WE -RIDE, RIDE, two men on two dromedaries, the sun flames over our heads, everything is shimmer and glimmer and swimming light. Reddish and orange-colored dunes, dunes behind dunes beyond dunes, loneliness and burning silence, and two men on two dromedaries in that swinging gait which makes you sleepy, so that you forget the day, the sun, the hot wind and the long way. Tufts of yellow grass grow sparsely on the crests of the dunes, and here and there gnarled hamdh bushes wind over the sand like giant snakes. Sleepy have become the senses, you are rocking in the saddle, you perceive hardly anything beyond the crunching of the sand under the camels' soles and the rub of the saddle-peg against the crook of your knee. Your face is wrapped in your head cloth for protection against sun and wind; and you feel as if you were carrying your own loneliness, like a tangible substance, across it, right across it ... to the wells of Tayma . . . to the dark wells of Tayma .that give water to him that is thirsty ...
'... right across the Nufud to Tayma ...' I hear a voice, and do not know whether it is a dream-voice or the voice of my companion".
'Didst thou say something, Zayd?'
'I was saying,' replies my companion, 'that not many people would venture right across the Nufud just to see the wells of Tayma...'
ZAYD AND I ARE returning from Qasr Athaymin on the Najd-Iraq frontier where I went at the request of King Ibn Saud. Having accomplished my mission and with plenty of leisure time at my disposal, I decided to visit the remote, ancient oasis of Tayma, nearly two hundred miles to the southwest: the Tema of the Old Testament of which Isaiah said, 'The inhabitants of the land of Tema brought water to him that was thirsty.' The abundance of Tayma's water, its huge wells which have no like in all Arabia, made it in pre-Islamic days a great centre of caravan trade and a seat of early Arabian culture. I have long wanted to see it; and so, disregarding the circuitous caravan routes, we struck, from Qasr-Athaymin, right into the heart of the Great Nufud, the reddish sand desert that stretches itself so mightily between the highlands of Central Arabia and the Syrian Desert. There is no track and no path in this part of the tremendous wasteland. The wind sees to it that no footstep 'Of man or animal leaves a lasting trace in the soft, yielding sand and that no landmark stands out for long to guide the wayfarer's eye. Under the strokes of the wind the dunes incessantly change their outlines, flowing in a slow, imperceptible movement from form to form, hills ebbing into valleys and valleys growing into new hills dotted with dry, lifeless grass that faintly rustles in the wind and is bitter as ashes even to a camel's mouth.
Although I have crossed this desert many times in many directions, I would not trust myself to find my way through it unaided, and therefore I am glad to have Zayd with me. This country here is his homeland: he belongs to the tribe of Shammar, who live on the southern and eastern fringes of the Great Nufud and, when the heavy winter rains suddenly transform the sand dunes into lush meadows, graze their camels in its midst for a few months of the year. The moods of the desert are in Zayd's blood, and his heart beats with them.
Zayd is probably the handsomest man I have ever known: broad of forehead and slim of body, middle-sized, fine-boned, and full of wiry strength. Over the narrow wheat-colored face with its strongly moulded cheekbones and the severe and at the same time sensual mouth lies that expectant gravity which is so characteristic of the desert Arab -dignity and self-composure wedded to intimate sweetness. He is a felicitous combination of purest beduin stock and Najdi town life, having preserved within himself the beduin's sureness of instinct without the beduin's emotional liability, and acquired the practical wisdom of the townsman without falling prey to his worldly sophistication. He, like myself, enjoys adventure without running after it. Since his earliest youth his life has been filled with incident and excitement: as a boyish trooper in the irregular camel corps levied by the Turkish government for its campaign in the Sinai Peninsula during the Great War; defender of his Shammar homeland against Ibn Saud; arms-smuggler in the Persian Gulf; tempestuous lover of many women in many parts of the Arab world (all of them, of course, legitimately married to him at one time or another, and then as legitimately divorced); horse trader in Egypt; soldier of fortune in Iraq; and lastly, for nearly five years, my companion in Arabia.
And now, in this late summer of 1932, we ride together, as so often in the past, winding our lonesome way between dunes, stopping at one or another of the widely spaced wells and resting at night under the stars; the eternal swish-swish of the animals' feet over the hot sand; sometimes, during the march, Zayd's husky voice chanting in rhythm with the camels' tread; night camps, cooking coffee and rice and occasional wild game; the cool sweep of the wind over our bodies as we lie at night on the sand; sunrise over sand dunes, red and violently bursting like fireworks; and sometimes, like today, the miracle of life awaking in a plant that has been watered by chance.
