urgent messages from clayton broke across this cheerful work with orders to wait in wejh for two days and meet the nur el bahr, an egyptian patrol ship, coming down with news. i was not well and waited with more excellent grace. she arrived on the proper day, and disembarked macrury, who gave me a copy of long telegraphic instructions from jemal pasha to fakhri in medina. these, emanating from enver and the german staff in constantinople, ordered the instant abandonment of medina, and evacuation of the troops by route march in mass, first to hedia, thence to el ula, thence to tebuk, and finally to maan, where a fresh rail-head and entrenched position would be constituted.
this move would have suited the arabs excellently; but our army of egypt was perturbed at the prospect of twenty-five thousand anatolian troops, with far more than the usual artillery of a corps, descending suddenly on the beersheba front. clayton, in his letter, told me the development was to be treated with the utmost concern, and every effort made to capture medina, or to destroy the garrison when they came out. newcombe was on the line, doing a vigorous demolition-series, so that the moment’s responsibility fell on me. i feared that little could be done in time, for the message was days old, and the evacuation timed to begin at once.
we told feisal the frank position, and that allied interests in this case demanded the sacrifice, or at least the postponement of immediate advantage to the arabs. he rose, as ever, to a proposition of honour, and agreed instantly to do his best. we worked out our possible resources and arranged to move them into contact with the railway. sherif mastur, an honest, quiet old man, and rasim, with tribesmen, mule-mounted infantry, and a gun, were to proceed directly to fagair, the first good water-base north of wadi ais, to hold up our first section of railway, from abdulla’s area northward.
ali ibn el hussein, from jeida, would attack the next section of line northward from mastur. we told ibn mahanna to get close to el ula, and watch it. we ordered sherif nasir to stay near kalaat el muadhdham, and keep his men in hand for an effort. i wrote asking newcombe to come in for news. old mohammed ali was to move from dhaba to an oasis near tebuk, so that if the evacuation got so far we should be ready. all our hundred and fifty miles of line would thus be beset, while feisal himself, at wejh, stood ready to bring help to whatever sector most needed him.
my part was to go off to abdulla in wadi ais, to find out why he had done nothing for two months, and to persuade him, if the turks came out, to go straight at them. i hoped we might deter them from moving by making so many small raids on this lengthy line that traffic would be seriously disorganized, and the collection of the necessary food-dumps for the army at each main stage be impracticable. the medina force, being short of animal transport, could carry little with them. enver had instructed them to put guns and stores on trains; and to enclose these trains in their columns and march together up the railway. it was an unprecedented manoeuvre, and if we gained ten days to get in place, and they then attempted anything so silly, we should have a chance of destroying them all.
next day i left wejh, ill and unfit for a long march, while feisal in his haste and many preoccupations had chosen me a travelling party of queer fellows. there were four rifaa and one merawi ju-heina as guides, and arslan, a syrian soldier-servant, who prepared bread and rice for me and acted besides as butt to the arabs; four ageyl, a moor, and an ateibi, suleiman. the camels, thin with the bad grazing of this dry billi territory, would have to go slowly.
delay after delay took place in our starting, until nine at night, and then we moved unwillingly: but i was determined to get clear of wejh somehow before morning. so we went four hours and slept. next day we did two stages of five hours each, and camped at abu zereibat, in our old ground of the winter. the great pool had shrunk little in the two months, but was noticeably more salt. a few weeks later it was unfit to drink. a shallow well near by was said to afford tolerable water. i did not look for it, since boils on my back and heavy fever made painful the jolting of the camel, and i was tired.
long before dawn we rode away, and having crossed hamdh got confused in the broken surfaces of agunna, an area of low hills. when day broke we recovered direction and went over a watershed steeply down into el khubt, a hill-locked plain extending to the sukhur, the granite bubbles of hills which had been prominent on our road up from um lejj. the ground was luxuriant with colocynth, whose runners and fruits looked festive in the early light. the ju-heina said both leaves and stalks were excellent food for such horses as would eat them, and defended from thirst for many hours. the ageyl said that the best aperient was to drink camel-milk from cups of the scooped-out rind. the ateibi said that he was sufficiently moved if he just rubbed the juice of the fruit on the soles of his feet. the moor hamed said that the dried pith made good tinder. on one point however they were all agreed, that the whole plant was useless or poisonous as fodder for camels.
this talk carried us across the khubt, a pleasant three miles, and through a low ridge into a second smaller section. we now saw that, of the sukhur, two stood together to the north-east, great grey striated piles of volcanic rock, reddish coloured where protected from the burning of the sun and the bruising of sandy winds. the third sakhara, which stood a little apart, was the bubble rock which had roused my curiosity. seen from near by, it more resembled a huge football half-buried in the ground. it, too, was brown in colour. the south and east faces were quite smooth and unbroken, and its regular, domed head was polished and shining and had fine cracks running up and over it like stitched seams: altogether one of the strangest hills in hejaz, a country of strange hills. we rode gently towards it, through a thin shower of rain which came slanting strangely and beautifully across the sunlight.
