In AD 624, the army of the Prophet Mohammad engaged a rival Meccan force at Badr, where the Wadi Safra meets the coastal plain. The Muslims were then but a small sect, and had they lost the battle of Badr, they might well have disappeared. More than 1,000 years later, the Prophet’s direct descendants found themselves in a similar plight. In 1916, Sharif Feisal and his Bedu army were retreating slowly down the Wadi Safra with a Turkish brigade behind them. If the Turks had launched a massive counter-attack at that moment, they would probably have broken through into the coastal plain and taken Rabegh, then Mecca, and the Arab Revolt would have been at an end.
In the Prophet’s day, Badr was an important watering-station on the route to Mecca. Today, though, it is little more than a truck-stop on the motorway, without even a place to stay. I arrived there on a bus from jeddah, late on a steamy night, and stood by the side of the road for an hour desperately trying to flag down a lift. Finally I gave up, bought two small bottles of mineral water, and walked along the soft asphalt for a mile until I found a sandy drywash, where, after carefully avoiding snake and scorpion tracks, I laid out my sleeping-bag. It was too hot to sleep, so I lay watching the stars until morning, and when dawn came, I saw that I was in a wadi forested with patches of thorn-trees and tamarisk, from which granite foothills rose steeply, their sharply carved facets turned at angles to the sun like cut jewels, flashing in the early light. The lower slopes were covered in a down of mustard-yellow goatgrass, which from this distance looked almost like a growth of lichen staining the rock. This yellowish growth solved the riddle of the valley’s name, for Wadi Safra means ‘The Yellow Wadi’ in Arabic. I hiked back to the truck-stop and after half an hour a young Bedui of the Bani Salem Harb agreed to take me to Hamra and Medina in his pick-up for 100 riyals. The Darb Sultani –the road which crawled up the Wadi Safra – opened like a long twisting corridor, climbing up steadily until a vast panorama of mountains lay before us, silver and grey, like successive waves of cloud extending into the distance until they appeared to merge into the sky itself. We passed village after village of ancient baked-mud houses, now standing roofless on the rocky sides of the valley, in forests of date-palms: Jedida, Hussainiyya, Wasta, Kharma. In Lawrence’s day these villages were the heartland of the Bani Salem, and produced almost all the tribe’s grain and dates. The Bedu remained in the villages for five months of the year, spending the rest of the time wandering with their herds and flocks and leaving the villages and palm-groves to their slaves. These slaves, who were mostly of African origin, had no legal status, and numbered about 10,000 at the time of Lawrence’s visit.
My Bedui driver asked what I was about, and when I mentioned ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ he asked, ‘Who?’
‘An Englishman who helped lead the Arab armies in the Great Arab Revolt.’
‘What?’
‘When the Hashemites were here.’
‘Oh, the Hashemites! That was long ago. This is the country of the Saudis now!’
Was he being deliberately obtuse, I wondered, or could tribal memories really have become so short? His people, the Bani Salem, were one of the main clans of the Harb – a major Bedu tribe in the Hejaz. This youth’s grandfathers and grand-uncles had actually fought with Feisal, while many of the Masruh Harb – their rivals – had sided with the Turks, under the ‘traitor’ Sheikh ibn Mubeiriq. It was only after a while that I remembered that it had been the Bani Salem who had run from the Turks at the crucial moment. Perhaps, after all, it was a memory the tribe would rather forget.
Hamra took me by surprise. I had imagined some tiny hamlet in a cleft in the wadi side, but the scale of the place was enormous, with thousands of palms whose heads moved slowly like sea-grass to the tune of the wind. The wadi was about half a mile wide here, lying between two steep, stony walls, and the ruined houses stood on a long ridge at the foot of the northern spur, and on high earth mounds rising steeply from the wadi bed. Lawrence had numbered the houses at about 150, but there were obviously many hundreds more, and there was also the remains of a Turkish fort, a shapeless mud stump on an island in the sea of palms. This village had for generations been a station on the Pilgrim Road from Yanbu’ al-Bahr to Medina, and when Richard Burton had halted here, disguised as a Persian doctor, in 1852, the fort had been manned by a platoon of Albanian soldiers. I climbed the ridge and scrambled among the warren of ruptured and leaning mud walls, eroded into surreal sculptures by the rain, and tried to picture what this village must have been like in late October 1916, when the wadi was full of Feisal’s defeated troops, and three camel-riders, one of them an Englishman, had suddenly appeared on the outskirts of the village.
*
Lawrence and his two rafiqs had left Rabegh on 21 October, under the cover of darkness. From a distance, all three might have been mistaken for Bedu, since Lawrence wore an Arab headcloth and had thrown a cloak over his uniform. Close up, though, he would easily have been recognized as a foreigner. Not only was he cleanshaven and pink-faced, he obviously knew nothing about camel-riding. When he had travelled with camels in the Negev two years previously, he had preferred to walk. Sharif ‘Ali, the eldest of the Hashemite sons, had reluctantly provided him with his best camel and an escort of two Bani Salem – Sheikh Obeyd and his son ‘Abdallah – to take him to Feisal’s camp. Though Lawrence was to masquerade as a Syrian, ‘Ali had ordered Obeyd not to let him talk to anyone: the desert and the hills were full of Turkish spies, and the ‘traitor’ ibn Mubeiriq, whose tribal district they were passing through, would happily have killed Lawrence or sold him to the Turks. The riders cleared Rabegh’s palm-groves and stalked out into the endless coastal plain of the Tihama. There was no moon, and the night yawned infinitely before them, its silence broken only by the soft percussion of the camels’ feet on the flat sand. As the darkness closed in, Lawrence felt suddenly apprehensive. He had entered a hostile and unknown dimension, into which few Europeans had been before him, and from which even fewer had returned alive. He was unsure, even, that he could trust his companions. He knew, of course, that the role of companion or rafiq was a solemn office to the Bedu: every traveller who wanted to cross a tribal district must have a rafiq from the local tribe or one allied to it to frank him through. For a rafiq to turn on his charge once accepted was a heinous affront to the Bedu code of honour, and a Bedui found guilty by his fellow-tribesmen of the crime of bowqa – treachery – would be ostracized for life, and never allowed to marry from his own folk. To be tribeless in a tribal society amounted virtually to a death sentence, for any marauder might kill the outcast without the risk of starting a blood-feud – the one social institution in Arabia which prevented bloodshed on a large scale. Nevertheless, Lawrence reminded himself, like the English code of the ‘gentleman’, the rules the Bedu lived by were only an ideal. The German explorer Charles Huber, for instance, who had come this way in 1884, had been murdered by his Harb rafiqs near Rabegh, when the Arabs had discovered that he was a Christian.