to townsmen this garden was a memory of the world before we went mad with war and drove ourselves into the desert: to auda there was an indecency of exhibition in the plant-richness, and he longed for an empty view. so we cut short our second night in paradise, and at two in the morning went on up the valley. it was pitch dark, the very stars in the sky being unable to cast light into the depths where we were wandering. to-night auda was guide, and to make us sure of him he lifted up his voice in an interminable tio, ho, ho’ song of the howeitat; an epic chanted on three bass notes, up and down, back and forward, in so round a voice that the words were indistinguishable. after a little we thanked him for the singing, since the path went away to the left, and our long line followed his turn by the echoes of his voice rolling about the torn black cliffs in the moonlight.
on this long journey sherif nasir and auda’s sour-smiling cousin, mohammed el dheilan, took pains with my arabic, giving me by turn lessons in the classical medina tongue, and in the vivid desert language. at the beginning my arabic had been a halting command of the tribal dialects of the middle euphrates (a not impure form), but now it became a fluent mingling of hejaz slang and north-tribal poetry with household words and phrases from the limpid nejdi, and book forms from syria. the fluency had a lack of grammar, which made my talk a perpetual adventure for my hearers. newcomers imagined i must be the native of some unknown illiterate district; a shot-rubbish ground of disjected arabic parts of speech.
however, as yet i understood not three words of auda’s, and after half an hour his chant tired me, while the old moon climbed slowly up the sky, sailed over the topmost hills and threw a deceitful light, less sure than darkness, into our valley. we marched until the early sun, very trying to those who had ridden all night, opposed us.
breakfast was off our own flour, thus lightening at last, after days of hospitality, our poor camels’ food-load. sharraf being not yet in abu raga, we made no more of haste than water-difficulties compelled; and, after food, again put up our blanket roofs and lay till afternoon, fretfully dodging after their unstable shadow, getting moist with heat and the constant pricking of flies.
at last nasir gave the marching signal, and we went on up the defile, with slightly pompous hills each side, for four hours; when we agreed to camp again in the valley bed. there was abundant brushwood for fuel; and up the cliff on our right were rock-pools of fresh water, which gave us a delicious drink. nasir was wrought up; he commanded rice for supper, and the friends to feed with us.
our rule of march was odd and elaborate. nasir, auda, and nesib were so many separate, punctilious houses, admitting the supremacy of nasir only because i lived with him as a guest and furnished them with the example of respect. each required to be consulted on the details of our going, and where and when we should halt. this was inevitable with auda, a child of battle who had never known a master, since, as a tiny boy, he had first ridden his own camel. it was advisable with nesib, a syrian of the queasy syrian race; jealous; hostile to merit, or to its acknowledgement.
such people demanded a war-cry and banner from outside to combine them, and a stranger to lead them, one whose supremacy should be based on an idea: illogical, undeniable, discriminant: which instinct might accept and reason find no rational basis to reject or approve. for this army of feisal’s the conceit was that an emir of mecca, a descendant of the prophet, a sherif, was an otherworldly dignitary whom sons of adam might reverence without shame. this was the binding assumption of the arab movement; it was this which gave it an effective, if imbecile unanimity.
in the morning we rode at five. our valley pinched together, and we went round a sharp spur, ascending steeply. the track became a bad goat-path, zigzagging up a hill-side too precipitous to climb except on all fours. we dropped off our camels and led them by the head-stalls. soon we had to help each other, a man urging the camels from behind, another pulling them from the front, encouraging them over the worst places, adjusting their loads to ease them.
parts of the track were dangerous, where rocks bulged out and narrowed it, so that the near half of the load grazed and forced the animal to the cliff-edge. we had to re-pack the food and explosives; and, in spite of all our care, lost two of our feeble camels in the pass. the howeitat killed them where they lay broken, stabbing a keen dagger into the throat-artery near the chest, while the neck was strained tight by pulling the head round to the saddle. they were at once cut up and shared out as meat.
the head of the pass we were glad to find not a range but a spacious plateau which sloped slowly before us to the east. the first yards were rough and rocky, overgrown with low mats of thorns like ling; but afterwards we came to a valley of white shingle, in whose bed a beduin woman was filling her water-skin with a copper cup, ladling milky water, quite pure and sweet, from a little hole a foot wide, scraped elbow deep in the pebbles. this was abu saad, and for its name’s sake and for its water, and the joints of red meat bumping on our saddles, we settled we would stay here one night, filling up yet more of the time which must be filled before sharraf came back from his expedition against the railway.
