Dreamers of the Day (20 page)

The atmosphere was festive and may have been fueled by something other than tea. Already giddy, I shook my head and smiled a demurral at the dour and thin-faced native who presented a brass tray offering me one of the little cups.

A few yards away stood several large male pack camels. Laden with equipment boxes, wicker lunch baskets, and rolled carpets, the animals produced a constant bizarre gargling noise unlike anything I’d ever heard before. The smaller riding camels crouched nearby with ropes wrapped around their folded knees to prevent them getting to their feet. Dozing with long-lashed eyes half-closed, they seemed serenely indifferent to the bustle around them. Their only movement was to lower their heads now and then to rub their chins against the ground.

Seeing me, Sergeant Thompson trudged through the sand, looking profoundly doubtful about this mode of transportation. “Tried to talk him into driving to Sakhara,” Thompson said, glowering at Winston, who’d gone off to speak with Lawrence. “He’s like a child. ‘Oh, goody! Camels!’ They’re picturesque from a distance, but when you get up close? Filthy, vile, stinking brutes.”

“Attar of camel is unlikely to gain commercial acceptance,” I agreed, but really? I was as thrilled as Winston by the prospect of riding one.

Each of us was led to a mount and informed of the animal’s name. Mine was Dahabeah, an austere and self-contained individual whose six-foot-long neck was slung with colorful woven lavalieres that jingled with tiny silver bells. Two camel boys gripped her tasseled halter on either side and looked at me expectantly.

Dahabeah herself snaked her head out of reach when I tried to make friends by scratching behind her ears. One side of her split upper lip curled in distaste.
What do you take me for?
she seemed to ask.
Some sort of horse?
And then she spat.

A week—a day, an hour—earlier, I would have shrunk from her, convinced of my own inadequacy. Instead, I laughed, transformed by a kiss and a man who had pronounced me handsome, accomplished, and brave.

“Hold here, madams,” the nearer boy instructed. “Yes, and sit, so! Very fine, madams! Very comfortable, yes?”

“Comfortable” was not the word that came to mind, but I smiled anyway and looked around to see how the others were doing. The ladies and most of the men sat sidesaddle. Winston, by contrast, had arranged himself astride, his thick legs gripping at a substantial hump while his feet, in street shoes and spats, dangled. This did not promise to be an effective tactic; Colonel Lawrence was resisting an anticipatory grin. He himself appeared to be sitting at home in an easy chair: legs crossed at the ankles, feet resting on his camel’s left shoulder as though it were a hassock.

I settled myself the same way and tugged my skirt down to cover myself a bit better. “Hold tight, madams!” the bigger boy warned and slipped the tether from Dahabeah’s knees.

Released, she lurched and rocked upright, back legs rising high before her forelegs straightened. All around me, women gave little shrieks that carried far in the still, cool air. Even a few of the men shouted their surprise. Miss Bell rolled her eyes at our amateur attempts to regain balance, but Lawrence laughed and traded amused commentary with a number of marvelously robed Arab dignitaries, who were evidently going to accompany us on horseback.

Lady Cox immediately demanded to be let down. “I am far too old and spoiled for this nonsense. I shall go by auto and meet you there.”

Beside me, Sergeant Thompson looked as though he’d have joined her, had the humiliation of such a decision been less than mortal. He confined himself to muttering his own peculiar dialect of “French” while his camel jacked herself upright. The motion very nearly pitched Thompson onto the ground. It would have been quite a fall, Thompson himself being an exceedingly tall man perched at a great height on a camel much larger than my own.

“Nothing to grab but sky,” he snarled, fear making him angry. “How the hell do you steer this thing?”

“Pull this, I think!” I held up a light cord that ran from the forward pommel to the camel’s right nostril.

Thompson tugged on his, but the effect was not as hoped. Rather than circling clockwise, the animal swiveled her head around to look directly back at him with an expression so alarming, the policeman felt for his pistol by reflex.

In the midst of all this European incompetence, the Arab horsemen called out advice, which Lawrence translated, sometimes. “The camels know where they’re going,” he said. “Relax and give them their heads.”

That was easier said than done, of course, but after a certain amount of circling and roaring, the lead animal finally plodded off toward the pyramids on padded feet the size of dinner plates. Our caravan soon strung out into a line, just as one sees in storybook illustrations. The pace was not torrid, which was just as well, for the gait of a camel is complex and disagreeable. Each advance of four linear feet entailed a set of jerks, twists, and contortions. Up and down, side to side—those are familiar to anyone who has ridden a horse. A camel adds forward and back to the dance.

