ordinary – everything seemed other-worldly, odd, hostile, inimical to life. At last they crossed a fifty-foot ridge of vast, twisted columns, and came into the sandy bed of the Wadi Aish, where there were scattered thorn-bushes and waterholes. They couched their camels, unloaded and piled up their baggage, then sent the beasts out into the scrub to fill their bellies on the green stuff. No sooner were they out than someone screamed ‘Raiders!’ and Lawrence glanced up to see riders racing towards them, hanging together in the heat-haze like a swarm of flies. There was the chilling crack of rifles and the sound of bullets buzzing through the air, and whanging off the stones around him. Some of the ‘Agayl fell flat and fired back at once, while others rushed hazardously towards the enemy, whooping out challenges. The raiders had not been expecting so large a party or so aggressive a defence. Almost at once they reined in their camels, and pulled away. Auda identified them from the cut of their clothes as a party of Shammar, whose Emir, ibn Rashid, had taken the side of the Turks.

On 19 May, ten days after setting out from Wejh, they filled their water-skins at the pools at Dira’a, and in the evening crossed the railway at ad-Dizad. There was a Turkish fort nearby which seemed to have been abandoned, and the trained dynamiters among the ‘Agayl quickly got to work on the rails, setting up a relay of gun-cotton and gelatine charges which they detonated in sequence, filling the valley with deafening explosions and billows of smoke. Auda, who had never seen explosives before, burst into delighted laughter and made up a verse about it spontaneously. The ‘Agayl lunged for their camels, and while they were mounting up, Lawrence cut three telegraph wires and dragged the poles down by attaching them to half a dozen mounts. They trotted on for five miles until the going became too difficult, then made camp on a ridge. Lawrence lay in the darkness listening to the shouts of Turkish soldiers in the stations and outposts down the line, and the occasional salvo of shots they fired at imaginary raiders in the shadows. He dared not light a fire or send up a signal-flare to contact the baggage-party, which had become separated from his riders in the darkness. Later, two scouts returned and led Lawrence and his men on to where the main body were encamped, safe behind a sand-dune. They managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, but it was still dark when they mounted again, and Auda guided them across hills and dunes until, at dawn, they found themselves on the edge of a vast, shimmering plain which stretched endlessly to the east, falling steadily until it merged with the haze of the eastern sky. This was al-Houl, ‘The Terror’ – a vast anvil of sand and stone without a tree, a bush or a single blade of grass.

For five days they rode across the wilderness in the teeth of a smouldering sand-storm which leached their bodies dry of moisture. Yet they could not drink more than a few mouthfuls a day, for their water was limited and there would be no major water-sources till they reached the Wadi Sirhan. As the day drew on, Lawrence would see strange will-o’-the-wisp luminosities which licked suddenly out of the nothingness, and dust-devils that fumed across the hot flints like pillars of fire. Not only was there no life here, there was no sign of life. As his party rode forward reluctantly into the emptiness, weighed down by the awesome vastness of the sky, Lawrence looked in vain for the tracks of lizards, rats, insects or birds. The hugeness of this plain, so ancient, so still, so silent, reduced them to black specks on its redness, and it seemed to Lawrence that they made no progress, for the horizon remained always the same distance before them, the same distance behind: ‘we ourselves felt tiny in it,’ he wrote, ‘our progress across its stillness an immobility of futile effort.’¹⁴ The only sound was the splash of water in the goatskins, the mesmeric creak of the saddles, and the clink of the camels’ feet on the dry stones. By noon on the first day, a hot wind was boiling off the horizon, bringing with it the spice-taste of the great Nafud desert which lay beyond. The ‘Agayl drew their headcloths tightly across their mouths, but Lawrence decided to ‘face out’ the storm simply from masochistic perversity, and as a result developed badly chapped lips and a throat so hoarse with dust that he could not eat properly for the next three days. They rode from dawn till sunset, for even Auda felt too ill-at-ease in such a void to travel at night, with the risk of losing the way and thrashing about in unknown desert until they died of thirst. Soon the flint country merged into gi’an or salt-flats, which gleamed blindingly white in the sun, a sensation so painful that several times Lawrence almost fainted. At last, on 24 May, he sighted the first significant animal life he had seen since entering al-Houl – two ostrich, strutting rapidly across the horizon – and when one of the ‘Agayl ran up with ostrich eggs, he, Auda, Nasir, and Nasib al-Bakri halted to breakfast on them. Lawrence caught up with the main party hours later to find that his servant Gasim – the ill-favoured peasant from Ma’an – was missing. His camel was there, complete with his saddle-bags and rifle, but of the man himself there was no trace.

The ‘Agayl suggested that he had fallen asleep in the saddle during the night and tumbled off, hitting his head on a rock, or even that he had been the victim of a grudge-killing. It was clear that Gasim was lost, and that the ‘Agayl – to whom he was merely a bad-tempered stranger – were not prepared to go back and look for him. Lawrence realized that the onus fell on him. He considered ordering one of his servants to go back on his camel, but realized that such a shirking of his duty would always be remembered. He begged half a skin of water from the ‘Agayl – the last water they had – and turned his camel silently, forcing her back along the line of camel-riders and into the desert beyond, cursing his need to live up to Bedu ideals. Within twenty minutes the caravan was out of sight, and the terrible loneliness of the desert descended on him. The only sign that humans had ever survived in this void was a pattern of threshing-pits across the flints of the desert floor, where in the past the Fajr Bedu had worked grain from the wild grass samh. The pits were tiny pools of sand like eyes in the stony waste, and Lawrence urged his camel across them deliberately so as to leave some trace of his outward journey. He rode on for an hour and a half through a series of mirages which cast ghostly sparklers of light and haze, and sighted at last a tiny dark blemish on the desert’s surface. This was Gasim. When Lawrence approached, he saw that the man was blundering about in confusion, half blinded by the sun, his arms held out and his mouth gaping. Lawrence couched his camel and Gasim snatched the water-skin from him, spilling the precious liquid down his shirt in his eagerness to drink. Lawrence sat him on the camel’s rump, then mounted himself and set off on a compass-bearing, hoping desperately that he could now find the caravan. He traced the tracks he had left on the threshing-floors, and Gasim clung on behind the saddle, blubbering. Within an hour, though, he spotted a black bubble in the distance, which gradually split and swelled, resolving into the forms of three camel-riders. For an anxious moment, Lawrence wondered if it was the enemy. Then, suddenly, he recognized Auda and two of Sharif Nasir’s ‘Agayl, who had come back to search for him. Lawrence yelled sneers at them for abandoning a man in the desert. Auda replied that Gasim was not worth the price of a camel: Lawrence interrupted him. ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ he said. Gasim claimed to have dismounted to urinate and lost the caravan in the darkness, but Lawrence suspected that he had actually halted and gone to sleep. Soon they caught up with Sharif Nasir and Nasib al-Bakri. While the Sharif appreciated Lawrence’s act of courage, Nasib was angry that he had endangered his own life and Auda’s – and consequently the entire mission – for the sake of a single worthless man.