Arabian Sands (37 page)

Laila had been one of the strongholds of the Akhwan, a militant, religious brotherhood dedicated to the purification and the unification of Islam. This movement had aimed at breaking up the tribes and settling the Bedu round the wells and in the oases, since these fanatics regarded nomadic life as incompatible with strict conformity with Islam, which in their eyes entailed the scrupulous observance of fasts, prayers, and ablutions. Ibn Saud had risen to power on this
movement, but later, when the Akhwan rebelled against him, accusing him of religious laxity because he forbade them to raid into the neighbouring states, he broke their power at the battle of Sabila in 1928. Here in Laila, and in the Wadi Dawasir, the old fanaticism had survived.

The hatred which I encountered was a disturbing experience. It was ugly, as is all hatred, and to me, accustomed to religious tolerance, it seemed senseless; but I wondered if it were not preferable to the new hatred based on distinctions of colour, nationality, and class which our civilization has engendered and which are convulsing the more sophisticated parts of the Middle East. In the early days of Islam, while their faith was still unchallenged, the Arabs were remarkably tolerant about religion. But to the people of Laila I was an intruder from an alien civilization, which they identified with Christianity. They knew that the Christian had subjugated most of the Muslim world, and that contact with their civilization had everywhere destroyed or profoundly modified the beliefs, institutions, and culture they cherished. Naturally they did not realize how little sympathy I had with the innovations and inventions with which they associated me, nor how much sympathy I had with the way of life they sought to preserve.

In the evening we discussed what we should do. Jabrin was about a hundred and fifty miles away, but I was confident that I could get there by following Philby’s route, which was shown on an otherwise blank map. I realized, however, that if I failed to find this oasis we should be lost in the empty waterless desert to the south of the Hasa. I suggested to the others that I should guide them, but they were naturally doubtful of my ability to find a place which I had never seen, and which was eight days’ journey away.

I said, ‘We don’t need a guide, I can find the way.’

Bin Ghabaisha asked. ‘How can you do that? You have never seen the country.’

I explained: ‘Abdullah Philby marked Jabrin on the map. I can find it with my compass.’

Muhammad was sceptical: ‘There are no landmarks. The way is across open plains like the Jaddat al Harasis; it is different from the journey we have just made. Then we did not
need a guide. We knew the Aradh was on our left. We had only to strike it to arrive at the Hassi. The Saar knew the actual place of the well. Now we need a guide.’

I suggested that we should probably meet some Bedu on the way, but Amair said doubtfully, ‘They say here that the country is empty. There has been no rain.’

I went on, ‘Believe me, I can find Jabrin. By God, I don’t want to die of thirst in the desert any more than you do ! ’

Bin Kabina asked, ‘How many days will it take?’

I answered, ‘Eight’; and he said: ‘That is what they say here.’

Eventually they agreed that I should guide them. Bin Ghabaisha said, ‘It is obvious we shall not find a guide here and God forbid we should remain in Laila. We must put ourselves in Umbarak’s hands.’

I asked if we should find Arabs at Jabrin, and Muhammad said, ‘We are bound to find Murra there. There are always some of them there. Don’t worry about that, Umbarak. You just get us to Jabrin. Do that and we shall be thankful.’

I sincerely hoped we should find Arabs at Jabrin. By then we should need more food, and, what was far more important, we should need a guide to show us the water-holes on our way to Abu Dhabi, four hundred miles farther on. Without a guide we should be stranded at Jabrin with worn-out camels, in the northern wastes of the Empty Quarter. It was not a pleasant thought.

That evening Muhammad tried to give me some money. He said, ‘Abdullah Philby gave us this before he left. Here is a fifth of it, your share; we are travelling companions and should share all things alike.’

We left Laila on 7 February. We carried six skins full of water, and had with us ninety pounds of flour, fifteen pounds of rice, thirty pounds of dates, and some butter, sugar, tea, and coffee. The Amir’s son pretended that he had difficulty in buying even this small quantity of food. As we were unlikely to get anything but dates from the Murra at Jabrin, I knew that we were going to be very hungry before we reached Abu Dhabi. I reckoned that it would take us at least a month to get there. We therefore decided to ration ourselves to three
pounds of flour between the five of us for our one evening meal. We could use the rice only when we were on a well and had plenty of water. We would eat the dates for breakfast, or rather they would, for by now I could no longer even stand the sight of dates. As we led our camels out of the town, some Arabs shouted to us not to come back if we failed to find the way.

