Arabian Sands (36 page)

The slave came in again with some quilts for our bedding. He asked if we wanted more coffee and when we refused helped himself and went out. The fire died down and the room grew very dark. The wind banged a loose shutter throughout the night.

After our release we plan to travel
eastwards to the Trucial Coast.
We visit Laila where we are
refused a guide, but make our
own way to Abu Dhabi.

We were in a small bare room at the top of the castle. We had been given bread and tea at dawn, but since then no one had come near us. It was now nearly eleven o’clock. Bin Kabina, silent and depressed, had covered himself again with his blanket and I wondered if he was asleep. Every now and again I could hear a wheel creaking on a well, but on looking out of the window could see nothing but a drab plain, where the wind spun eddies of dust among leafless bushes. In the distance I could just make out the dark wall of the Aradh.

The night had seemed very long, for I had not slept. I had been haunted by the memory of three boys whom I had seen a few months earlier sitting outside a village in the Tihama. Each of them nursed in his lap a bundle of stained wrappings which concealed the suppurating stump of his right hand. Their hands had been cut off simply because they had been circumcised in a manner which the King had forbidden. I could not forget the twitching face and pain-filled eyes of one gentle, delicate-looking youth. I had been told that when the Amir’s slave hesitated to execute this savage punishment he held out his hand, saying, ‘Cut. I am not afraid.’ I had lain there in the dark, dreading that some such punishment might be inflicted on bin Kabina and my other companions as a warning to others not to bring foreigners into Saudi Arabia without permission, and that if I was taken away to Jidda I should never know their fate.

However, these forebodings were dispelled when the door opened and the Amir came in. Smiling, he said cheerfully, ‘I told you it would be all right. Abdullah Philby spoke to the King on your behalf, and the King has given orders that you are to be released and allowed to go on your way.’ Philby, who
is a Muslim, had lived in Riyadh for many years and was a regular attendant at the King’s court. I had seen him recently in London, and had told him that I planned this journey. He came to meet me at Laila a few days later, and then he told me what had happened.

The Amir now asked where I proposed to go, so that he could inform the King. I told him that I would like to go to Laila and to cross from there to the Trucial Coast. He said that the car was waiting and would take me back to Sulaiyil.

We drove down the Wadi Dawasir, passing through the gap which separates the Aradh from the main Tubaiq range to the north. The cliffs of the Aradh were here about eight hundred feet high. We went to the Amir of Sulaiyil’s house where the others were waiting for us, having spent a cold night in the stocks. Bin Ghabaisha said, ‘By God ! if I had realized that they were going to do this to me they would never have caught me, when I had a rifle in my hand and a camel under me’; but they were as relieved as I was that nothing more had happened to them. We arranged to go to Laila next day. We had little food left, but agreed that it would be better to buy what we needed there than tire our camels by carrying it.

Two Yam dined with the Amir that night and, after we had fed, one of them told us how he had killed bin Duailan. The lamp smoked and gave little light, and the room was filled with weird shadows; the embers glowed on the coffee hearth and wisps of smoke were bitter in our nostrils. Outside, a rising wind pressed at the badly-fitting door. I watched the man as he told his story, speaking slowly and with many pauses. He was leaning forward and occasionally stroked his pointed black beard with a thin small hand. His face was framed in the white folds of his head-cloth, which was topped with a simple black head-rope. He had great dignity, and was unmistakably a desert Arab, passionate, yet austere.