We had stopped for our noon prayer. As I washed my hands, face and feet from a water skin, a few drops spilled over a dried up tuft of grass at my feet, a miserable little plant, yellow and withered and lifeless under the harsh rays of the sun. But as the water trickled over it, a shiver went through the shriveled blades, and I saw how they slowly, tremblingly, unfolded. A few more drops, and the little blades moved and curled and then straightened themselves slowly, hesitantly, tremblingly ... I held my breath as I poured more water over the grass tuft. It moved more quickly, more violently, as if some hidden force were pushing it out of its dream of death. Its blades -what a 'delight to behold! -contracted and expanded like the arms of a starfish, seemingly overwhelmed by a shy but irrepressible delirium, a real little orgy of sensual joy: and thus life re-entered victoriously what a moment ago had been as dead, entered it visibly, passionately, overpowering and beyond understanding in its majesty.
Life in its majesty ... you always feel it in the desert. Because it is so difficult to keep and so hard, it is always like a gift, a treasure, and a surprise. For the desert is always surprising, even though you may have known it for years. Sometimes, when you think you can see it in all its rigidity and emptiness, it awakens from its dream, sends forth its breath -and tender, pale-green grass stands suddenly where only yesterday there was nothing but sand and splintery pebbles. It sends forth its breath again and a flock of small birds flutters through the air -from where? Where to? -Slim-bodied, long-winged, emerald-green; or a swarm of locusts rises up above the earth with a rush and a zoom, grey and grim and endless like a horde of hungry warriors...
Life in its majesty: majesty of sparseness, always surprising:
Herein lies the whole nameless scent of Arabia, of sand deserts like this one, and of the many other changing landscapes.
Sometimes it is lava ground, black and jagged; sometimes dunes without end; sometimes a wadi between rocky hills. Covered with thorn bushes out of which a startled hare jumps across your way; sometimes loose sand-with tracks of gazelles and a few fire-blackened stones over which long-forgotten wayfarers cooked their food in long-forgotten days; sometimes a village beneath palm trees, and the wooden wheels over the wells make music and sing to you without stopping; sometimes a well in the midst of a desert valley, with beduin herdsmen bustling around it to water their thirsty sheep and camels -they chant in chorus while the water is drawn up in large leather buckets and poured with a rush into leather troughs to the delight of the excited animals. Then again, there is loneliness in steppes overcome by a sun without mercy; patches of hard, yellow grass and leafy bushes that crawl over the ground with snaky branches offer welcome pasture to your dromedaries; a solitary acacia tree spreads its branches wide against the steel-blue sky; from between earth mounds and stones appears, eyes darting right and left, and then vanishes like a ghost, the gold-skinned lizard which, they say, never drinks water. In a hollow stand black tents of goat hair; a herd of camels is being driven homeward through the afternoon, the herdsmen ride on barebacked young camels, and when they call their animals the silence of the land sucks in their voices and swallows them without echo.
Sometimes you see glimmering shadows far on the horizon: are they clouds? They float low, frequently changing their color and position, now resembling grey-brown mountains -but in the air, somewhat above the horizon -and now, for all the world to see, shady groves of stone pines: but -in the air. And when they come down lower and change into lakes and flowing rivers which quaveringly reflect the mountains and the trees in their inviting waters, you suddenly recognize them for what they are: blandishment of the jinns, the mirage that has so often led travelers to false hopes and so to perdition: and your hand goes involuntarily toward the water skin at your saddle...
And there are nights full of other dangers, when the tribes are in warlike commotion and the traveler does not light fire while camping so as not to be seen from the distance, and sits wide awake through long hours, his rifle between the knees. And those days of peace, when after a long, lonely wandering you meet a caravan and listen in the evening to the talk of the grave, sunburned men around the campfire: they talk of the simple, great things of life and death, of hunger and satiety, of pride and love and hatred, of the lust of the flesh and its appeasement, of wars, of the palm groves in the distant home village -and you never hear idle babbling: for one cannot babble in the desert ...
And you feel the call of life in the days of thirst, when the tongue sticks to the palate like a piece of dry wood and the horizon sends no deliverance but offers flaming samum wind and whirling sand instead. And in yet different days, when you are a guest in beduin tents and the men bring you bowls full of milk-the milk of fat she-camels at the beginning of spring, when after strong rainfalls the steppes and dunes are green as a garden and the animals' udders heavy and round; from a comer of the tent you can hear the women laugh while they cook a sheep in your honor over an open fire.
