Seven Pillars of Wisdom: Chapter XVI
CHAPTER XVI

Leaving Hamra as dusk fell, we marched back down Wadi Safra until
opposite Kharma, where we turned to the right up the side valley. It
was closely grown with stiff brushwood, through which we drove our
camels strenuously, having tucked up the streamers of our saddle-bags
to save them from being shredded by the thorns. Two miles later we
began to climb the narrow pass of Dhifran, which gave evidence even by
night of labour expended on the road. It had been artificially
smoothed, and the stones piled at each side into a heavy wall of
protection against the rush of water in the rains. Parts had been
graded, and were at times carried on a causeway built seemingly six or
eight feet high, of great blocks of uncut stone: but it had been
breached at every turn by torrents, and was in terrible ruin.

The ascent lasted perhaps for a mile; and the steep descent on the
other side was about the same. Then we got to the level and found
ourselves in a much broken country of ridges, with an intricate net of
wadies whose main flow was apparently towards the south-west. The going
was good for our camels. We rode for about seven miles in the dark, and
came to a well, Bir el Murra, in a valley bed under a very low bluff,
on whose head the square courses of a small fort of ashlar stood out
against the starry sky. Conceivably both fort and causeway had been
built by an Egyptian Mameluke for the passage of his pilgrim-caravan
from Yenbo.
We halted there for the night, sleeping for six hours, a long luxury
upon the road, though this rest was broken twice by challenges from
half-seen mounted parties who had found our bivouac. Afterwards we
wandered among more small ridges until the dawn showed gentle valleys
of sand with strange hills of lava hemming us about. The lava here was
not the blue-black cinder-stone of the fields about Rabegh: it was
rust-coloured, and piled in huge crags of flowing surface and bent and
twisted texture, as though played with oddly while yet soft. The sand,
at first a carpet about the foot of the dolerite, gradually gained on
it. The hills got lower, with the sand banked up against them in
greater drifts, till even the crests were sand-spattered, and at last
drowned beyond sight. So, as the sun became high and painfully fierce,
we led out upon a waste of dunes, rolling southward for miles down hill
to the misty sea, where it lay grey-blue in the false distance of the
heat.

The dunes were narrow. By half-past seven we were on a staring plain of
glassy sand mixed with shingle, overspread by tall scrub and thorn
bushes, with some good acacia trees. We rode very fast across this,
myself in some discomfort; for I was not a skilled rider: the movement
exhausted me, while sweat ran down my forehead and dripped smartingly
into my gritty, sun-cracked eyelids. Sweat was actually welcome when a
drop fell from the end of a tuft of hair, to strike on the cheek cold
and sudden and unexpected like a splash, but these refreshments were
too few to pay for the pain of heat. We pressed on, while the sand
yielded to pure shingle, and that again hardened into the bed of a
great valley, running down by shallow, interwoven mouths towards the
sea.
We crossed over a rise, and from the far side opened a wide view, which
was the delta of Wadi Yenbo, the largest valley of Northern Hejaz. It
seemed a vivid copse of tamarisk and thorn. To the right, some miles up
the valley, showed darkly the palm-groves of Nakhi Mubarak, a village
and gardens of the Beni Ibrahim Juheina. In the distance, ahead of us,
lay the massive Jebel Rudhwa, brooding always so instantly over Yenbo,
though more than twenty miles away. We had seen it from Masturah, for
it was one of the great hills of Hejaz, the more wonderful because it
lifted itself in one clear edge from flat Tehama to crest. My
companions felt at home in its protection; so, as the plain was now
dancing with unbearable heat, we took shade under the branches of a
leafy acacia beside the path, and slumbered through the middle day.

In the afternoon we watered our camels at a brackish little water hole
in the sand bed of a branch watercourse, before a trim hedge of the
feathery tamarisk, and then pushed on for two more happy hours. At last
we halted for the night in typical Tehama country of bare slowly-swelling
sand and shingle ridges, with shallow valleys.

