In the event, the stragglers eventually joined the main party in dribs and drabs, and they camped for the night in the extravagant landscape of Wadi Rumm, with its towering multicolored cliffs, where they were joined the next day by Abd el Kader, accompanying Sharif Ali ibn Hussein of the Harith and his men. This was not a good mixture; Abd el Kader may have resented being separated from Lawrence’s party, and the two men were arguing furiously when they arrived, since Abd el Kader also resented the amount of attention paid to Sharif Ali. This was inevitable; Ali was a legendary figure, both as a warrior and as a leader, who “could outstrip a trotting camel on his bare feet, keep his speed over half a mile, and then vault with one hand into the saddle, holding his rifle in the other,” as well as kneel down, put his arms on the ground, and rise to his feet lifting two men, one standing on each of his hands. Lawrence described him with admiration as “impertinent, headstrong, conceited … reckless [and] impressive,” all adjectives which might have been applied to himself, except perhaps “conceited.”

In Lawrence’s account, the long journey from Aqaba to Azrak seemsmore like a sightseeing tour than a hardship, but they were still moving slowly day by day in deference to the saddle-sore Indians and British, and eating what were by Bedouin standards lavish feasts: rice cooked specially to Lawrence’s taste by Farraj and Daud, and bully beef (the British army’s equivalent of canned corned beef) and biscuits for the rest of the British. Their route was not without danger; as they crossed the railway it took them past Turkish blockhouses, close enough so that Lawrence called a halt and sent Lloyd’s soldier-servant to climb up the pole and cut the telegraph wires. This created another grave problem for the Turks, since it obliged them to use radio messages, which the British could intercept and decode. In the distance, Lawrence could hear Turkish rifle and machine gun fire, a sign that Abd el Kader and Ali were encountering difficulties as they crossed the railway line a few miles away.

The next morning Lawrence continued to ride north, parallel to the railway line, so that he was able to give the train coming south from Maan an ironic, cheerful wave, as if he led a body of harmless, friendly Bedouin rather than a band of heavily armed train destroyers. Then they turned slightly to the west, away from the tracks, until they reached the flat plains around El Jefer, where they found Auda Abu Tayi uncomfortably camped.

Auda had been obliged to send his tents, his womenfolk, and his herds deeper into the desert, out of range of Turkish aircraft, and was living in a makeshift tent, really more of a rough lean-to in the brush, and quarrelling bitterly with his Howeitat tribesmen over the wages they claimed they had not been paid. He served his guests a feast of rice, meat, and dried tomatoes—even the abstemious Lawrence, who was usually indifferent to food, commented that it was “luscious"—but it seemed to Lawrence unlikely that Auda or his men would be in a mood to follow him to the Yarmuk gorge to blow up a bridge, with no prospect of loot. As they were drinking coffee, a cloud of dust was reported on the horizon from the direction of Maan, and assumed to be a regiment of mounted Turks venturing out to attack them. Auda quickly ordered his tents struck; Lawrence had his camels led into shallow gullies, and made to kneel tokeep them out of sight; and Jemadar Shah deployed his Indian machine gunners with their Vickers and Lewis guns among the thornbushes. In the event, the dust cloud turned out to be Abd el Kader and Ali ibn el Hussein and his men arriving, so the tent was put back up and a second meal prepared. “They had lost two men and a mare in the shooting on the railway in the night,” Lawrence noted, without surprise.

The next day Lloyd left to ride back from Auda’s encampment to Aqaba with his soldier-servant, who was suffering from sunburn and opthalmia (as well as wood splinters in his hands and legs, from climbing the telegraph pole); Lawrence immediately missed Lloyd’s company, as he went on to more “war, tribes and camels without end.” Camels were a constant preoccupation. Once the Bedouin were encamped somewhere, they sent the camels far off to graze, so there were none close by Auda’s encampment for Lloyd to ride back to Aqaba—one senses also, reading between the lines of Lawrence’s account, that Auda and the Howeitat were not in a generous or cooperative mood, and were making difficulties even over such a small matter as the loan of a couple of camels for a British member of Parliament.

Lawrence needed to keep the Howeitat reasonably happy—they had supposed optimistically that the capture of Aqaba was the triumphant climax of their part in the war, rather than the beginning of a longer and more difficult campaign—since they were the first rung in the ladder of tribes that was to take him from Aqaba to Yarmuk. He therefore attempted to make peace between Auda and the tribesmen, and to urge them on to one more big effort. Finally, near midnight, Auda held up his camel stick for silence, and they heard from far away a noise “like the mutter of a distant, very lowly thunderstorm.” It was October 27, and Allenby’s attack on the Gaza-Beersheba line had begun with a prolonged artillery barrage against Gaza.

The sound of the guns had a strong effect on the Howeitat—here, at last, was some sign that the British were prepared to fight—and Lawrence remarked that the atmosphere in the camp became “serene and cordial,” in contrast to that of the previous night. However, as Lawrence was aboutto mount his camel, Auda leaned close, brushed his beard against Lawrence’s ear, and whispered, “Beware of Abd el Kader.” There were too many people around for Auda to expand on this warning, and it is notable that even in his own camp, Auda did not feel able to speak freely. As in the French Resistance movement in World War II, treachery, double-dealing, and betrayal were facts of everyday life—Lawrence was behind the enemy lines from the moment he set foot out of Aqaba, and at the mercy of anybody who wanted to claim a reward or curry favor with the Turks. In any case, since he would need Abd el Kader once he arrived at Yarmuk if he stuck to his original plan, he seems to have decided to ignore Auda’s warning—or it may be that he thought Abd el Kader was more of a buffoon than a threat.

The sound of the big guns firing on Gaza urged Lawrence on to greater speed and greater risks if he was to fulfill his promise to Allenby. The distance from Jefer to Azrak was nearly 150 miles, across flinty desert, broken only by steep, rocky escarpments and dry wadis; even on a modern map of the Middle East it is shown as a vast empty area, bisected only by oil pipelines. On the British War Office map of 1917 it is shown as beige-colored blank space, meaning that no European had ever surveyed it, or even seen it. Lawrence’s Indian machine gunners could do at best thirty or thirty-five miles a day, so he was already falling behind schedule. From the way he writes about the journey in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he might seem to have been enjoying the scenery, but inwardly he must have been seething with impatience.

No matter how empty the desert looked to a European, it was full of hostile strangers. At one point, near Beir, Lawrence’s group came under attack from raiders firing indiscriminately over their heads. These turned out to be Suhkuri of the Beni Sakhr tribe, “a dangerous gang,” as Lawrence described them; once they had ceased firing, at the sight of Ali, they explained that it was an immemorial Beni Sakhr custom to shoot at all strangers. Though these rough, surly customers were distinctly unfriendly, Lawrence and Ali went to the trouble of putting them at their ease, and their chief eventually arrived and put on a tribal show by way ofapology. The show was a rough equivalent of a Moroccan fantasia, in which the tribesmen rode around Lawrence’s group at a full gallop on their horses, firing their rifles into the air and shouting at the top of their voices, “God give victory to our Sharif!” in honor of Ali, and, “Welcome Aurens, harbinger of victory!” to Lawrence—perhaps merely a sign that his reputation was firmly established as a man with gold sovereigns to distribute.