For five days they rode across the wilderness in the teeth of a smouldering sand-storm which leached their bodies dry of moisture. Yet they could not drink more than a few mouthfuls a day, for their water was limited and there would be no major water-sources till they reached the Wadi Sirhan. As the day drew on, Lawrence would see strange will-o’-the-wisp luminosities which licked suddenly out of the nothingness, and dust-devils that fumed across the hot flints like pillars of fire. Not only was there no life here, there was no sign of life. As his party rode forward reluctantly into the emptiness, weighed down by the awesome vastness of the sky, Lawrence looked in vain for the tracks of lizards, rats, insects or birds. The hugeness of this plain, so ancient, so still, so silent, reduced them to black specks on its redness, and it seemed to Lawrence that they made no progress, for the horizon remained always the same distance before them, the same distance behind: ‘we ourselves felt tiny in it,’ he wrote, ‘our progress across its stillness an immobility of futile effort.’ 14The only sound was the splash of water in the goatskins, the mesmeric creak of the saddles, and the clink of the camels’ feet on the dry stones. By noon on the first day, a hot wind was boiling off the horizon, bringing with it the spice-taste of the great Nafud desert which lay beyond. The ‘Agayl drew their headcloths tightly across their mouths, but Lawrence decided to ‘face out’ the storm simply from masochistic perversity, and as a result developed badly chapped lips and a throat so hoarse with dust that he could not eat properly for the next three days. They rode from dawn till sunset, for even Auda felt too ill-at-ease in such a void to travel at night, with the risk of losing the way and thrashing about in unknown desert until they died of thirst. Soon the flint country merged into gi’ anor salt-flats, which gleamed blindingly white in the sun, a sensation so painful that several times Lawrence almost fainted. At last, on 24 May, he sighted the first significant animal life he had seen since entering al-Houl – two ostrich, strutting rapidly across the horizon – and when one of the ‘Agayl ran up with ostrich eggs, he, Auda, Nasir, and Nasib al-Bakri halted to breakfast on them. Lawrence caught up with the main party hours later to find that his servant Gasim – the ill-favoured peasant from Ma’an – was missing. His camel was there, complete with his saddle-bags and rifle, but of the man himself there was no trace.
The ‘Agayl suggested that he had fallen asleep in the saddle during the night and tumbled off, hitting his head on a rock, or even that he had been the victim of a grudge-killing. It was clear that Gasim was lost, and that the ‘Agayl – to whom he was merely a bad-tempered stranger – were not prepared to go back and look for him. Lawrence realized that the onus fell on him. He considered ordering one of his servants to go back on his camel, but realized that such a shirking of his duty would always be remembered. He begged half a skin of water from the ‘Agayl – the last water they had – and turned his camel silently, forcing her back along the line of camel-riders and into the desert beyond, cursing his need to live up to Bedu ideals. Within twenty minutes the caravan was out of sight, and the terrible loneliness of the desert descended on him. The only sign that humans had ever survived in this void was a pattern of threshing-pits across the flints of the desert floor, where in the past the Fajr Bedu had worked grain from the wild grass samh.The pits were tiny pools of sand like eyes in the stony waste, and Lawrence urged his camel across them deliberately so as to leave some trace of his outward journey. He rode on for an hour and a half through a series of mirages which cast ghostly sparklers of light and haze, and sighted at last a tiny dark blemish on the desert’s surface. This was Gasim. When Lawrence approached, he saw that the man was blundering about in confusion, half blinded by the sun, his arms held out and his mouth gaping. Lawrence couched his camel and Gasim snatched the water-skin from him, spilling the precious liquid down his shirt in his eagerness to drink. Lawrence sat him on the camel’s rump, then mounted himself and set off on a compass-bearing, hoping desperately that he could now find the caravan. He traced the tracks he had left on the threshing-floors, and Gasim clung on behind the saddle, blubbering. Within an hour, though, he spotted a black bubble in the distance, which gradually split and swelled, resolving into the forms of three camel-riders. For an anxious moment, Lawrence wondered if it was the enemy. Then, suddenly, he recognized Auda and two of Sharif Nasir’s ‘Agayl, who had come back to search for him. Lawrence yelled sneers at them for abandoning a man in the desert. Auda replied that Gasim was not worth the price of a cameclass="underline" Lawrence interrupted him. ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ he said. Gasim claimed to have dismounted to urinate and lost the caravan in the darkness, but Lawrence suspected that he had actually halted and gone to sleep. Soon they caught up with Sharif Nasir and Nasib al-Bakri. While the Sharif appreciated Lawrence’s act of courage, Nasib was angry that he had endangered his own life and Auda’s – and consequently the entire mission – for the sake of a single worthless man.
