His mood was temporarily alleviated, however, when, camping at the water pool, he met two young ‘Agayl boys named ‘Ali and Othman, who were due to be punished for having set fire to the camp. Although Lawrence later wrote in Seven Pillarsthat the pair had implored him to take them with him, evoking the reply that he, Lawrence, was a simple man who had no desire for servants, he wrote in his field diary that he had actually ‘begged them’ from Sa’ad al-Gharm – chief of Sharif Sharraf’s Agayl escort – which they met at the pool. ‘Othman soft-looking,’ he wrote, ‘‘Ali fine fellow. Both apparently plucky.’ 10Lawrence insisted in Seven Pillarsthat he had never been ‘lofty’ and had never had cooks or body-servants, only his guards, who were fighting men. This was untrue: in the Hejaz he had travelled with a Syrian cook called Arslan; Hamad the Moor – whether or not Lawrence had executed him – was clearly a servant of some kind. When Lawrence met ‘Ali and Othman, he had already had a substantial entourage of his own: three ‘Agayl named Mukhaymar, Marjan and ‘Ali: Mohammad, a fat peasant from the Hauran in Syria, and Gasim, a bad-tempered, yellow-toothed fellow from Ma an, who had lived among the Howaytat. Lawrence noted on his equipment list for the Wejh–Aqaba trek that he had provided four revolvers for his ‘servants’. He wanted the ‘Agayl boys simply because they were attractive, or ‘clean’, as he put it, but he justified himself by maintaining that Gasim and Mohammad were useless, and declared that he must have extra men.
‘Ali and Othman were to become immortalized in Seven Pillarsas ‘Farraj and Da ‘ud’ – the puckish figures whose mischief seems to counterpoint the grimmer side of the action in the text with remarkably opportune timing. So opportune, indeed, Lawrence’s friend Vyvyan Richards observed wryly, that ‘had all the Arab campaign been planned by some Shakespearian dramatic genius he could not have imagined a more delightful human relief for the great story than this astonishing pair’. 11Lawrence represented them as homosexual lovers with a deep devotion to one another – an example of the Eastern ‘boy and boy affection’ which, he said, the segregation of women made inevitable. He suggested that such coupling was commonplace, and on the second page of Seven Pillarslaunched into a lengthy description of homosexuality among the Arabs, illustrated by passages of an overtly sensual character: ‘friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace’. 12The story of ‘Farraj and Da’ud’owes much more to Lawrence’s Uranian connections than to Arab culture: even the ‘fleshiness’ of the prose is evocative of Uranian novels, such as Rolfe’s Don Tarquinio,which Richards listed as one of Lawrence’s favourite books while an undergraduate. The homoerotic theme in Seven Pillars,while purporting to be ethnographical, is actually an expression of Lawrence’s own suppressed desires: it is possible that the idea of ‘friends quivering together’ is what he imagined was happening, but it is unlikely to have been the truth. Homosexuality, accepted only tacitly among Arab townsmen and villagers, was taboo among the Bedu, for whom merest suggestion of it would be likely to bring out daggers. The explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who travelled among them for five years in the 1940s, living closely with his companions day after day, far from their womenfolk, recorded that he had never encountered among them a single instance of homosexuality. No doubt it existed, but it was so much frowned upon as to be carefully hidden – certainly it was never flaunted in public as Lawrence claims was the case with ‘Farraj and Da’ud’.
‘Ali and Othman were only two of a new contingent of ‘Agayl Lawrence’s column borrowed from Sharif Sharraf at Abu Ragha, bringing their numbers up to thirty-five. On 16 May, the day Lawrence acquired his new servants, he reported himself ‘still waiting and still savage’. 13The following day, though, much to his relief, the enlarged patrol finally mounted their camels and drew off across volcanic harra –a maze of basalt clinkers so thick and angular that the camels were obliged to travel in single file. Lawrence’s internal desolation was now matched by the surreal strangeness of the landscape: it was as if they had passed into another dimension. Nothing here was reassuring or ordinary – everything seemed other-worldly, odd, hostile, inimical to life. At last they crossed a fifty-foot ridge of vast, twisted columns, and came into the sandy bed of the Wadi Aish, where there were scattered thorn-bushes and waterholes. They couched their camels, unloaded and piled up their baggage, then sent the beasts out into the scrub to fill their bellies on the green stuff. No sooner were they out than someone screamed ‘Raiders!’ and Lawrence glanced up to see riders racing towards them, hanging together in the heat-haze like a swarm of flies. There was the chilling crack of rifles and the sound of bullets buzzing through the air, and whanging off the stones around him. Some of the ‘Agayl fell flat and fired back at once, while others rushed hazardously towards the enemy, whooping out challenges. The raiders had not been expecting so large a party or so aggressive a defence. Almost at once they reined in their camels, and pulled away. Auda identified them from the cut of their clothes as a party of Shammar, whose Emir, ibn Rashid, had taken the side of the Turks.
On 19 May, ten days after setting out from Wejh, they filled their water-skins at the pools at Dira’a, and in the evening crossed the railway at ad-Dizad. There was a Turkish fort nearby which seemed to have been abandoned, and the trained dynamiters among the ‘Agayl quickly got to work on the rails, setting up a relay of gun-cotton and gelatine charges which they detonated in sequence, filling the valley with deafening explosions and billows of smoke. Auda, who had never seen explosives before, burst into delighted laughter and made up a verse about it spontaneously. The ‘Agayl lunged for their camels, and while they were mounting up, Lawrence cut three telegraph wires and dragged the poles down by attaching them to half a dozen mounts. They trotted on for five miles until the going became too difficult, then made camp on a ridge. Lawrence lay in the darkness listening to the shouts of Turkish soldiers in the stations and outposts down the line, and the occasional salvo of shots they fired at imaginary raiders in the shadows. He dared not light a fire or send up a signal-flare to contact the baggage-party, which had become separated from his riders in the darkness. Later, two scouts returned and led Lawrence and his men on to where the main body were encamped, safe behind a sand-dune. They managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep, but it was still dark when they mounted again, and Auda guided them across hills and dunes until, at dawn, they found themselves on the edge of a vast, shimmering plain which stretched endlessly to the east, falling steadily until it merged with the haze of the eastern sky. This was al-Houl, ‘The Terror’ – a vast anvil of sand and stone without a tree, a bush or a single blade of grass.