Like red metal the sun disappears behind hills; higher than anywhere else in the world is the starry sky at night, deep and dreamless your sleep under the stars; pale-grey and cool dawn the mornings. Cold are the nights in winter, biting winds flap against the campfire around which you and your companions huddle together in search of warmth; burning the days in summer when you ride, ride on your rocking dromedary through endless hours, your face muffled in your head cloth to protect it from the searing wind, your senses lulled into sleepiness, while high above you in the noon heat a bird of prey draws its circles...
The afternoon glides slowly past us with its dunes, and its silence, and its loneliness.
Moor. a while, the loneliness is broken by a group of beduins who cross our path-four or five men and two women-mounted on dromedaries, with a beast of burden carrying a folded black tent, cooking-pots and other utensils of nomad life, with a couple of children perched on top of it all. As they come upon us, they rein in their animals:
'Peace be with you.'
And we answer: 'And with you be peace and the grace of God.' 'What is your destination, O wayfarers?' 'Tayma, insha-Allah:' 'And whence come you?' 'From Qasr Athaymin, brothers,' I reply; and then there is silence. One of them, a gaunt, elderly man with a sharp face and a black, pointed beard, is obviously the leader; his glance also is black and pointed when, passing over Zayd, it rests suspiciously on me, the stranger of light complexion who has so unexpectedly appeared from nowhere in this pathless wilderness; a stranger who says he is coming from the direction of British-held Iraq, and might well be (I can almost read Sharp-Face's thought) an infidel surreptitiously entering the land of the Arabs. The old man's hand plays, as if in perplexity, with the pommel of his saddle while his people, now loosely grouped around us, obviously wait for him to speak. After a few moments, he seems to be unable to bear the silence any longer, and he asks me:
'Of which Arabs art thou?' -meaning to what tribe or region I belong. But even before I am able to reply, his features light up in a sudden smile of recognition:
'Oh, I know thee now! I have seen thee with Abd al-Aziz! But that was long ago -four long years ago...'
And he stretches his hand in friendliness toward me and recalls the time when I was living in the royal castle at Riyadh and he came there in the retinue of a Shammar chieftain to pay the respects of the tribe to Ibn Saud, whom the beduins always call by his first name, Abd al-Aziz, without any formal, honorific title: for in their free humanity they See only a man in the King, to be honored, no doubt, but not beyond the deserts of man. And so we go on for a while reminiscing, speaking of this man and that, exchanging anecdotes about Riyadh, in and around which up to a thousand guests live daily off the King's bounty, receiving on departure presents that vary in accordance with each man's status -from a handful of silver coins or an abaya to the heavy purses of golden sovereigns, horses or dromedaries which he frequently distributes among the chieftains.
But the King's generosity is not so much a matter of the purse as of the heart. Perhaps more than anything else, it is his warmth of feeling that makes the people around him, not excepting myself, love him.
In all my years in Arabia, Ibn Saud's friendship has lain like a warm shimmer over my life.
He calls me his friend, although he is a king and I a mere journalist. And I call him my friend -not merely because throughout the years that I have lived in his realm he has shown me much friendliness, for that he shows to many men: I call him my friend because on occasion he opens his innermost thoughts to me as he opens his purse to so many others. I love to call him my friend, for, despite all his faults -and there are not a few of them -he is an exceedingly good man. Not just 'kindhearted': for kindness of heart can sometimes be a cheap thing. As you would admiringly say of an old Damascene blade that it is a 'good' weapon because it has all the qualities you could demand from a weapon of its kind: thus do I consider Ibn Saud a good man. He is rounded within himself and always follows his own path; and if he often errs in his actions, it is because he never tries to be anything but himself.
My FIRST MEETING with King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud took place at Mecca early in 1927, a few months after my conversion to Islam.
The recent sudden death of my wife, who had accompanied me on this, my first, pilgrimage to Mecca, had made me bitter and unsocial. I was desperately striving to clamber out of darkness and utter desolation. Most of my time was spent in my lodgings; I had contact with only a few people, and for weeks I avoided even the customary courtesy call on the King. Then one day, while visiting one of Ibn Saud's foreign guests-it was, I remember, Hajji Agos Salim of Indonesia -I was informed that by order of the King my name had been entered on his guest list! He seemed to have been apprised of the reason of my reserve and to accept it with silent understanding. And so, a guest who had never yet seen the face of his host, I moved into a beautiful house at the southern end of Mecca near the rocky gorge through which the way to Yemen passes. From the terrace I could see a large part of the city: the minarets of the Great Mosque, the thousands of white cubes of houses with roof balustrades of colored bricks, and the dead desert hills domed by skies that glared like liquid metal.