our path took up between the sakhara and the sukhur by a narrow gorge with sandy floor and steep bare walls. its head was rough. we had to scramble up shelves of coarse-faced stone, and along a great fault in the hill-side between two tilted red reefs of hard rock. the summit of the pass was a knife-edge, and from it we went down an encumbered gap, half-blocked by one fallen boulder which had been hammered over with the tribal marks of all the generations of men who had used this road. afterwards there opened tree-grown spaces, collecting grounds in winter for the sheets of rain which poured off the glazed sides of the sukhur. there were granite outcrops here and there, and a fine silver sand underfoot in the still damp water-channels. the drainage was towards heiran.
we then entered a wild confusion of granite shards, piled up haphazard into low mounds, in and out of which we wandered any way we could find practicable going for our hesitating camels. soon after noon this gave place to a broad wooded valley, up which we rode for an hour, till our troubles began again; for we had to dismount and lead our animals up a narrow hill-path with broken steps of rock so polished by long years of passing feet that they were dangerous in wet weather. they took us over a great shoulder of the hills and down among more small mounds and valleys, and afterwards by another rocky zigzag descent into a torrent-bed. this soon became too confined to admit the passage of laden camels, and the path left it to cling precariously to the hill-side with a cliff above and cliff below. after fifteen minutes of this we were glad to reach a high saddle on which former travellers had piled little cairns of commemoration and thankfulness. of such a nature had been the road-side cairns of masturah, on my first arabian journey, from rabegh to feisal.
we stopped to add one to the number, and then rode down a sandy valley into wadi hanbag, a large, well-wooded tributary of hamdh. after the broken country in which we had been prisoned for hours, the openness of hanbag was refreshing. its clean white bed swept on northward through the trees in a fine curve under precipitous hills of red and brown, with views for a mile or two up and down its course. there were green weeds and grass growing on the lower sand-slopes of the tributary, and we stopped there for half an hour to let our starved camels eat the juicy, healthy stuff.
they had not so enjoyed themselves since bir el waheidi, and tore at it ravenously, stowing it away unchewed inside them, pending a fit time for leisurely digestion. we then crossed the valley to a great branch opposite our entry. this wadi eitan was also beautiful. its shingle face, without loose rocks, was plentifully grown over with trees. on the right were low hills, on the left great heights called the jidhwa, in parallel ridges of steep broken granite, very red now that the sun was setting amid massed cloud-banks of boding rain.
at last we camped, and when the camels were unloaded and driven out to pasture, i lay down under the rocks and rested. my body was very sore with headache and high fever, the accompaniments of a sharp attack of dysentery which had troubled me along the march and had laid me out twice that day in short fainting fits, when the more difficult parts of the climb had asked too much of my strength. dysentery of this arabian coast sort used to fall like a hammer blow, and crush its victims for a few hours, after which the extreme effects passed off; but it left men curiously tired, and subject for some weeks to sudden breaks of nerve.
my followers had been quarrelling all day; and while i was lying near the rocks a shot was fired. i paid no attention; for there were hares and birds in the valley; but a little later suleiman roused me and made me follow him across the valley to an opposite bay in the rocks, where one of the ageyl, a boreida man, was lying stone dead with a bullet through his temples. the shot must have been fired from close by; because the skin was burnt about one wound. the remaining ageyl were running frantically about; and when i asked what it was ali, their head man, said that hamed the moor had done the murder. i suspected suleiman, because of the feud between the atban and ageyl which had burned up in yenbo and wejh; but ali assured me that suleiman had been with him three hundred yards further up the valley gathering sticks when the shot was fired. i sent all out to search for hamed, and crawled back to the baggage, feeling that it need not have happened this day of all days when i was in pain.
as i lay there i heard a rustle, and opened my eyes slowly upon hamed’s back as he stooped over his saddle-bags, which lay just beyond my rock. i covered him with a pistol and then spoke. he had put down his rifle to lift the gear; and was at my mercy till the others came. we held a court at once; and after a while hamed confessed that, he and salem having had words, he had seen red and shot him suddenly. our inquiry ended. the ageyl, as relatives of the dead man, demanded blood for blood. the others supported them; and i tried vainly to talk the gentle ali round. my head was aching with fever and i could not think; but hardly even in health, with all eloquence, could i have begged hamed off; for salem had been a friendly fellow and his sudden murder a wanton crime.
then rose up the horror which would make civilized man shun justice like a plague if he had not the needy to serve him as hangmen for wages. there were other moroccans in our army; and to let the ageyl kill one in feud meant reprisals by which our unity would have been endangered. it must be a formal execution, and at last, desperately, i told hamed that he must die for punishment, and laid the burden of his killing on myself. perhaps they would count me not qualified for feud. at least no revenge could lie against my followers; for i was a stranger and kinless.
i made him enter a narrow gully of the spur, a dank twilight place overgrown with weeds. its sandy bed had been pitted by trickles of water down the cliffs in the late rain. at the end it shrank to a crack a few inches wide. the walls were vertical. i stood in the entrance and gave him a few moments’ delay which he spent crying on the ground. then i made him rise and shot him through the chest. he fell down on the weeds shrieking, with the blood coming out in spurts over his clothes, and jerked about till he rolled nearly to where i was. i fired again, but was shaking so that i only broke his wrist. he went on calling out, less loudly, now lying on his back with his feet towards me, and i leant forward and shot him for the last time in the thick of his neck under the jaw. his body shivered a little, and i called the ageyl, who buried him in the gully where he was. afterwards the wakeful night dragged over me, till, hours before dawn, i had the men up and made them load, in my longing to be set free of wadi kitan. they had to lift me into the saddle.