My diary shows that it took us eight days to reach Jabrin, and records our marching hours, which were not really long, since only twice did we do eight hours in a day. But my recollection is of riding interminably through a glaring haze-bound wilderness, which seemed to be without beginning and without end. The weariness of our camels added to my own, making it barely tolerable, especially when their bodies jerked in flinching protest as they trod with their worn soles upon the flints which strewed alike the hollows and the ridges. Sometimes we found a path, and its smooth surface afforded them temporary relief, but I dared not follow it if it deviated from my compass course, for there were no landmarks in this desert which I could recognize to warn me if I was going wrong. I knew that I should only have to be eight or ten miles out to miss Jabrin, not much after a hundred and fifty miles. Was Jabrin shown accurately on the map? Though Cheesman and Philby were meticulously accurate in their work, both of them had fixed Jabrin after a long journey. I could not recall what method they had used. If they had fixed its position by compass-traverse a ten-mile error was possible.

In the evening we camped wherever we could find a few bushes to give us fuel. We would turn the camels loose to search for food and I would watch them hobbling away, heading back instinctively towards their homelands in the south; and as they got farther and farther away, adding yet more miles to the miles they had already covered that day, I would think wearily, ‘Now one of us will have to go and get them.’ If I started to do so, the others would jump up, saying, ‘We will get them, Umbarak’; but sometimes I would insist and, accompanied by one of them, would set off irritably in pursuit. To spare the camels, we were carrying little water, and during these days I was always thirsty and also hungry, for being
thirsty I found it difficult to swallow the heavy, unappetizing bread which bin Kabina cooked. The weather was very cold, and on most nights we could see lightning and sometimes hear thunder, and I hoped it would not rain, for we would have no sort of shelter.

On previous journeys it had needed a conscious effort on my part to understand what my companions said; but now, although I still spoke Arabic haltingly, for I am a bad linguist, I could no longer withdraw into the sanctuary of my own mind, beyond reach of their disputes. I could follow their talk too easily. For one entire day bin Kabina and Muhammad argued about the money I had given them two years before at Tarim. On the ground that the camel which bin Kabina had ridden belonged to him, Muhammad had kept two-thirds of the money which I had intended for bin Kabina. Remembering how destitute bin Kabina had been at the time, I thought this mean and said so. The argument went on and on, angry shouted interruptions checking but not halting an endless flow of repetition. It only came to an end when we stopped for the night. They then sat contentedly together baking bread. Throughout another day, bin Kabina and Amair wrangled continuously about the respective merits of their grandfathers. Bin Kabina said maliciously. ‘Anyway, my grandfather never farted in public,’ and the discomfited Amair blushed for this appalling solecism on the part of a grandfather who had been dead for twenty years. When next day they started to quarrel once more about their grandfathers, I protested. They looked at me in surprise and said, ‘But it passes the time,’ which I suppose was true.

Two days before we reached Jabrin we crossed the Dahana sands, here about fifteen miles wide. This belt of crescent dunes links the sands of the Empty Quarter with the great Nafud sands in northern Arabia. Rain had fallen two months earlier and had penetrated three feet into the Sands, which were touched with a bloom of newly sprung seedlings. To me the unexpected hint of spring in the drab monotony of those days was very welcome. On the eighth morning we climbed a final ridge. I had calculated that if we were ever to see Jabrin we should see it now; and there it lay, straight in front of us, the splashes of the palm-groves dark on the khaki plain. I sat down
on a tumulus to rest, for I was very tired, while the others broke into excited talk. Later, we went down into the plain and found a well near a grove of acacias.

We watered the camels and turned them loose. They would no doubt find something, although even the acacias were leafless from the long drought. Only twice during the past eight days had I noticed anything which I thought they could eat, but I suppose they must have found something more during those shuffling quests which took them so far afield. Bin Kabina may have noticed the compassion in my eyes, for he said, ‘Their patience is very wonderful. What other creature is as patient as a camel? That is the quality which above all else endears them to us Arabs.’