The rescue of Gasim was Lawrence’s most courageous single deed, and did much to enhance his reputation after the war. Though he apparently tried to play down the heroism of the act in Seven Pillars,by portraying his irritation that the duty of rescuing the man fell on him, the fact that it occupies an entire chapter is significant. There is no mention of Gasim in any official reports, but in an article in The Timeswritten in 1918, Lawrence claimed that ‘many of his party’ were lost in crossing al-Houl – a claim less indicative of success than of failure. According to the Seven Pillarsaccount, at least one man waslost in al-Houl, a slave of Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s whom nobody went back for, since he was believed to know the country well. His mummified corpse was discovered weeks later. Although the rescue of Gasim has the characteristics of one of Lawrence’s departures into fantasy, in this case we have solid evidence, from his diary entry for 24 May 1917, that he actually didgo back to look for him, for that evening Sharif Nasir apparently beat ‘Ali and Othman – Lawrence’s newly acquired servants – for allowing him to return alone. He also wrote in his diary that he ‘wasted two hours and a half looking for Gasim, which has been taken by some to suggest that the rescue attempt actually failed. Lawrence was precise in his choice of words, and a master of linguistic nuances: is it likely that he would have chosen to write ‘wasted’ if he had really returned with the lost man? If Gasim was indeed rescued, why does his name not appear again in the text of Seven Pillarswhen he was Lawrence’s servant, and the party a relatively small one? The absence of his name following the incident is considered the most convincing evidence that Lawrence’s heroic rescue attempt was a failure.
Now, it is the case that ‘Gasim’ is not referred to by this single name after Lawrence had supposedly brought him out of the desert, but three weeks after the incident, he does refer to a man called ‘Gasim ash-Shimit’ in a tale he tells in an attempt to parody Auda’s epic style of rhetoric. This tale, it is true, is set at Wejh before the Aqaba expedition, but the important question is whether ‘Gasim ash-Shimt’ and the Gasim of the rescue story are the same man. First of all, the name: ‘ash-Shimt’ means ‘he who rejoices in another’s misfortune’; it is not a family name, nor is it kunya –a name defining the named person in relation to someone else, such as ‘the father of so-and-so’. It is clearly a nickname, and as such it certainly seems to evoke the character of Gasim as Lawrence described him. It so happens that in Seven Pillarsthere are two references to an Arab Lawrence simply calls ‘The Shimt’ following the incident in al-Houl – the first at the battle of Aba 1-Lissan, about a month later, when Lawrence, searching for Auda on the battlefield, asks ‘The Shimt’ where his horsemen have gone. The second reference is indirect: in his description of the Mudowwara raid which took place the following September, Lawrence notes that ‘The Shimt’s boy – a very dashing fellow’ 15had been killed in the attack. If’ The Shimt’ and Lawrence’s Gasim are the same man, then it seems probable that Lawrence did indeed bring Gasim out of the desert and save his life. Moreover, the phrase ‘wasted two and a half hours looking for Gasim’ does not, in the English idiom, necessarily mean that the rescue attempt was abortive – it could indicate only that Lawrence was annoyed because Gasim had needlessly wasted time and energy by his incompetence: throughout the trek to Aqaba his diary entries frequently express his impatience to get on. Finally, Lawrence also wrote in his diary the phrase ‘not worth a camel’s price’ – which he said later was spoken by Auda, and to which he is supposed to have replied, ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ Such comments smack of deliberate admonishment to someone who has done a stupid thing – such as going to sleep in the desert when the rest of the caravan is moving on: they are scarcely the kind of remarks likely to be made about a comrade – no matter how disagreeable – who has just been lost. The balance of evidence seems to me to suggest that Lawrence did return alone into al-Houl and save the life of Gasim – a remarkable act of bravery for a man who was terrified of being hurt.