‘It was late in the morning,’ he said. ‘Three of my relatives had unsaddled at my tent, and we were drinking coffee, while my son was skinning the goat we had killed for them. Suddenly we heard the sound of firing to the south, very many shots. We gave the alarm and ran to fetch our camels. While we were mounting, a small herdsboy rushed up, shouting out
that my uncle’s camp was being attacked by Mishqas, many, many Mishqas. He cried to me to hurry, saying that they had already killed Salim, and Jabr, who was my nephew, and that they were taking all the camels. Twelve of us gathered from the surrounding tents, and we rode to their help. As we got near my uncle’s tents we saw five Mishqas – God’s curse on all Mishqas! – jump on their camels and ride off. They were dressed only in dark loin-cloths. They had been looting the tents and one of them carried a rug. The women were wailing round the body of my nephew – God have mercy on him – and as we galloped past they shouted that the main body of Mishqas was already gone, taking all the camels, and they cried on us for vengeance. We galloped after the few we could see, and we were gaining on them when they reached some low dunes covered with bushes. They stopped there and fired on us. The plain was as bare as this floor, and we could only get near them from the north, where there were other dunes. They had already killed one of us. We could not see them. Do you understand? We got off our camels and ran towards them through the dunes. There was much firing. We killed three of them, and they had killed another of us and wounded two more. Then we killed another, and knew that there was only one left. He was somewhere among the big dunes, and every time one of us moved he fired, and he never missed. He had killed four of us, and still we could not see him, though we knew where he was. I realized that he was very close, with only the crest of a dune between us. I and my cousin crawled slowly up it towards him. Then my cousin lifted his head to look as we neared the top of the dune, and fell back dead beside me, shot through the forehead. I saw the barrel of a rifle jerking. By God, it was less than eight paces from where I lay! I realized that the rifle had jammed. I drew my dagger and leapt on the man before he could get to his feet. I drove my dagger into his neck and killed him. He was a little man and was armed with an English rifle.’

He stopped speaking and fetched a rifle from the corner and held it out to me, saying, ‘This was the rifle; and he also had a pair of field-glasses hung round his neck. Later someone recognized him and told us that he was bin Duailan, “The Cat”.’

I said that he had travelled with me the year before and that I had given him the field-glasses. The Yam said, ‘Yes, we have heard of you as the Christian who travels with the Mishqas, and we thought that you had probably given him this rifle.’ But I replied, ‘No, he captured that from a government post in the Hadhramaut quite recently.’

After a pause, he said, ‘By God, he was a man! He knew how to fight. I thought he would kill us all.’ He told us that in this raid the Mishqas had killed fourteen Yam and captured a hundred and thirty camels, and that nine Mishqas had been killed. He added, ‘Now that the King has given us permission to raid them, we shall, if God wills, recover our camels and capture many others and, by God, we shall kill every Mishqas we see. By God, you were lucky that we did not find you before you got here!’

We left Sulaiyil next morning, 29 January. Laila was a hundred and sixty miles away, and Abu Dhabi on the Trucial Coast was at least six hundred miles beyond that, twice as far from here as Manwakh, from where we had started our journey. It took us eight days to reach Laila. Our camels were tired, and Muhammad’s camel and three of the baggage camels had large saddle-swellings. The Amir at Sulaiyil warned us that we should find no grazing other than acacias until near Laila, where there had been a little rain in the autumn.

The first afternoon we overtook two Yam and a Dahm driving a couple of hundred white sheep and black goats to Laila for sale. We camped with them and bought a goat for our evening meal, which they shared with us. They were friendly, and curious about our journey across the sands. The Dahm had a blood-feud with his own tribe and was living among the Yam. He told me that he had been in Najran in the summer when a Christian had come there from Abha and stayed for two days with bin Madhi, the Amir. He was amused when I told him that I was this Christian. He said he had seen me in the distance in the market-place, but that I was then wearing different clothes. This was true, as at that time I was dressed as a Saudi. When we left them they explained how to find the next well. There was a clearly-marked track to Laila,
and this route, surveyed by Philby, was shown on the map I had with me.

The following afternoon, seeing dark clouds banking up in the west, I asked Muhammad, without thinking, if it would rain, and he answered immediately, ‘Only God knows.’ I should have realized that this would be his answer. No Bedu would ever express an opinion about the weather, since to do so would be to claim knowledge that belongs to God. I told him that in England wise men could foretell the weather, but this was almost blasphemy and he exclaimed, ‘I seek refuge in God from the Devil.’

The last two days before we reached Laila were bitterly cold, with a strong north-easterly wind. We rode across a stony plateau which sloped gently to the east. There was little vegetation until we were near the town, when the ground was suddenly covered with a small white flower called
rahath.
We stopped early, so that the camels could have a good feed, and started late next morning. It was a pleasure to look round at sunset and see our camels lying down fully fed, instead of roaming about in their perpetual hungry quest for food. This was only the second time they had had enough to eat since we had left Manwakh. Little did I know that it was going to take us another forty days to reach Abu Dhabi and that in all that time our camels would only get one more proper meal. After dark we saw the lights of a car in the distance. Later we heard its engine racing and realized that it was stuck in the sand. Resenting all cars, especially in Arabia, I was rather pleased that it was in trouble!