Still, I might have gone on postponing my call on the King had it not been for a chance encounter with Amir Faysal, his second son, in a library under the arcades of the Great Mosque. It was pleasant to sit in that long, narrow room surrounded by old Arabic, Persian and Turkish folios; its stillness and darkness filled me with peace. One day, however, the usual silence was broken by the swishing entry of a group of men preceded by armed bodyguards: it was Amir Faysal with his retinue passing through the library on his way to the Kaaba. He was tall and thin and of a dignity far beyond his twenty-two years and his beardless face. In spite of his youth, he had been given the important position of viceroy of the Hijaz after his father's conquest of the country two years earlier (his elder brother, Crown Prince Saud, was viceroy of Najd, while the King himself spent half the year in Mecca, the capital of the Hijaz, and the other half in the Najdi capital, Riyadh).
The librarian, a young Meccan scholar with whom I had been friendly for some time, introduced me to the Prince. He shook hands with me; and when I bowed to him, he lightly tipped my head back with his fingers and his face lit up in a warm smile.
'We people of Najd do not believe that man should bow before man; he should bow only before God .in prayer.'
He seemed to be kind, dreamy and a little reserved and shy an impression which was confirmed during the later years of our acquaintance. His air of nobility was not assumed; it seemed to glow from within. When we spoke to each other on that day in the library, I suddenly felt a strong desire to meet the father of this son.
'The King would be happy to see thee,' said Amir Faysal.
'Why dost thou shun him?'
And the next morning the amir's secretary fetched me in an automobile and took me to the King's palace. We passed through the bazaar street of Al-Maala, slowly making our way through a noisy throng of camels, beduins and auctioneers selling all kinds of beduin wares -camel-saddles, abayas, carpets, water skins, silver-inlaid swords, tents and brass coffeepots then through a wider, quieter and more open road, and finally reached the huge house in which the King resided. Many saddled camels filled the open space before it, and a number of armed slaves and retainers lounged about the entrance stairway. I was made to wait in a spacious, pillared room whose floor was laid with inexpensive carpets. Broad, khaki-covered divans ran along the walls, and green leaves could be seen through the windows: the beginnings of a garden which was being grown with great difficulty out of the arid soil of Mecca. A black slave appeared.
'The King invites thee.'
I entered a room like the one I had just left, except that it was rather smaller and lighter, one side opening fully onto the garden. Rich Persian carpets covered the floor; in a bay window overlooking the garden the King sat cross-legged on a divan; at his feet on the floor a secretary was taking dictation. When I entered, the King rose, extended both hands and said:
'Ahlan wa-sahlan' -'Family and plain' -which means, 'You have now arrived within your family and may your foot tread on an easy plain': the most ancient and most gracious of Arabian expressions of welcome.
For just a second I was able to gaze in wonderment at Ibn Saud's gigantic height. When (by then aware of the Najdi custom) I lightly kissed the tip of his nose and his forehead, I had to stand on my toes despite my six feet, while he had to bend his head downward. Then, with an apologetic gesture in the direction of the secretary, he sat down, pulling me to his side on the divan.
'Just a minute, the letter is nearly finished.'
While he quietly continued to dictate, he also opened a conversation with me, never confusing the two themes. After a few formal sentences, I handed him a letter of introduction. He read it -which meant doing three things at once -and then, without interrupting his dictation or his inquiry after my welfare, called for coffee.
By that time I had had an opportunity to observe him more closely. He was so well proportioned that his huge size -he must have been at least six and a half feet -became apparent only when he stood. His face, framed in the traditional red-and-white checked kufiyya and topped by a gold-threaded igal, was strikingly virile. He wore his beard and moustache clipped short in Najdi fashion; his forehead was broad, his nose strong and aquiline, and his full mouth appeared at times almost feminine, but without being soft, in its sensual tenderness. While he spoke, his features were enlivened by unusual mobility, but in repose his face was somehow sad, as if withdrawn in inner loneliness; the deep setting of his eyes may have had something to do with this. The superb beauty of his face was slightly marred by the vague expression of his left eye, in which a white film was discernible. In later times I learned the story of this affliction, which most people unknowingly attributed to natural causes. In reality, however, it had occurred under tragic circumstances.
