CHAPTER X
Moored in Rabegh lay the NORTHBROOK, an Indian Marine ship. On board
was Colonel Parker, our liaison officer with Sherif Ali, to whom he
sent my letter from Abdulla, giving Ali the father's 'orders' to send
me at once up to Feisal. Ah' was staggered at their tenour, but could
not help himself; for his only telegraph to Mecca was by the ship's
wireless, and he was ashamed to send personal remonstrances through us.
So he made the best of it, and prepared for me his own splendid
riding-camel, saddled with his own saddle, and hung with luxurious
housings and cushions of Nejd leather-work pieced and inlaid in various
colours, with plaited fringes and nets embroidered with metal tissues.
As a trustworthy man he chose out Tafas el Raashid, a Hawazim Harb
tribesman, with his son, to guide me to Feisal's camp.
He did all this with the better grace for the countenance of Nuri Said,
the Bagdadi staff officer, whom I had befriended once in Cairo when he
was ill. Nuri was now second in command of the regular force which Aziz
el Masri was raising and training here. Another friend at court was
Faisel Ghusein, a secretary. He was a Sulut Sheikh from the Hauran, and
a former official of the Turkish Government, who had escaped across
Armenia during the war, and had eventually reached Miss Gertrude Bell
in Basra. She had sent HIM on to me with a warm recommendation.
To Ali himself I took a great fancy. He was of middle height, thin, and
looking already more than his thirty-seven years. He stooped a little.
His skin was sallow, his eyes large and deep and brown, his nose thin
and rather hooked, his mouth sad and drooping. He had a spare black
beard and very delicate hands. His manner was dignified and admirable,
but direct; and he struck me as a pleasant gentleman, conscientious,
without great force of character, nervous, and rather tired. His
physical weakness (he was consumptive) made him subject to quick fits
of shaking pa**ion, preceded and followed by long moods of infirm
obstinacy. He was bookish, learned in law and religion, and pious
almost to fanaticism. He was too conscious of his high heritage to be
ambitious; and his nature was too clean to see or suspect interested
motives in those about him. Consequently he was much the prey of any
constant companion, and too sensitive to advice for a great leader,
though his purity of intention and conduct gained him the love of those
who came into direct contact with him. If Feisal should turn out to be
no prophet, the revolt would make shift well enough with Ali for its
head. I thought him more definitely Arab than Abdulla, or than Zeid,
his young half-brother, who was helping him at Rabegh, and came down
with Ali and Nuri and Aziz to the palm-groves to see me start. Zeid was
a shy, white, beardless lad of perhaps nineteen, calm and flippant, no
zealot for the revolt. Indeed, his mother was Turkish; and he had been
brought up in the harem, so that he could hardly feel great sympathy
with an Arab revival; but he did his best this day to be pleasant, and
surpa**ed AM, perhaps because his feelings were not much outraged at
the departure of a Christian into the Holy Province under the auspices
of the Emir of Mecca. Zeid, of course, was even less than Abdulla the
born leader of my quest. Yet I liked him, and could see that he would
be a decided man when he had found himself.
Ali would not let me start till after sunset, lest any of his followers
see me leave the camp. He kept my journey a secret even from his
slaves, and gave me an Arab cloak and head-cloth to wrap round myself
and my uniform, that I might present a proper silhouette in the dark
upon my camel. I had no food with me; so he instructed Tafas to get
something to eat at Bir el Sheikh, the first settlement, some sixty
miles out, and charged him most stringently to keep me from questioning
and curiosity on the way, and to avoid all camps and encounters. The
Masruh Harb, who inhabited Rabegh and district, paid only lip-service
to the Sherif. Their real allegiance was to Hussein Mabeirig, the
ambitious sheikh of the clan, who was jealous of the Emir of Mecca and
had fallen out with him. He was now a fugitive, living in the hills to
the East, and was known to be in touch with the Turks. His people were
not notably pro-Turkish, but owed him obedience. If he had heard of my
departure he might well have ordered a band of them to stop me on my
way through his district.
Tafas was a Hazimi, of the Beni Salem branch of Harb, and so not on
good terms with the Masruh. This inclined him towards me; and when he
had once accepted the charge of escorting me to Feisal, we could trust
him. The fidelity of road-companions was most dear to Arab tribesmen.
The guide had to answer to a sentimental public with his life for that of
his fellow. One Harbi, who promised to take Huber to Medina and broke
his word and k**ed him on the road near Rabegh, when he found out that
he was a Christian, was ostracized by public opinion, and, in spite of
the religious prejudices in his favour, had ever since lived miserably
alone in the hills, cut off from friendly intercourse, and refused
permission to marry any daughter of the tribe. So we could depend upon
the good will of Tafas and his son, Abdulla; and Ali endeavoured by
detailed instructions to ensure that their performance should be as
good as their intention.
