The Wadi Rum was, in fact, one of the most spectacular sights in the whole of Arabia: a maze of sandstone whose continual process of evolution was so clearly visible that the vast boulevards and buttresses of red rock appeared to be part of a living organism. No matter how many times Lawrence visited Rum, he never ceased to be transported by these great bastions of rock, skewered and scrolled and fissured and wrinkled by salt and sand and wind into shapes that no delirious mind could invent – delirium tremensembodied in rock and stone: the landscape of the unconscious mind. For Lawrence, Rum was a gateway to the cosmos – a road down which he might ride to that far-off, alluring sunlit space of eternal sleep: ‘often …’ he wrote, ‘my mind used to turn me from the direct road, to clear my senses by a night in [Rum] and by the ride down its dawn-lit valley towards the shining plains, or up its valley in the sunset to that glowing square which my anticipation would never let me reach. I would say, shall I ride on this time, beyond the Khazail, and know it all?’ 16
For now, though, a war had to be won, and a railway had to be wrecked, and Lawrence rode between the grand walls of the wadi only as far as the great natural amphitheatre in the rock beneath Jabal Rum. This was the ideal hideout and base for guerrilla operations. Protected by sheer cliffs on three sides, it was invisible to anyone coming up the wadi until they literally rode into it, and here, fifteen minutes’ climb up the hillside, lay the natural spring called Shallala, known to modern visitors as ‘Lawrence’s Spring’. The tents of the Howaytat were pitched in the lee of the sheer rock walls, hidden among thick rattambush near the ruins of an ancient Nabataean temple. Lawrence’s party camped there after dark and received visitors from various Howaytat clans, all of whom were disgruntled by what they saw as a Hashemite attempt to promote the Abu Tayyi. Of all the Bedu, none were so jealous of their personal integrity as the Howaytat – Lawrence wrote that every fourth or fifth man considered himself a Sheikh. The Dumaniyya clan under Sheikh Gasim Abu Dumayk – the valiant warrior who had led the fighting at Fuweilah – were openly rebellious. Lawrence realized that he could not win Gasim over, and declared furiously that he would enrol members of any other clan but the Dumaniyya for his raid on Mudowwara. Gasim stormed off, bellowing that he would join the Turks.
Feeling that he lacked authority to handle this mutiny himself, Lawrence returned to Aqaba, consulted Feisal, and rode back to Rum with a Sharif – ‘Abdallah ibn Hamza – to smooth over the troubles. ‘Abdallah managed to bring some of the Dumaniyya round, but Gasim himself remained defiant, not least because Za’al Abu Tayyi – whom Lawrence considered ‘the finest raider alive’ – was to accompany the raiding party, together with twenty-five tribesmen of the Towayha. None of the other clans of the Howaytat would accept Za’al’s authority, neither would the separate clans even talk to one another. As ‘Abdallah had returned to Aqaba, and the other Sharif with the party, Nasir al-Harithi, went blind on the first day out, Lawrence was the only individual sufficiently impartial to assume the direction of the raid, and, for the first time, he had to abandon his habit of working through a Sharif, and take on direct leadership himself.
Lawrence left Rum at dawn on 16 September, with 116 Bedu and his two British NCOs, each protected by a pair of Feisal’s personal body-slaves, who were prepared to die in their defence. He guarded these British soldiers with solicitous care, first because their skills were crucial to the coming battle, secondly because their loss would have reflected badly on the Arabs, and thirdly because it was in his nature to care for others: ‘He was ever thoughtful of us,’ Brook remembered, ‘and careful to see that the intense heat was not proving too much for us.’ 17They travelled along al-Ga’a – a vast swath of salt sehbhadividing Rum from the plateau of Shirah, whose bed of hard, flat clay made it a natural highway. Within a few hours, the gnarled sandstone blocks whose theme reached its crescendo in Rum mountain were playing out smaller and less distinct by degrees until the last outlying blocks stood no higher than a man. Sandstone gave way to cut-glass limestone slopes, and they rode towards a hogsback where the ridge drooped to a saddle between two bookends, marking the entrance to another clay sehkhaon which they spent the night. The following day they crossed wilder country – intersecting limestone ridges relieved by knots of tamarisk and rattamtrees. In the evening they came upon Mudowwara well, set in a valley between huge limestone plinths, no more than three miles from the station. Today, a few stunted palm-trees grow in that spot, indicating the presence of water, but the well itself is a sandy pit, completely dry. In 1917 there was abundant water, but it had been deliberately fouled by the Turks, who had hurled into it the carcasses of dead camels. Their bloated flesh was nauseatingly apparent to Lawrence and his party, but they filled their waterskins anyway – for it was the only water available to them – and both Yells and Brook later went down with severe diarrhoea.
At sunset, Lawrence, with Za’al and the two NCOs, stole forward on foot to the last ridge overlooking the station, where the Turks had built guard-sangars from the flaky grey rock. The sangars are still there, and one warm night, having arrived at Mudowwara riding a camel called ‘Alyan, I crawled up the same crest to see the same station buildings, standing by the ghost of the line, from which the tracks and sleepers had been torn and piled up. On 17 September 1917, though, the line remained very much intact, and Lawrence looked down from the crest on the series of blockhouses along the station platform and saw their windows lit by cooking fires, and a host of tents in the foreground inhabited by about 200 milling Turks. Lawrence wrote later that the station was about 300 yards from the ridge, and thus out of range of the Stokes mortar. He decided that they must creep even nearer to find a better site. They crawled so close to the enemy, in fact, that they could hear them talking, and clearly saw the face of a young officer who left the camp to relieve himself, and lit a cigarette with a match. They withdrew to the shelter of the hill and discussed the prospect of an assault in whispers: the garrison was 200 compared with their 116 men, and Lawrence felt that the station buildings were too solid for the mortar shells. He decided not to chance storming the station, but to mine the railway down the line instead.