Some years earlier, one of his wives, at the instigation of the rival dynasty of Ibn Rashid, had put poison into his incense vessel -a little brazier used at ceremonial gatherings in Najd -with the obvious intention of killing him. As usual, the brazier was handed first to the King before being passed around among his guests. On inhaling the first whiff, Ibn Saud immediately sensed that there was something wrong with the incense and dashed the vessel to the ground. His alertness saved his life, but not before his left eye had been affected and partially blinded. But instead of avenging himself on the faithless woman, as many another potentate in his position would surely have done, he forgave her -for he was convinced that she had been the victim of insuperable influences at the hands of her family, who were related to the House of Ibn Rashid. He merely divorced her and sent her back, richly endowed with gold and gifts, to her home at Hail.
AFTER THAT FIRST MEETING, the King sent for me almost daily. One morning I went to him with the intention of asking, without much hope of its being granted, permission to travel into the interior of the country, for Ibn Saud did not, as a rule, allow foreigners to visit Najd. Nevertheless, I was about to bring this matter up when suddenly the King shot a brief, sharp glance in my direction -a glance which seemed to penetrate to my unspoken thoughts -smiled, and said:
'Wilt thou not, 0 Muhammad, come with us to Najd and stay for a few months at Riyadh l'
I was dumbfounded, and so, obviously, were the other people present. Such a spontaneous invitation to a stranger was almost unheard of.
He went on; 'I would like thee to travel by motorcar with me next month.'
I took a deep breath and answered: 'May God lengthen thy life, O Imam, but what use would that be to me1 What good would it do me to whizz in five or six days from Mecca to Riyadh without having seen anything of thy country beyond the desert, some sand dunes and perhaps, somewhere on the horizon, people like shadows ... If thou hast no objection, a dromedary would suit me better, 0 Long-of-Age, than all thy cars together.'
Ibn Saud laughed: 'Art thou thus tempted to look into the eyes of my beduins? I must warn thee beforehand: they are backward people, and my Najd is a desert land without charms, and the camel-saddle will be hard and the food dreary on the journey -nothing but rice and dates and occasionally meat. But so be it. If thou hast set thy heart on it, thou shalt ride. And, after all, it may well be that thou wilt not regret having come to know my people: they are poor, they know nothing and are nothing -but their hearts are fun of good faith.'
And some weeks later, equipped by the King with dromedaries, provisions, a tent and a guide, I set out by a roundabout route to Riyadh, which I reached after two months. That was my first journey into the interior of Arabia; the first of many: for the few months of which the King had spoken grew into years how easily they grew into years! -spent not only in Riyadh but in almost every part of Arabia. And the saddle is hard no longer...
'MA Y GOD LENGTHEN the life of Abd al-Aziz,' says Sharp Face. 'He loves the badu and the badu love him.'
And why should they not 1 -I ask myself: The King's open handedness toward the beduins of Najd has become a standing feature of his administration; not a very admirable feature, perhaps, for the regular gifts of money which Ibn Saud distributes among the tribal chieftains and their followers have made them so dependent on his largesse that they are beginning to lose all incentive to improve their living conditions by their own endeavours and are gradually lapsing into the status of dole-receivers, content to remain ignorant and indolent.
Throughout my conversation with Sharp-Face, Zayd seems impatient. While he talks with one of the men, his eyes frequently rest on me, as if to remind me that there is a long way before us and that reminiscences and reflections do not quicken the camels' pace. We part. The Shammar beduins ride away toward the east and soon disappear behind dunes. From where we stand, we can hear one of them intone a nomad chant, such as a camel-rider sings to spur his beast and to break the monotony of his ride; and as Zayd and I resume our westward course toward far-off Tayma, the melody gradually fades away, and silence returns.
'LOOKTHERE!' Zayd's voice breaks through the silence, 'a hare t' I tum my eyes to the bundle of grey fur that has leaped out of a clump of bushes, while Zayd slides down from his saddle, unslinging the wooden mace that hangs on the pommel. He bounds after the hare and swings the mace over his head for the throw; but just as he is about to hurl it, he catches his foot in a hamdh root, falls flat on his face -and the hare disappears from sight.
'There goes a good supper,' I laugh as he picks himself up, ruefully eyeing the mace in his hand.' But mind it not, Zayd: that hare was obviously not our portion...'
'No, it was not,' he replies, somewhat absent-mindedly; and then I see that he is limping painfully.