All of us who were new to the experience concentrated mightily on keeping our seats while trying to discover some predictable pattern to the herky-jerky rhythm. After a few minutes, I was confident enough to raise my eyes and joke to Sergeant Thompson, “I feel like a cooked noodle!”

Thompson made no reply, in English or in French, for his entire attention had shifted from his own plight to that of Mr. Churchill. I followed Thompson’s horrified gaze some twenty yards ahead. There, with stately slowness, His Britannic Majesty’s secretary for air and the colonies was, by degrees, tipping sideways off his mount. Topcoat billowing, round arms waving frantically, Winston clawed at the saddle with increasing desperation, searching for some purchase. At last he managed to get a grip, but not a reprieve. The saddle itself was only resting momentarily on the camel’s flank, and with each of the camel’s six-element strides it ticked…ever…downward.

When the inevitable moment of separation came, Winston looked resigned to it, almost. I wish I could say that we were kind when he thudded onto the ground, but alas! Even his adoring wife, Clementine, was convulsed, and every attempt to stifle our laughter made things worse.

“The animal must be an Egyptian nationalist,” someone shouted.

“Offer her a caliphate!” someone else called out.

To Thompson’s alarm, our Arab escorts wheeled their steeds around and raced toward Winston, who still lay glaring upward from the ground. “Christ!” Thompson cried. “They’ll crush him, and on my watch!” But no—these were superbly skilled riders on beautifully trained Arabian horses. With a splendid spray of fine yellow sand, they pulled up just in time and leapt gallantly to the ground, shouting their distress.

“They plead with the great man,” Lawrence translated, straight-faced, “that he will, by God, exchange mounts with one of them, and not hazard himself again by sailing on a ship of the desert!”

Growling, Winston rolled onto his hands and knees, stood himself up, brushed himself off, and looked around for his hat. “Tell them I started on a camel,” he ordered Lawrence, “and I’ll finish on a camel!” To the rest of us, he declared, “I’ll have you know I ranked fourth in my class of cavalry candidates at Sandhurst.”

“Yes, and I’m quite sure your animal was aware of that,” Lawrence soothed as he slid lightly off his own mount and came to the side of Winston’s. “When she realized she’d have the honor of carrying you”—Lawrence heaved the heavy saddle upward—“naturally, she puffed up with pride. Then she felt how badly you rode and decided there must have been some mistake.” Lawrence bent at the knees, then rose to ram a shoulder into the camel’s belly. The animal exhaled with an audible rush of stinking breath and he jerked the belly strap tight before continuing: “Since she was obviously being ridden by some very common person, she decided to unload you as speedily as possible. So she let out the air, the girth loosened, and off you came.”

Slapping the animal’s neck, Lawrence turned around. The schoolboy grin had been replaced by a workmanlike confidence. “It won’t happen again.”

The errant camel was once more brought to her knees, and Winston was helped to remount. At that point, the two great men exchanged a few private words, Churchill glowering and bullish, Lawrence quiet and reassuring. Whatever Lawrence told him, it seemed to make a difference. Churchill rode without incident afterward.

As for the rest of us? Well, even without an inglorious public plummet, we were soon humbled. You see, camel saddles have two high horns, front and rear. Their wooden frames beat rhythmically on bones, while their coarse woolen covers grind like pumice against any unprotected skin. My garters chafed and buttons prodded, and judging from the increasingly open squirming and shifting, all the other greenhorns were equally discomfited. Within twenty minutes conversation ceased as we passed from quiet dismay to open misery. In a fury of wretchedness, one or another of the men would kick and snarl at his beast, trying to rouse it to a trot, but these were tourist camels, disinclined to hurry. Their response was not an increase in speed but bared yellow teeth and a bitter, misanthropic commentary of their own.

I suspected that more than one of us envied Lady Cox’s snap decision not to embark on this trek at all. How easy it is to begin a journey in ignorance and how quickly one can come to regret it, I thought. We had gone too far to turn back now, though the pyramids seemed no closer on the horizon. Indeed, our goal seemed to recede as time ground on, but there was nothing to do except stay the course.