so we rode on four more miles, to camp under spreading trees, in close-grown thickets of thorn-scrub, hollow underneath like booths. by day these made tent-ribs for our blankets stretched against the masterful sun. at night they were bowers for our sleeping-places. we had learned to sleep with nothing overhead but moon and stars, and nothing either side to keep distant the winds and noises of the night; and by contrast it was strange, but quieting, to rest within walls, with a roof above; even though walls and roof were only interlacing twigs making a darker mesh against the star-scattered sky.
for myself, i was ill again; a fever increasing upon me, and my body very sore with boils and the rubbing of my sweaty saddle. when nasir, without my prompting, had halted at the half-stage, i turned and thanked him warmly, to his astonishment. we were now on the limestone of the shefa crest. before us lay a great dark lava-field, and short of it a range of red and black banded sandstone cliffs with conical tops. the air on the high tableland was not so warm; and morning and evening there blew across us a free current which was refreshing after the suspended stillness of the valleys.
we breakfasted on our camel meat, and started more gaily the next morning down a gently-falling plateau of red sandstone. then we came to the first break of surface, a sharp passage to the bottom of a shrub-grown, sandy valley, on each side of which sandstone precipices and pinnacles, gradually growing in height as we went down, detached themselves sharply against the morning sky. it was shadowed in the bottom, and the air tasted wet and decayed, as though sap was drying out into it. the edges of the cliffs about us were clipped strangely, like fantastic parapets. we wound on, ever deeper into the earth until, half an hour later, by a sharp corner we entered wadi jizil, the main gutter of these sandstone regions, whose end we had seen near hedia.
jizil was a deep gorge some two hundred yards in width, full of tamarisk sprouting from the bed of drifted sand, as well as from the soft twenty-foot banks, heaped up wherever an eddy in flood or wind had laid the heavier dust under the returns of cliffs. the walls each side were of regular bands of sandstone, streaked red in many shades. the union of dark cliffs, pink floors, and pale green shrubbery was beautiful to eyes sated with months of sunlight and sooty shadow. when evening came, the declining sun crimsoned one side of the valley with its glow, leaving the other in purple gloom.
our camp was on some swelling dunes of weedy sand in an elbow of the valley, where a narrow cleft had set up a back-wash and scooped out a basin in which a brackish remnant of last winter’s flood was caught. we sent a man for news up the valley to an oleander thicket where we saw the white peaks of sharraf’s tents. they expected him next day; so we passed two nights in this strange-coloured, echoing place. the brackish pool was fit for our camels, and in it we bathed at noon. then we ate and slept generously, and wandered in the nearer valleys to see the horizontal stripes of pink and brown and cream and red which made up the general redness of the cliffs, delighting in the varied patterns of thin pencillings of lighter or darker tint which were drawn over the plain body of rock. one afternoon i spent behind some shepherd’s fold of sandstone blocks in warm soft air and sunlight, with a low burden of the wind plucking at the rough wall-top above my head. the valley was instinct with peace, and the wind’s continuing noise made even it seem patient.
my eyes were shut and i was dreaming, when a youthful voice made me see an anxious ageyli, a stranger, daud, squatting by me. he appealed for my compassion. his friend farraj had burned their tent in a frolic, and saad, captain of sharraf’s ageyl was going to beat him in punishment. at my intercession he would be released. saad happened, just then, to visit me, and i put it to him, while daud sat watching us, his mouth slightly, eagerly, open; his eyelids narrowed over large, dark eyes, and his straight brows furrowed with anxiety. daud’s pupils, set a little in from the centre of the eyeball, gave him an air of acute readiness.
saad’s reply was not comforting. the pair were always in trouble, and of late so outrageous in their tricks that sharraf, the severe, had ordered an example to be made of them. all he could do for my sake was to let daud share the ordained sentence. daud leaped at the chance, kissed my hand and saad’s and ran off up the valley; while saad, laughing, told me stories of the famous pair. they were an instance of the eastern boy and boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable. such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. when innocent they were hot and unashamed. if sexuality entered, they passed into a give and take, unspiritual relation, like marriage.
next day sharraf did not come. our morning passed with auda talking of the march in front, while nasir with forefinger and thumb flicked sputtering matches from the box across his tent at us. in the midst of our merriment two bent figures, with pain in their eyes, but crooked smiles upon their lips, hobbled up and saluted. these were daud the hasty and his love-fellow, farraj; a beautiful, soft-framed, girlish creature, with innocent, smooth face and swimming eyes. they said they were for my service. i had no need of them; and objected that after their beating they could not ride. they replied they had now come bare-backed. i said i was a simple man who disliked servants about him. daud turned away, defeated and angry; but farraj pleaded that we must have men, and they would follow me for company and out of gratitude. while the harder daud revolted, he went over to nasir and knelt in appeal, all the woman of him evident in his longing. at the end, on nasir’s advice, i took them both, mainly because they looked so young and clean.
