It had not been the war of ghosts which he had envisaged, but it had been an astonishingly successful action. The Arab irregulars had engaged a trained enemy of slightly superior numbers, and had killed 300 and taken 160 prisoner at a cost of only two men dead. Auda was delighted: two bullets had smashed his binoculars, one had pierced his revolver-holster, three had struck the blade of his scimitar, his horse had been shot from under him, and still he had survived. Aba 1-Lissan was the crucial battle in the capture of Aqaba, for the pass of Nagb ash-Shtar was now open to them. Standing on that crest, where Lawrence and Nasir had stood at that crucial moment in the Revolt, eighty years on, though, I saw plainly how the Arabs had won. The hollow of Aba 1-Lissan, now occupied by a village, is a natural amphitheatre, which would have been impossible to defend. Once the Turks had occupied the spring and failed to send out pickets to cover the heights around, the battle was as good as lost. They could not see the enemy hidden behind the hills, could not attack effectively uphill, and could only, perhaps, have retreated back to Ma an. The topographer in Lawrence must have known that the ground had favoured them intensely, and that not all battles would be won so easily. However, for now the bulk of the fighting was over, and that night Lawrence did a curious thing: he walked round the battlefield alone by moonlight, inspecting the corpses, moving them and arranging them in regular rows. His masochism pushed him forwards to look death, his ultimate fear, literally in the face. He later made an oddly surreal and strangely emotionless sketch of himself arranging the matchstick bodies: ‘I put them in order, one by one,’ he wrote, Very wearied myself, and longing to be one of these quiet ones.’³⁰

Three more Turkish posts lay between them and Aqaba, but the garrison at Guweira – 120 strong – had already surrendered to the local Howaytat Sheikh, ibn Jad, who had waited to see which side would win at Aba 1-Lissan before declaring for the Hashemites. Leaving the next post, Kathira, for ibn Jad’s men to assault in the darkness of the lunar eclipse due that night, Lawrence’s party pushed on down the Wadi Ithm, and found post after post abandoned. The Turks had fled to Khadra at the mouth of the wadi – the last bastion standing between the Arabs and the sea. The following night hundreds of Howaytat and Haywat tribesmen joined the Hashemite force, swelling their numbers to over 1,000 men. In the morning, Khadra surrendered without a fight. A British gunboat – later identified as Slieve Foy – had lain off the Gulf at dawn and had put a couple of shells into the hills. Lawrence and Nasir rode fast out of Ithm and across the great Wadi Araba, where they glimpsed the blue of the sea through a powerful haze, but Slieve Foy had weighed anchor and was gone. They would have to take the news of the victory to Cairo themselves, by camel.³¹ They found Aqaba town ruined and deserted – smashed to bits by the shellfire of British gunships weeks before. The Hashemite patrol which had marched 600 miles through smouldering deserts to get here took possession of its prize without a single shot being fired.

16. An Amateurish Buffalo-Billy Sort of Performance

Crossing Sinai: The Mudowwara Raid July – September 1917

Of all Lawrence’s camel-treks, the one I most wanted to reconstruct was his classic traverse of Sinai in forty-nine hours, to take the news of the capture of Aqaba to the British at Suez. The Howaytat I met in Wadi Rum insisted that it was impossible, so I brought one of them, Sabah ibn ‘lid, to Sinai to make the crossing with me, and prove to them that it was not. Sabah’s grandfather had ridden with Lawrence on several of his raids, but the Bedu of Jordan had grown used to four-wheel drive vehicles, I thought, and no longer knew what camels and men were capable of. Unlike them, the tribes of Sinai still rode their camels, and I bought four of the best mounts I could find from the Nuwayba’ Tarabin. Though I had Lawrence’s own map, copied from the Royal Geographical Society archives, reconstructing the route proved far more difficult than I had anticipated. For a start, Aqaba and Sinai were now separated by the narrow strip of Israel, and the border at Ras an-Naqab (called Nagb Akaba in Lawrence’s day) – between Israel and Egypt – was closed. I had to find an alternative route up the escarpment which approximated to the one Lawrence had taken, and which would take us to Ras an-Naqab. An old camel-man of the Tarabin named Furrayj showed me Wadi Tuwayba – a tortuous way running parallel with Lawrence’s pilgrim route, but starting at Taba on the Egyptian side of the border. Furrayj would accompany us as guide and rafiq for the first part of the journey: another rafiq of the Haywat would be waiting for us at Themed. My wife, Mariantonietta – an experienced camel-rider and fluent Arabic speaker – made up the party of four.