The Sherifs lit a fire of aromatic wood to bake bread and boil coffee;
and we slept sweetly with the salt sea air cool on our chafed faces. We
rose at two in the morning, and raced our camels over a featureless
plain of hard shingle and wet sand to Yenbo, which stood up with walls
and towers on a reef of coral rag twenty feet above our level. They
took me straight through the gates by crumbling, empty streets--Yenbo
had been half a city of the dead since the Hejaz Railway opened--to the
house of Abd el Kader, Feisal's agent, a well-informed, efficient,
quiet and dignified person, with whom we had had correspondence when he
was postmaster in Mecca, and the Survey in Egypt had been making stamps
for the new State. He had just been transferred here.
With Abd el Kader, in his picturesque rambling house looking over the
deserted square, whence so many Medina caravans had started, I stayed
four days waiting for the ship, which seemed as if it might fail me at
the rendezvous. However, at last the SUVA appeared, with Captain Boyle,
who took me back to Jidda. It was my first meeting with Boyle. He had
done much in the beginning of the revolt, and was to do much more for
the future: but I failed to make a good return impression. I was
travel-stained and had no baggage with me. Worst of all I wore a native
head-cloth, put on as a compliment to the Arabs. Boyle disapproved.

Our persistence in the hat (due to a misunderstanding of the ways of
heat-stroke) had led the East to see significance in it, and after long
thought their wisest brains concluded that Christians wore the hideous
thing that its broad brim might interpose between their weak eyes and
the uncongenial sight of God. So it reminded Islam continually that God
was miscalled and misliked by Christians. The British thought this
prejudice reprehensible (quite unlike our hatred of a head-cloth), one
to be corrected at any price. If the people would not have us hatted,
they should not have us any way. Now as it happened I had been educated
in Syria before the war to wear the entire Arab outfit when necessary
without strangeness, or sense of being socially compromised. The skirts
were a nuisance in running up stairs, but the head-cloth was even
convenient in such a climate. So I had accepted it when I rode inland,
and must now cling to it under fire of naval disapproval, till some
shop should sell me a cap.

In Jidda was the EURYALUS, with Admiral Wemyss, bound for Port Sudan
that Sir Rosslyn might visit Sir Reginald Wingate at Khartum. Sir
Reginald, as Sirdar of the Egyptian Army, had been put in command of
the British military side of the Arab adventure in place of Sir Henry
McMahon, who continued to direct its politics; and it was necessary for
me to see him, to impart my impressions to him. So I begged the Admiral
for a passage over sea, and a place in his train to Khartum. This he
readily granted, after cross-questioning me himself at length.

I found that his active mind and broad intelligence had engaged his
interest in the Arab Revolt from the beginning. He had come down again
and again in his flagship to lend a hand when things were critical, and
had gone out of his way twenty times to help the shore, which properly
was Army business. He had given the Arabs guns and machine-guns,
landing parties and technical help, with unlimited transport and naval
co-operation, always making a real pleasure of requests, and fulfilling
them in overflowing measure.

Had it not been for Admiral Wemyss' good will, and prescience, and the
admirable way in which Captain Boyle carried out his wishes, the
jealousy of Sir Archibald Murray might have wrecked the Sherifs
rebellion at its start. As it was, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss acted godfather
till the Arabs were on their feet; when he went to London; and Allenby,
coming out fresh to Egypt, found the Arabs a factor on his battle
front, and put the energies and resources of the Army at their
disposal. This was opportune, and a fortunate twist of the whirligig;
for Admiral Wemyss' successor in the naval command in Egypt was not
considered helpful by the other services, though apparently he treated
them no worse than he treated his own subordinates. A hard task, of
course, to succeed Wemyss.

In Port Sudan we saw two British officers of the Egyptian Army waiting
to embark for Rabegh. They were to command the Egyptian troops in
Hejaz, and to do their best to help Aziz el Masri organize the Arab
Regular Force which was going to end the war from Rabegh. This was my
first meeting with Joyce and Davenport, the two Englishmen to whom the
Arab cause owed the greater part of its foreign debt of gratitude.
Joyce worked for long beside me. Of Davenport's successes in the south
we heard by constant report.

Khartum felt cool after Arabia, and nerved me to show Sir Reginald
Wingate my long reports written in those days of waiting at Yenbo. I
urged that the situation seemed full of promise. The main need was
skilled assistance; and the campaign should go prosperously if some
regular British officers, professionally competent and speaking Arabic,
were attached to the Arab leaders as technical advisers, to keep us in
proper touch.