'Didst thou hurt thyself, Zayd?'
'Oh, it is nothing. I only twisted my ankle. It will get better in a little while.'
But it does not get better. After another hour in the saddle I can see beads of perspiration on Zayd's face; and when I take a look at his foot, I find that the ankle has been badly sprained and is angrily swollen.
'There is no use going on like this, Zayd. Let us make camp here; a night's rest will restore thee.'
ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT Zayd seems to be restless with pain. He awakens long before dawn, and his sudden movement stirs me also from my uneasy sleep.
'I see only one camel,' he says: and when we look around, we discover that one of the beasts -Zayd's -has indeed disappeared. Zayd wants to set out on mine to search for it, but his injured foot makes it difficult for him even to stand, not to speak of walking and mounting and dismounting.
'Thou rest, Zayd, and I shall go instead; it won't be difficult to find my way back by retracing my own tracks.'
And in the breaking dawn I ride away, following the tracks of the lost dromedary which wind across the sand valley and disappear behind the dunes.
I ride for one hour, and another, and a third: but the tracks of the strayed animal go on and on, as if it had pursued a deliberate course. The forenoon is well advanced when I stop for a short halt, dismount, eat a few dates and drink from the small water skin attached to my saddle. The sun stands high, but somehow it has lost its glare. Dun-colored clouds, unusual at this time of year, float motionless under the sky; a strangely thick, heavy air envelops the desert and softens the outlines of the dunes beyond their usual softness.
An eerie stir over the summit of the high sand hill in front of me catches my eye -is it an animal? The lost camel perhaps? But when I look more carefully, I see that the movement is not above but in the dune crest itself: the crest is moving, ever so slightly, ripplingly, forward -and then it seems to trickle down the slope toward me like the crest of a slowly breaking wave. A murky redness creeps up the sky from behind the dune; under this redness its contours lose their sharness and become blurred, as if a veil had suddenly been drawn across; and a reddish twilight begins to spread rapidly over the desert. A cloud of sand whirls against my face and around me, and all at once the wind begins to roar from all directions, crisscrossing the valley with powerful blasts. The trickling movement of the first hilltop has been taken up by all the sand hills within sight. In a matter of minutes the sky darkens to a deep, rust-brown hue and the air is filled with swirling sand dust which, like a reddish fog, obscures the sun and the day. This is a sandstorm, and no mistake.
My crouching dromedary, terrified, wants to rise. I pull it down by the halter, struggling to keep myself upright in the wind that has now assumed the force of a gale, and manage to hobble the animal's forelegs and, to make it more secure, a hind leg as well. Then I throw myself down on the ground and draw my abaya over my head. I press my face against the camel's armpit so as not to be choked by the flying sand. I feel the animal press its muzzle against my shoulder, no doubt for the same reason. I can feel the sand being heaped upon me from the side where I am unprotected by the dromedary's body, and have to shift from time to time to avoid being buried.
I am not unduly worried, for it is not the first time that I have been surprised by a sandstorm in the desert. Lying thus on the ground, tightly wrapped in my abaya, I can do nothing but wait for the storm to abate and listen to the roar of the wind and the flapping of my cloak -flapping like a loose sail-no, like a banner in the wind -like the flapping of tribal banners carried on high poles by a beduin army on the march: just as they flapped and fluttered nearly five years ago over the host of Najdi beduin riders -thousands of them, and I among them -returning from Arafat to Mecca after the pilgrimage. It was my second pilgrimage. I had spent one year in the interior of the Peninsula and had managed to return to Mecca just in time to take part in the congregation of pilgrims on the Plain of Arafat, to the east of the Holy City; and on the way back from Arafat I found myself in the midst of a multitude of white-garbed Najdi beduins, riding in a tense gallop over the dusty plain -a sea of white-garbed men on honey-yellow, golden-brown and red-brown dromedaries-a roaring, earth-shaking gallop of thousands of dromedaries pushing forward like an irresistible wave -the tribal banners roaring in the wind and the tribal cries with which the men announced their various tribes and the warlike deeds of their ancestors surging in waves over each detachment: for to the men of Najd, men of the Central Arabian highlands, war and pilgrimage spring from the same source ... And the numberless pilgrims from other lands -from Egypt and India and North Africa and Java-unaccustomed to such wild abandon, scattered in panic before our approach: for nobody could have survived who stood in the way of the thundering host -just as instantaneous death would have been the portion of a rider who fell from the saddle in the midst of the thousands and thousands of galloping mounts.
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