To distract myself, I watched the two experienced riders in our party. Miss Bell was admirably stoic and skilled in the saddle, but Lawrence’s boneless, unresisting grace was a marvel, and I found myself relaxing as I tried to mirror his supple motion. Dahabeah gradually drew even with his slowing mount. Without much thought, I called, “Colonel Lawrence! I’m surprised that you—”

At the sound of his name, he straightened, and I realized he’d been sleeping. He came to himself with startling quickness, but I could see that it was not merely boredom and the rocking rhythm of the camel that had lulled him. His cornflower eyes were red-rimmed and sunken in bruised-looking, bluish skin. His features seemed stretched taut across the bone.
Poveretto!
I thought reflexively, and it came to me that my landlady, Mrs. Motta, had taught me the proper way to respond to affliction: not with an admonition to buck up or count one’s blessings but with simple kindness and compassion.

“You poor thing,” I said aloud, and firmly. “Colonel Lawrence, you look exhausted.”

“The longest fortnight I have ever lived,” he admitted. “Forty points of view, forty opinions to bring into balance…And then it all has to be written up.” He smiled briefly and looked away. “Winston’s idea of working hard is to assign an impossible task to others and wait for the report.” He leaned toward me slightly and confided, “War was easier.”

For a time he rode silently, haggard and depressed, then shook the tiredness off, stretching like a cat before settling back into his saddle. “What was it you…?”

“Oh! Yes! I’m so sorry I woke you. It was just something silly. I wondered why you didn’t wear your Arab robes this morning.”

“Clothing is a tool, Miss Shanklin. What one wears depends on whom one hopes to influence. When Winston brought me into the Colonial Office, everyone expected me to be colorful and difficult. ‘What? Wilt thou bridle the wild ass of the desert?’” he quoted with self-deprecating amusement. “They were prepared to resist anything I said or did. So I have been plain and brown as a wren, and used their own surprise as a lever.”

“And have you achieved what you hoped? Will your friend Feisal get his kingdom?” He hesitated, and I promised, “I won’t say anything to Herr Weilbacher, if you’d rather I don’t. I know Sergeant Thompson thinks Karl is a German spy.”

“Thompson is an excellent policeman,” said Lawrence, although his tone seemed to imply,
The man is out of his depth.
“Has Karl asked about me?”

“He mentioned that you knew each other before the war.”

Lawrence grinned into the sun. “In a manner of speaking. Of course, he was doing his job and I was doing mine.”

“Anyway, I’d like you to know that Karl is simply—” My breath caught before I finished: “A dear friend.”

“Yes…He can be charming.” Lawrence looked away, his eyes measuring the distance to the pyramids. “You have my leave to inform Herr Weilbacher that the British Crown plans to repair the injury done to the House of the Sherifs of Mecca.” All this was said in the bland, measured tones of diplomacy. Then he smiled his beaming, cryptic smile and added, “The French won’t like it.”

“You could tell him yourself,” I suggested. “Have dinner with us.”

He giggled. “It might be entertaining to watch the veins stand out on Thompson’s forehead, but no. Thanks, all the same.” Lawrence yawned and rubbed at his face. “Another day, and this part of the job will be done.
Inshallah,
it will last. Are you still planning to come to Palestine with our party? We’re scheduled to leave day after tomorrow.”

“Oh! Jebail! That’s right—” I’d become so enthralled by Karl, I’d forgotten all about Colonel Lawrence’s invitation. But I could easily imagine what Karl would say.
To see the Holy Land in such company! Agnes, you must go! We have time. I will be here when you return.

Lawrence and I discussed our itinerary. There would be three days in Jerusalem before going north to the American Mission School, where Lillian had taught. Then I asked, “And what are your plans when all this is over, Colonel?”

“Back to the groves of academe, I suppose. I’m trying to write a memoir. A lot of that going around,” he said, as though authorship were the flu. “Have you heard the old joke about Job sitting on his dunghill?” he asked, his tired eyes flickering with amusement. “He tells his friends all his troubles and at the end, one of them says, ‘Yes, but you know…there could be a book in it!’”

He had recently written an introduction for a new edition of Doughty’s
Arabia Deserta
and hoped to make “a few quid” from the same publisher by providing book translations from French to English. We talked of novels next, and I was surprised to learn that he had read Dornford Yates’s Berry tales, which were light and humorous courtroom stories. Those were, Lawrence told me, the only things that could make him laugh after the war. He was fond as well of W. W. Jacobs and George Birmingham but particularly taken with Richard Garnett’s study
The Twilight of the Gods.
“Garnett’s scholarship is so easy and exact, so deep, but so unobtrusive,” he said with boyish enthusiasm. Lawrence had begun to consider reinterpreting
The Odyssey,
which he had carried in the original Greek throughout the desert campaign. He thought a soldier’s perspective would add dimension to a translation like Butler’s.