Wingate was glad to hear a hopeful view. The Arab Revolt had been his
dream for years. While I was at Khartum chance gave him the power to
play the main part in it; for the workings against Sir Henry McMahon
came to a head, were successful, and ended in his recall to England.
Sir Reginald Wingate was ordered down to Egypt in his stead. So after
two or three comfortable days in Khartum, resting and reading the MORTE
D'ARTHUR in the hospitable palace, I went down towards Cairo, feeling
that the responsible person had all my news. The Nile trip became a
holiday.

Egypt was, as usual, in the throes of a Rabegh question. Some
aeroplanes were being sent there; and it was being argued whether to
send a brigade of troops after them or not. The head of the French
Military Mission at Jidda, Colonel Bremond (Wilson's counterpart, but
with more authority; for he was a practising light in native warfare, a
success in French Africa, and an ex-chief of staff of a Corps on the
Somme) strongly urged the landing of Allied forces in Hejaz. To tempt
us he had brought to Suez some artillery, some machine-guns, and some
cavalry and infantry, all Algerian Moslem rank and file, with French
officers. These added to the British troops would give the force an
international flavour.

Bremond's specious appreciation of the danger of the state of affairs
in Arabia gained upon Sir Reginald. Wingate was a British General,
commander of a nominal expeditionary force, the Hejaz Force, which in
reality comprised a few liaison officers and a handful of storemen and
instructors. If Bremond got his way he would be G.O.C. of a genuine
brigade of mixed British and French troops, with all its pleasant
machinery of responsibility and despatches, and its prospect of
increment and official recognition. Consequently he wrote a guarded
despatch, half-tending towards direct interference.

As my experience of Arab feeling in the Harb country had given me
strong opinions on the Rabegh question (indeed, most of my opinions
were strong), I wrote for General Clayton, to whose Arab Bureau I was
now formally transferred, a violent memorandum on the whole subject.
Clayton was pleased with my view that the tribes might defend Rabegh
for months if lent advice and guns, but that they would certainly
scatter to their tents again as soon as they heard of the landing of
foreigners in force. Further, that the intervention-plans were
technically unsound, for a brigade would be quite insufficient to
defend the position, to forbid the neighbouring water-supplies to the
Turks, and to block their road towards Mecca. I accused Colonel Bremond
of having motives of his own, not military, nor taking account of Arab
interests and of the importance of the revolt to us; and quoted his
words and acts in Hejaz as evidence against him. They gave just
plausible colour to my charge.

Clayton took the memorandum to Sir Archibald Murray, who, liking its
acidity and force, promptly wired it all home to London as proof that
the Arab experts asking this sacrifice of valuable troops from him were
divided about its wisdom and honesty, even in their own camp. London
asked for explanations; and the atmosphere slowly cleared, though in a
less acute form the Rabegh question lingered for two months more.

My popularity with the Staff in Egypt, due to the sudden help I had
lent to Sir Archibald's prejudices, was novel and rather amusing. They
began to be polite to me, and to say that I was observant, with a
pungent style, and character. They pointed out how good of them it was
to spare me to the Arab cause in its difficulties. I was sent for by
the Commander-in-Chief, but on my way to him was intercepted by a
waiting and agitated aide, and led first into the presence of the Chief
of Staff, General Lynden Bell. To such an extent had he felt it his
duty to support Sir Archibald in his whimsies that people generally
confounded the two as one enemy. So I was astonished when, as I came
in, he jumped to his feet, leaped forward, and gripped me by the
shoulder, hissing, 'Now you're not to frighten him: don't you forget
what I say!'

My face probably showed bewilderment, for his one eye turned bland and
he made me sit down, and talked nicely about Oxford, and what fun
undergrads had, and the interest of my report of life in Feisal's
ranks, and his hope that I would go back there to carry on what I had
so well begun, mixing these amiabilities with remarks of how nervous
the Commander-in-Chief was, and how worried about everything, and the
need there was for me to give him a reassuring picture of affairs, and
yet not a rosy picture, since they could not afford excursions either
way.

I was hugely amused, inwardly, and promised to be good, but pointed out
that my object was to secure the extra stores and arms and officers the
Arabs needed, and how for this end I must enlist the interest, and, if
necessary (for I would stick at nothing in the way of duty), even the
excitement of the Commander-in-Chief; whereupon General Lynden Bell
took me up, saying that supplies were his part, and in them he did
everything without reference, and he thought he might at once, here and
now, admit his new determination to do all he could for us.

I think he kept his word and was fair to us thereafter. I was very
soothing to his chief.