We marched through the palm-groves which lay like a girdle about the
scattered houses of Rabegh village, and then out under the stars along
the Tehama, the sandy and featureless strip of desert bordering the
western coast of Arabia between sea-beach and littoral hills, for
hundreds of monotonous miles. In day-time this low plain was
insufferably hot, and its waterless character made it a forbidding
road; yet it was inevitable, since the more fruitful hills were too
rugged to afford pa**age north and south for loaded animals.
The cool of the night was pleasant after the day of checks and
discussions which had so dragged at Rabegh. Tafas led on without
speaking, and the camels went silently over the soft flat sand. My
thoughts as we went were how this was the pilgrim road, down which, for
uncounted generations, the people of the north had come to visit the
Holy City, bearing with them gifts of faith for the shrine; and it
seemed that the Arab revolt might be in a sense a return pilgrimage, to
take back to the north, to Syria, an ideal for an ideal, a belief in
liberty for their past belief in a revelation.
We endured for some hours, without variety except at times when the
camels plunged and strained a little and the saddles creaked:
indications that the soft plain had merged into beds of drift-sand,
dotted with tiny scrub, and therefore uneven going, since the plants
collected little mounds about their roots, and the eddies of the sea-winds
scooped hollows in the intervening spaces. Camels appeared not
sure-footed in the dark, and the starlit sand carried little shadow, so
that hummocks and holes were difficult to see. Before midnight we
halted, and I rolled myself tighter in my cloak, and chose A. hollow of
my own size and shape, and slept well in it till nearly dawn.
As soon as he felt the air growing chill with the coming change, Tafas
got up, and two minutes later we were swinging forward again. An hour
after it grew bright, as we climbed a low neck of lava drowned nearly
to the top with blown sand. This joined a small flow near the shore to
the main Hejaz lava-field, whose western edge ran up upon our right
hand, and caused the coast road to lie where it did. The neck was
stony, but brief: on each side the blue lava humped itself into low
shoulders, from which, so Tafas said, it was possible to see ships
sailing on the sea. Pilgrims had built cairns here by the road.
Sometimes they were individual piles, of just three stones set up one
above the other: sometimes they were common heaps, to which any
disposed pa**er-by might add his stone--not reasonably nor with known
motive, but because others did, and perhaps they knew.
Beyond the ridge the path descended into a broad open place, the
Masturah, or plain by which Wadi Fura flowed into the sea. Seaming its
surface with innumerable interwoven channels of loose stone, a few
inches deep, were the beds of the flood water, on those rare occasions
when there was rain in the Tareif and the courses raged like rivers to
the sea. The delta here was about six miles wide. Down some part of it
water flowed for an hour or two, or even for a day or two, every so
many years. Underground there was plenty of moisture, protected by the
overlying sand from the sun-heat; and thorn trees and loose scrub
profited by it and flourished. Some of the trunks were a foot through:
their height might be twenty feet. The trees and bushes stood somewhat
apart, in clusters, their lower branches cropped by the hungry camels.
So they looked cared for, and had a premeditated air, which felt
strange in the wilderness, more especially as the Tehama hitherto had
been a sober bareness.
Two hours up-stream, so Tafas told me, was the throat where Wadi Fura
issued from the last granite hills, and there had been built a little
village, Khoreiba, of running water channels and wells and palm-groves,
inhabited by a small population of freedmen engaged in date husbandry.
This was important. We had not understood that the bed of Wadi Fura
served as a direct road from near Medina to the neighbourhood of
Rabegh. It lay so far south and east of Feisal's supposed position in
the hills that he could hardly be said to cover it. Also Abdulla had
not warned us of the existence of Khoreiba, though it materially
affected the Rabegh question, by affording the enemy a possible
watering-place, safe from our interference, and from the guns of our
warships. At Khoreiba the Turks could concentrate a large force to
attack our proposed brigade in Rabegh.
In reply to further questions, Tafas disclosed that at Hajar, east of
Rabegh in the hills, was yet another supply of water, in the hands of
the Masruh, and now the headquarters of Hussein Mabeirig, their
Turcophil chief. The Turks could make that their next stage from
Khoreiba towards Mecca, leaving Rabegh unmolested and harmless on their
flank. This meant that the asked-for British Brigade would be unable to
save Mecca from the Turks. For that purpose would be required a force
with A front or a radius of action of some twenty miles, in order to
deny all three water-supplies to the enemy.
Meanwhile in the early sunlight we lifted our camels to a steady trot
across the good going of these shingle-beds among the trees, making for
Masturah well, the first stage out from Rabegh on the pilgrim road.
There we would water and halt a little. My camel was a delight to me,
for I had not been on such an animal before. There were no good camels
in Egypt; and those of the Sinai Desert, while hardy and strong, were
not taught to pace fair and softly and swiftly, like these rich mounts
of the Arabian princes.
Yet her accomplishments were to-day largely wasted, since they were
reserved for riders who had the knack and asked for them, and not for
me, who expected to be carried, and had no sense of how to ride. It was
easy to sit on a camel's back without falling off, but very difficult
to understand and get the best out of her so as to do long journeys
without fatiguing either rider or beast. Tafas gave me hints as we
went: indeed, it was one of the few subjects on which he would speak.
