As the day loomed nearer, I began to grasp more clearly the magnitude of the task we had undertaken. At first sight, a ride of forty-nine hours was a flea-bite compared with the 271 days it had taken Mariantonietta and me to cross the Sahara’s 4,500 miles. But to stay in the saddle for two full days and two full nights virtually without rest suddenly seemed an effort of a shorter duration but an equally demanding order. Lawrence had had great incentive, of course: not only had he won a startling victory, he had also left a Hashemite force at Aqaba so short of food that it was eating its own transport. According to the Oxford version of Seven Pillars,he had left Aqaba on the afternoon of 7 July, the day after capturing the town, and arrived at Suez on the afternoon of the 9th, ‘49 hours out of Aqaba’. He felt that this was ‘a fair time’, considering that both men and camels had been exhausted before they started: ‘Unfortunately the camels by now had done 1,000 miles in five weeks, and were all jaded,’ he wrote in a report for The Timessoon after the war, ‘so that it took the men two days to get to Suez.’ 1This was not modesty but litotes, and it was mischievous, for Lawrence well knew that his non-stop trek was a record – it was celebrated in his own life as one of the great camel-dashes of all time: ‘The great sagas sung throughout the desert, of phenomenal rides dating back to the time of Harun ar-Rashid,’ wrote Frank Stirling, ‘have all been eclipsed by Lawrence’s achievements …Such endurance… is almost incredible.’ 2
Our start was marked with a violent argument with the Taba Bedu who surrounded our tiny nest of camels as we saddled up. We had with us a rafiqfrom the Tarabin, they argued, but Tuwayba was Haywat territory and we must take another from the Haywat. We finally managed to placate them, and trudged up the steep track, dragging the camels after us by the headstalls. As we climbed the Gulf of Aqaba came into view beneath us, a translucent, shimmering blue, with the jagged edges of the Midian hills in the Hejaz beyond. Sunset came on us as we cleared the top of the escarpment, a zig-zag of gold etched into a scroll of dark cloud. It had taken us roughly four hours to make the ascent, which cannot have been far off Lawrence’s time: however, we were still fresh, and Mariantonietta pointed out the anomaly that Lawrence’s men and camels had been ‘trembling with fatigue’. I put this down to the fact that his animals had been weak before they had started, and that the men had just fought a battle at Aba 1-Lissan.
It was a moonless night, and the darkness closed in around us, locking us in an endlessly long tunnel from which there was no escape but morning. A bitter wind, bone-chilling as only a desert wind can be, was blasting in our faces. We were on the plateau of Sinai, the ‘great and terrible wilderness’, a vast shelterless plain of stone, whose great winds could freeze a man to death, and whose dust-storms could suck the body dry. The breathtaking force of the wind, the weight of the darkness, numbed our senses as if we were travelling in a dream. The camels pressed together haunch to haunch for comfort in the dark, and paced out bravely, their pads clicking on the rubble of rocks. We talked less and less, spinning away in our private universes, and between smatters of talk there was nothing but the sound of our saddles creaking and the familiar rhythmic slap of water in our jerry-cans. Furrayj smoked cigarettes furiously. Sabah began to sing a camel-song, a verse repeated again and again and again, but I was glad, for the sound of it kept us awake and anchored in reality. I knew from long experience that hallucination could be a far more dangerous enemy in the desert than bodily fatigue. We rode on for hour after hour, and slowly sleep began to stalk us. Sabah said that he could make out mountain peaks in the shadows where there were none, and at one point I looked over my shoulder to see another camel-rider following us, and only realized after minutes that no one was there. Even Lawrence had written of the ‘silence of the night so intense that we turned round in the saddles at fancied noises away there by the cloak of stars’. 3The world was so dim and silent, indeed, that it would not have surprised me to have come upon Lawrence’s party. We came, instead, upon a rich vein of thornscrub – presumably the one in which Lawrence and his eight Howaytat had halted for an hour to let their camels browse. Sabah kindled a fire quickly and efficiently and Mariantonietta made coffee. It was now ten o’clock, and we had been travelling for a solid seven hours without a break. Themed, the only watering place on the route, lay at least thirty-five miles away. Yet Lawrence claimed to have reached Themed by midnight on the first day. I acknowledged that he might have had better camels than ours – though his insistence that they were tired out before the start of the journey tended to neutralize that fact – but, even so, was it possible that he could have been so far ahead? Sunset had come upon him at the top of the escarpment – as it had for us. How, then, had he jumped forward to Themed in five or six hours? The only explanation I could think of was that his party had been running their camels. At a fast canter, they could just about have covered the distance in the time. But Lawrence had specifically stated that they had walked them: ‘If we rode hard,’ he wrote, ‘they might break down with exhaustion …we agreed to keep them at a walk, however tempting the surface.’ 4
The night seemed endless. The wind gusted stronger and more chilling, and Furrayj, who was seventy years old, became almost frozen to the saddle. Unlike us younger ones, he did not have the luxury of dropping down to the desert floor and stamping off the cold at a walk. In the saddle we would be overcome by that terrifying feeling of losing touch with the real world and drifting into the dimension of nightmare – or of falling asleep entirely and dropping from the camels’ backs on to the sharp stones. On foot, though, I was haunted by another fear which by day I had shrugged off, but which, as the night drew on, grew stronger and stronger: the fear of blundering into a minefield. There were live mines in Sinai – plenty of them – left over from the Six Day War in 1967, and though the Bedu declared that they knew where the mines lay, no one could be absolutely certain. In the saddle, high above the desert, I felt more confident, but as we tramped on on foot, I had unnerving visions of an unexpected crack and puff of smoke, and one of us lying in the cold desert with his or her leg blown off. The hours passed by with agonizing slowness as we rode and tramped. Themed, which Lawrence claimed to have reached at midnight, was still far ahead – in my mind as far away as the north pole. Somewhere, in the early hours of the morning, there arose in my frozen and exhausted head the first faint possibility that Lawrence might not have been telling the truth.
An hour before dawn we stopped and made a fire to warm Furrayj, who looked deathly pale by the light of my torch, and who was now quaking so visibly with cold that I was afraid he would die of exposure. With great gallantry, Sabah threw his own sheepskin-lined cloak around the old man’s bony shoulders. But he continued to shake, and we had to lift him on to his camel. He was saved only by the sun, which came up in a blaze behind us, sending pulses of golden light and unshrouding suddenly the stark immensity of the wilderness. We had reached the end of the tunnel. The night had closed us in a space a few yards square; now we were suddenly ants in an infinity of apricot-coloured rock, broken only by sharp crests like lone fangs, falling away into the depression of Wadi Themed. The sun warmed us gently as we followed dry water-courses where there were scattered sedges for the camels to graze. Furrayj lost his paleness and began to breathe steadily again. Presently we came to the road, which wound down into a deep dustbowl, out of sight.