After Auda, Mohammed el Dheilan is the chief figure of the Abu Tayi. He is taller than his cousin and massively built; a square-headed thoughtful man of forty-five, with a melancholy humor and a kind heart carefully concealed beneath it. He acts as master of ceremonies for the Abu Tayi, is Auda’s right-hand man, and frequently appears as his spokesman. Mohammed is greedy, richer than Auda, deeper and more calculating. Allah has endowed him with the eloquence of an Arabian Demosthenes; his tribesmen address him as “Father of Eloquence.” In a tribal council he can always be relied upon to persuade his audience to accept his views. He can wield a sword right lustily too, and is “a drinker of the milk of war” second only in prowess to the mighty Auda.

Zaal Ion Motlog is Auda’s nephew. He is twenty-five, something of a dandy, with polished teeth, carefully curled mustache, and a trimmed and pointed beard. He, too, is greedy and sharp-witted but without Mohammed’s mentality. Auda has been training him for years as chief scout to the tribe, so that he is a most daring and acceptable commander in a ghazu.

Nuri Shalaan, emir of Jauf, is not such a picturesque character as his friend and kinsman, Auda Abu Tayi, but as ruler of the Rualla Anazeh tribe, two hundred thousand strong, the largest single tribe in the desert, occupying nearly all the territory between Damascus and Bagdad, he is one of the great men of Arabia. His friendship was most vital to Hussein and Lawrence in the taking of Deraa and Damascus, and might have been of tremendous weight to Feisal now that he has been placed on the throne of Mesopotamia had he not sold himself to the French in Syria in 1919, after the war. Lawrence would not let Nuri declare war on the Turks until the last minute, because Nuri’s allegiance would have meant too many mouths to feed. Nuri Shalaan was the deadly enemy of Ibn Rashid, who coÖperated with the Turks, but who since the Great War has lost his portion of Arabia to Sultan Ibn Saud of Nejd. At one time Nuri Shalaan wanted an armorer. He captured Ibn Bani of Hail, Ibn Rashid’s armorer, the most skilled man of his craft in Arabia, and put him in prison with his own smith, Ibn Zarih. He gave them both forges and tools and declared that they should languish in prison until Ibn Zarih could make swords and daggers that could not be distinguished from those of Ibn Bani. They sweated and worked and the forges were kept burning until late every night, and finally, after many weeks, Ibn Zarih produced a wonderful dagger with an edge that could almost cut the wind. Nuri was satisfied; he released his two prisoners and sent Ibn Bani back to his country with rich presents. Nuri Shalaan was an old man of seventy when the Arab revolution broke out. He was always ambitious and determined to be a leader. Thirty years ago he killed his two brothers and made himself chief of the tribe. He ruled his people with a rod of iron, and they were practically the only Bedouins who obeyed orders. If they fail him he has their heads cut off; but in spite of his cruelty his followers all admire and are proud of him. Most Arab sheiks talk like magpies, but Nuri remains silent in the tribal council and settles everything with a few final clean-cut words of decision. Until the end of the war he had preferred tent life to that of all the palaces from Bagdad to the Bosporus, and kept great state in the largest black goat’s-hair tent in the desert, where sheep were slaughtered every few minutes for the endless stream of guests. He owned the best wheat land in Syria and the finest camels and horses. He is so rich he does not know how to measure his wealth.

Motlog Ibn Jemiann, sheik of the Beni Atiyeh, south of Maan, added four thousand fighting men to King Hussein’s forces. He is hard-working and brave as a lion. He helped Lawrence blow up trains near Maan and was in the thick of the fray whenever there were railway stations to be captured or any other little jobs of a particularly dangerous nature. During the scouting around Maan, two of Lawrence’s officers were trying to find an ancient Roman road in the desert. Motlog, always eager for adventure, went with them. In the deep sand their Ford careened madly from left to right and then at one point swerved so sharply that Motlog was thrown on his head. The officers jumped out of the car and ran back to pick him up and apologize to him, thinking he would be very angry. But the old sheik brushed off the sand and said ruefully, “Please don’t be offended with me; I haven’t learnt to ride one of these things yet.” He regarded riding in a motor-car as an art that had to be mastered just like riding a camel.

The Robber Harith Clan may not have been in the good graces of Hussein before the war, but their shereef, Ali Ibn Hussein, a youth of ‘nineteen, was responsible for converting nearly the whole of the Hauran to the revolt. He was the most reckless, most impertinent, and jolliest fellow in the Arabian army. The fastest runner in the desert, he could catch up with a camel in his bare feet and swing into the saddle with one hand while holding his rifle with the other. When Ali went into battle he took off all his clothing except his drawers. He said it was the cleanest way to get wounded. He had a wild sense of humor and made jokes about the king in his presence. He was one of the two shereefs in the Hedjaz who did not stand in terror of King Hussein.

The other was Shereef Shakr, a cousin of Feisal and the richest man in the Hedjaz. He was the only big shereef who plaited his hair, and, in addition, he encouraged lice in it, to show his respect for the old Bedouin proverb, “A well-populated head is a sign of a generous mind.” His home was in Mecca, but he spent most of his time in the saddle with the Bedouin tribesmen.

These are a few of the leading chieftains, in some of whom enthusiasm for Arabian nationalism had to be kindled, others cajoled by appeals to their vanity, and almost all inflamed with the zest for war on a big scale—the game they had known and played at from childhood. When they had once sworn allegiance they were as true as steel. Without their loyalty and dauntless courage and epic love of blood-curdling adventure the Arabian campaign would have been a dream on paper fabricated by an impractical young archÆologist.