His orders to preserve me from contact with the world seemed to have
closed even his mouth. A pity, for his dialect interested me.
Quite close to the north bank of the Masturah, we found the well.
Beside it were some decayed stone walls which had been a hut, and
opposite it some little shelters of branches and palm-leaves, under
which a few Beduin were sitting. We did not greet them. Instead, Tafas
turned across to the ruinous walls, and dismounted; and I sat in their
shade while he and Abdulla watered the animals, and drew a drink for
themselves and for me. The well was old, and broad, with a good stone
steyning, and a strong coping round the top. It was about twenty feet
deep; and for the convenience of travellers without ropes, like
ourselves, a square chimney had been contrived in the masonry, with
foot and hand holds in the corners, so that a man might descend to the
water, and fill his goat-skin.
Idle hands had flung so many stones down the shaft, that half the
bottom of the well was choked, and the water not abundant. Abdulla tied
his flowing sleeves about his shoulders; tucked his gown under his
cartridge belt; and clambered nimbly down and up, bringing each time
four or five gallons which he poured for our camels into a stone trough
beside the well. They drank about five gallons each, for they had been
watered at Rabegh a day back. Then we let them moon about a little,
while we sat in peace, breathing the light wind coming off the sea.
Abdulla smoked a cigarette as reward for his exertions.
Some Harb came up, driving a large herd of brood camels, and began to
water them, having sent one man down the well to fill their large
leather bucket, which the others drew up hand over hand with a loud
staccato chant. We watched them, without intercourse; for these were
Masruh, and we Beni Salem; and while the two clans were now at peace,
and might pa** through each other's districts, this was only a
temporary accommodation to further the Sherifs' war against the Turks,
and had little depth of goodwill in it.
As we watched, two riders, trotting light and fast on thoroughbred
camels, drew towards us from the north. Both were young. One was
dressed in rich Cashmere robes and heavy silk embroidered head-cloth.
The other was plainer, in white cotton, with a red cotton head-dress.
They halted beside the well; and the more splendid one slipped
gracefully to the ground without kneeling his camel, and threw his
halter to his companion, saying, carelessly, 'Water them while I go
over there and rest'. Then he strolled across and sat down under our
wall, after glancing at us with affected unconcern. He offered a
cigarette, just rolled and licked, saying, Tour presence is from
Syria?' I parried politely, suggesting that he was from Mecca, to which
he likewise made no direct reply. We spoke a little of the war and of
the leanness of the Masruh she-camels.
Meanwhile the other rider stood by, vacantly holding the halters,
waiting perhaps for the Harb to finish watering their herd before
taking his turn. The young lord cried What is it, Mustafa? Water them
at once'. The servant came up to say dismally, They will not let me'.
'God's mercy!' shouted his master furiously, as he scrambled to his
feet and hit the unfortunate Mustafa three or four sharp blows about
the head and shoulders with his riding-stick 'Go and ask them.' Mustafa
looked hurt, astonished, and angry as though he would hit back, but
thought better of it, and ran to the well.
The Harb, shocked, in pity made a place for him, and let his two camels
drink from their water-trough. They whispered, 'Who is he?' and
Mustapha said, 'Our Lord's cousin from Mecca'. At once they ran and
untied a bundle from one of their saddles, and spread from it before
the two riding camels fodder of the green leaves and buds of the thorn
trees. They were used to gather this by striking the low bushes with a
heavy staff, till the broken tips of the branches rained down on a
cloth stretched over the ground beneath.
The young Sherif watched them contentedly. When his camel had fed, he
climbed slowly and without apparent effort up its neck into the saddle,
where he settled himself leisurely, and took an unctuous farewell of
us, asking God to requite the Arabs bountifully. They wished him a good
journey; and he started southward, while Abdulla brought our camels,
and we went off northward. Ten minutes later I heard a chuckle from old
Tafas, and saw wrinkles of delight between his grizzled beard and
moustache.
'What is upon you, Tafas?' said I.
'My Lord, you saw those two riders at the well?'
'The Sherif and his servant?'
'Yes; but they were Sherif Ali ibn el Hussein of Modhig, and his cousin,
Sherif Mohsin, lords of the Harith, who are blood enemies of the Masruh.
They feared they would be delayed or driven off the water if the Arabs
knew them. So they pretended to be master and servant from Mecca. Did you
see how Mohsin raged when Ali beat him? Ali is a devil. While only eleven
years old he escaped from his father's house to his uncle, a robber of
pilgrims by trade; and with him he lived by his hands for many months,
till his father caught him. He was with our lord Feisal from the first
day's battle in Medina, and led the Ateiba in the plains round Aar and
Bir Derwish. It was all camel-fighting; and Ali would have no man with him
who could not do as he did, run beside his camel, and leap with one hand
into the saddle, carrying his rifle. The children of Harith are children
of battle.' For the first time the old man's mouth was full of words.