As the day loomed nearer, I began to grasp more clearly the magnitude of the task we had undertaken. At first sight, a ride of forty-nine hours was a flea-bite compared with the 271 days it had taken Mariantonietta and me to cross the Sahara’s 4,500 miles. But to stay in the saddle for two full days and two full nights virtually without rest suddenly seemed an effort of a shorter duration but an equally demanding order. Lawrence had had great incentive, of course: not only had he won a startling victory, he had also left a Hashemite force at Aqaba so short of food that it was eating its own transport. According to the Oxford version of Seven Pillars, he had left Aqaba on the afternoon of 7 July, the day after capturing the town, and arrived at Suez on the afternoon of the 9th, ‘49 hours out of Aqaba’. He felt that this was ‘a fair time’, considering that both men and camels had been exhausted before they started: ‘Unfortunately the camels by now had done 1,000 miles in five weeks, and were all jaded,’ he wrote in a report for The Times soon after the war, ‘so that it took the men two days to get to Suez.’¹ This was not modesty but litotes, and it was mischievous, for Lawrence well knew that his non-stop trek was a record – it was celebrated in his own life as one of the great camel-dashes of all time: ‘The great sagas sung throughout the desert, of phenomenal rides dating back to the time of Harun ar-Rashid,’ wrote Frank Stirling, ‘have all been eclipsed by Lawrence’s achievements …Such endurance… is almost incredible.’²

Our start was marked with a violent argument with the Taba Bedu who surrounded our tiny nest of camels as we saddled up. We had with us a rafiq from the Tarabin, they argued, but Tuwayba was Haywat territory and we must take another from the Haywat. We finally managed to placate them, and trudged up the steep track, dragging the camels after us by the headstalls. As we climbed the Gulf of Aqaba came into view beneath us, a translucent, shimmering blue, with the jagged edges of the Midian hills in the Hejaz beyond. Sunset came on us as we cleared the top of the escarpment, a zig-zag of gold etched into a scroll of dark cloud. It had taken us roughly four hours to make the ascent, which cannot have been far off Lawrence’s time: however, we were still fresh, and Mariantonietta pointed out the anomaly that Lawrence’s men and camels had been ‘trembling with fatigue’. I put this down to the fact that his animals had been weak before they had started, and that the men had just fought a battle at Aba 1-Lissan.

It was a moonless night, and the darkness closed in around us, locking us in an endlessly long tunnel from which there was no escape but morning. A bitter wind, bone-chilling as only a desert wind can be, was blasting in our faces. We were on the plateau of Sinai, the ‘great and terrible wilderness’, a vast shelterless plain of stone, whose great winds could freeze a man to death, and whose dust-storms could suck the body dry. The breathtaking force of the wind, the weight of the darkness, numbed our senses as if we were travelling in a dream. The camels pressed together haunch to haunch for comfort in the dark, and paced out bravely, their pads clicking on the rubble of rocks. We talked less and less, spinning away in our private universes, and between smatters of talk there was nothing but the sound of our saddles creaking and the familiar rhythmic slap of water in our jerry-cans. Furrayj smoked cigarettes furiously. Sabah began to sing a camel-song, a verse repeated again and again and again, but I was glad, for the sound of it kept us awake and anchored in reality. I knew from long experience that hallucination could be a far more dangerous enemy in the desert than bodily fatigue. We rode on for hour after hour, and slowly sleep began to stalk us. Sabah said that he could make out mountain peaks in the shadows where there were none, and at one point I looked over my shoulder to see another camel-rider following us, and only realized after minutes that no one was there. Even Lawrence had written of the ‘silence of the night so intense that we turned round in the saddles at fancied noises away there by the cloak of stars’.³ The world was so dim and silent, indeed, that it would not have surprised me to have come upon Lawrence’s party. We came, instead, upon a rich vein of thornscrub – presumably the one in which Lawrence and his eight Howaytat had halted for an hour to let their camels browse. Sabah kindled a fire quickly and efficiently and Mariantonietta made coffee. It was now ten o’clock, and we had been travelling for a solid seven hours without a break. Themed, the only watering place on the route, lay at least thirty-five miles away. Yet Lawrence claimed to have reached Themed by midnight on the first day. I acknowledged that he might have had better camels than ours – though his insistence that they were tired out before the start of the journey tended to neutralize that fact – but, even so, was it possible that he could have been so far ahead? Sunset had come upon him at the top of the escarpment – as it had for us. How, then, had he jumped forward to Themed in five or six hours? The only explanation I could think of was that his party had been running their camels. At a fast canter, they could just about have covered the distance in the time. But Lawrence had specifically stated that they had walked them: ‘If we rode hard,’ he wrote, ‘they might break down with exhaustion …we agreed to keep them at a walk, however tempting the surface.’⁴