In his dealings with Auda and other Arab chiefs, Lawrence found their rich sense of humor an important asset. Make an Arab laugh, and you can persuade him to do most things. Arabic is a solemn language, full of ceremony and stateliness; and Lawrence, who had an unusual knowledge of the various dialects spoken in Arabia, made the discovery that the direct translation into Arabic of ordinary colloquial English, spiced with wit, delighted his hearers. Another highly useful weapon in Colonel Lawrence’s mental armory was the faculty of mastering the unexpected with some inspired improvisation. Time and again he happened upon a desperate situation from which there was no obvious means of escape. In the space of a few seconds his alert brain would work out some seemingly fantastic but really brilliant method of dealing with the emergency.

Such an incident was one of his many adventures in the Syrian Desert. He was at the town of Azrak among the shifting sand-dunes southeast of Damascus, when a courier brought news that some Turkish spies were in a caravan of Syrian merchants which was on its way to the Arabian army supply-base at Akaba, three hundred miles to the south. He immediately decided that in order to draw the teeth of the spies he must reach Akaba either in company with the caravan or soon after its arrival. Normally the journey from Azrak to Akaba is twelve days by camel, and already the Syrian caravan had a start of nine days.

Realizing that his followers could not stand the forced pace at which he meant to travel, Lawrence took with him but one man—a half-breed Haurani—who was famous in the North Arabian Desert for his endurance. The pair were racing over the ridges between Azrak and Bair, eighty miles south of the camp from which they started, when suddenly a dozen Arabs appeared over the edge of a sand-dune and galloped their camels down the slope to cut off the strangers. As they approached, the Arabs shouted a request that Lawrence and his companion should dismount, and at the same time announced themselves as friends and members of the Jazi-Howeitat tribe. When only thirty yards away they themselves dismounted by way of encouraging the lone couple to do likewise. But Lawrence had recognized the Arabs as of the Beni-Sakr, allies of the Turks and blood-enemies of most of the Bedouin tribes that were fighting for King Hussein and Emir Feisal. It was known to the Beni-Sakr that gold passed up and down the caravan route, and they were out looking for loot.

This particular sector was the only war-time trade-route between Syria and Arabia, along which the merchants of Syria had for many months journeyed to Akaba for the purchase of Manchester cotton. Lawrence used cotton both as an aid to propaganda and as a means of getting as much gold as possible from Syria and Turkey. The Ottoman Empire needed cotton urgently, and for this reason the military authorities allowed traders to pass back and forth through the lines. When they reached Akaba. Lawrence and the Arab leaders would make converts among them by preaching Arab Nationalistic doctrines. At the same time they would collect much valuable information regarding conditions in Turkey. The merchants were also useful in smuggling down to Akaba German field-glasses which Lawrence needed for the equipment of his desert troops.

Meanwhile, the dismounted marauders of the Beni-Sakr stood on the sand and fingered their rifles expectantly, while still passing friendly greetings. Of a sudden Lawrence grinned so genially that they became mystified.

“Come near; I want to whisper something to you,” he said to their leader. Then bending down from the saddle of his camel he asked, “Do you know what your name is?”

The sheik looked speechless and rather amazed. Lawrence continued, “I think it must be ‘Terrace’ (Procurer)!”

This is the most terrible insult that one can offer a Bedouin. The Beni-Sakr leader was dumfounded and rather nervous. He could not understand how an ordinary traveler would dare to say such a thing to him in the open desert when numbers and arms were on his side. Before the sheik had time to recover himself, Lawrence remarked pleasantly:

“May Allah give you peace!”

Quietly telling the Haurani to come along, he swung off across the sand. The men of Beni-Sakr remained half bewildered until the pair had ridden about a hundred yards. Then they recovered their senses and began shooting; but the blond Prince of Mecca galloped over the nearest ridge and escaped. Bullets, by the way, have but little immediate effect on a camel that is traveling at twenty miles an hour.

Both Lawrence and his Haurani nearly killed their camels during the journey. They rode on an average of twenty-two hours a day. From dawn to setting sun they crossed the burning sands, only stopping then for a moment’s rest for their camels. When they reached Auda Abu Tayi’s country, east of the southern end of the Dead Sea, they exchanged their mounts for fresh beasts. They covered the whole distance of three hundred miles in just three days, a record for fast camel trekking that should stand for many years.

This weird adventure was but one of a hundred that befell Lawrence. I heard of another which explains why he always carried a Colt revolver of an early frontier model.

Some years ago, while wandering in Asia Minor, near Marash, a fever came upon him, and he made for Birgik, the nearest village. He happened to meet a Turkoman. They are a semi-nomadic crowd of Mongol descent, men with crooked eyes and faces that look as though they had been modeled in butter and then left out in the sun. He was not quite sure of his directions and asked the Turkoman to point out the way. The reply was, “Right across those low hills to the left.” As Lawrence turned away from him the Mongol sprang on his back, and they had a bit of a dog-fight on the ground for a few minutes. But Lawrence had walked more than a thousand miles and, apart from the fever, was nearly done up. Soon he found himself underneath.

“He sat on my stomach, pulled out my colt,” said Lawrence, “pressed it to my temple, and pulled the trigger many times. But the safety-catch was on. The Turkoman was a primitive fellow and knew very little about revolver mechanism. He threw the weapon away in disgust and proceeded to pound my head with a rock until I was no longer interested. After taking everything I had, he made off. I went to the village and got the inhabitants to help me chase the scoundrel. We caught him and made him disgorge the things he’d relieved me of. Since then I’ve always had a profound respect for a Colt, and have never been without one.”