The following afternoon we rode into Laila, a small dun-coloured town of flat-roofed mud buildings, with a population of about four thousand. We halted outside the Amir’s house, where we were told by a slave to unload our camels, and were then shown into a long dark room, bare of furnishings except for the rugs which covered the earthen benches round the walls. We greeted the Amir, a sour-faced, elderly man called Fahad, who was wrapped in a gold-embroidered cloak. He called for coffee and tea and then informed me in as few words as possible that Abdullah Philby had arrived yesterday by car from Riyadh, and not finding me here had gone off to look for me.

For the next two hours we sat in silence, which did not, however, prevent the Amir from making it quite clear how greatly he resented my presence. He left the room at sunset, and I went out into the courtyard to stretch my legs. I was looking at some saker falcons, which were sitting hooded on their blocks, when I heard the call to prayer. Everyone else hurried off to the mosque, except some small boys who now crowded round and reviled me for being an infidel and for not praying. One little urchin explained at length that I was unclean. I was tired, irritated by their ill manners, and wished they would go away.

Philby arrived about an hour later. He was an old friend of mine and I was delighted to see him. His car had stuck in the sands while he was looking for us, and I realized that it was his lights which we had seen the night before. He said: ‘I happened to call on the King just after the telegram arrived informing him that you and your party had turned up in Sulaiyil. He was absolutely furious. Asked me if I knew who you were; then said he would make an example of you that would stop other unauthorized Europeans from entering his country. I tried to put in a word for you, but he wouldn’t even let me open my mouth. I was worried what might happen to you and decided the best thing to do was to write him a letter. I gave it to him in the morning, saying as I did so that it was a man’s duty to intercede for Ms friends. He was quite different from the night before; said at once that he would send off an order for your release.’

The Amir had pitched a tent for Philby in the space outside his house, and we went there after dinner and talked till nearly dawn.

I grumbled about my churlish reception by the Amir that afternoon. Philby was sympathetic, but told me that I ought to realize that as a Christian I was anathema to these strict Wahabis. He pointed out that, after all, it was only this rigid adherence to their principles in a fast changing world that still preserved in a few remote areas the qualities which we both admired in the Arabs. To illustrate the length to which their Puritanism sometimes led them, he told me that once he was sitting with Ibn Saud on the palace roof in Riyadh when they heard someone singing in the distance. Genuinely shocked, the
King exclaimed, ‘God protect me! Who is that singing?’ and sent an attendant to fetch the culprit. The man came back with a Bedu boy who had been driving camels into the town. Sternly the King asked the boy If he did not realize that to sing was to succumb to the temptings of the devil, and ordered him to be flogged.

As Philby was anxious to visit Qariya to investigate the ruins which no European had yet seen, he left next day, but we remained for a further twenty-four hours in Laila, during which time the Amir left us without food. I did not see him again. I remained reading in the seclusion of the tent, interrupted by children peeping in, making rude remarks, and running away. My Rashid tried to buy supplies for our journey, but were cursed and spat at for bringing an infidel into the town. The shopkeepers said that they would only accept our money after it had been publicly washed. This nicety did not, however, prevent them from charging us exorbitant prices when eventually I got hold of some flour, rice, dates, and butter Amir’s son. Muhammad asked the Amir to find us a guide to take us to Jabrin, but he answered, ‘I will encourage no man to travel with an infidel.’ The villagers had already declared that none of them would go with us, expressing the hope that we should die of thirst in the desert. They said that this was sure to happen,.as no rain had fallen in the country between Laila and Jabrin and consequently we should encounter no Bedu to direct us. Some of them horrified my companions by asking why they had not murdered me in the desert and gone off with my possessions. Bin Kabina kept muttering, ‘They are dogs and sons of dogs. They say you are an infidel, but you are a hundred times better than such Muslims as these.’