The well was shallow and the water sweet. My companions stripped off their shirts and poured buckets of water over each other, but I shrank from this bitter washing in the cold wind despite their gibes and encouragement. ‘Come on, Umbarak,’ called out bin Ghabaisha, and denied that it was cold, although I could hear him gasp each time Amair threw water over him. He still wore his loin-cloth, but the water moulded it to him like draperies on a statue; all Arabs dislike uncovering themselves in public, but here this modesty seemed exaggerated. I contrasted it with the behaviour of other Bedu with whom I had bathed in the Euphrates, who had chased each other naked along the river bank.

Later, Muhammad and Amair went off to look for the Murra. We had been in the territory of this tribe since we had crossed the Dahana, and Muhammad was still confident that we should find some of them in this oasis. The Murra, one of the great tribes of the Najd, number between five and ten thousand persons and live in an area as large as France. They guided Philby across the Empty Quarter, but their knowledge of it is limited to parts of the central and Western Sand, and they do not range anything like as widely as the Rashid, who may be met with from the borders of the Yemen to Oman, and from Dhaufar to Riyadh, the Hasa, and the Trucial Coast.

The Murra have a great reputation in Saudi Arabia as trackers, and are widely employed by the government for tracking down criminals and identifying them from their
footprints. The Murra who was friendly to us in Sulaiyil was so employed.

While the others were away we cooked a large meal of rice against their return, and then, while we lay idly round the fire, bin Kabina and bin Ghabaisha tried to teach me a game, rather like draughts, which they played with camel-droppings in the sand, but either their explanations were too involved or the –game was too complicated, for I never understood it.

When the others came back at sunset they told us that they had found neither Arabs nor fresh tracks. They asked me how much farther I could guide them. Between here and Abu Dhabi, my map showed only a single well called Dhiby, which Thomas had located at the end of his great journey across the Sands. It was about a hundred and fifty miles away in a depression to the south of the Qatar peninsula. Sixty miles to the east of it were the salt-flats of the Sabkhat Mutti, which, starting on the coast, run southward into the desert. AI Auf had once told me that camels were sometimes inextricably bogged in the Sabkhat Mutti after rain, but that they would never be engulfed as in the Umm al Samim.

I told the others that I could take them as far as Sabkhat Mutti, but that I neither knew whether I could find Dhiby well nor whether its water would be drinkable. I vaguely remembered Hamad telling me the year before, when we were in Dhafara, that all the water near the Sabkhat Mutti was brackish. However, Muhammad said that if I could guide as far as the Sabkhat Mutti he could then guide us to Abu Dhabi. I was doubtful about this, but we had to go on, since we should starve if we stayed where we were. The others reassured me by saying that we were certain to encounter some of the Murra before we got to the Sabkhat Mutti.

We decided to fill the ten water-skins which we had with us. This would mean that our baggage camels would again be heavily loaded, but we were quite prepared to sacrifice them in order to save our riding camels and ourselves. Three of them and Muhammad’s mount had developed deep, evil-smelling ulcers on their humps and withers, where the saddle-swellings had burst and the skin sloughed away. Amair cut off lumps of mortifying fat and flesh, which he said it was better to remove.
They paid little heed to this operation, so I hoped it did not hurt them too much. My companions were always prepared to endure discomfort and even hardship to save their camels, but inevitably the hardness of their lives made them callous to all pain. Desert people can be as callous about their own sufferings as they are about the sufferings of others and of animals. I remember I once hired a camel in Tibesti. Its owner was to come with me on foot, but as we started I noticed that he was limping. I asked him what was the matter and he showed me his bare feet. He had worn through the soles on a recent journey to Kufra and was now walking on the raw flesh. The mere thought of his pain made me feel sick, and yet, because he needed the money, he proposed to walk across the mountains. But if Arabs are callous they are never deliberately cruel. It would have been inconceivable to my companions that anyone could derive pleasure from inflicting pain. Although, to avenge a death, any of them would have knifed an unarmed herdsboy, not one of them would ever have tortured him. Many of the R.A.F. stationed at Aden believed that they would be castrated by Arabs if they came down in the desert, but I am convinced that no Arab tribesman would do this; the very idea would revolt him. Once when I was telling my companions about the Danakil, I mentioned that they castrated the men they had killed. They were really shocked, and Amair said disgustedly, ‘They must be animals; no human being would do a thing like that.’