Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 59).djvu/61

 "THE UNCROWNED Mecca (King Hussein of the Hejaz) to such an extent that he was permitted to sign the King's name to State papers. Out of grati- tude for his services to their country, the Arab leaders made him an Emir and a Prince of Mecca, an honour unparalleled in Arabian history. King Hussein himself presented his British commander with the curved gold sword, worn only by direct descendants of Mohammed. Auda Abu Tayi, always sincere in his judgments of people, once said to me : "I have never seen a man who has such a great capacity for work as Lawrence. He is one of the finest camel drivers that ever trekked across the desert." A Bedouin, can pay no finer compliment. Lawrence won the admiration and undying devotion of the Arabs because of his under- standing of them, through his proficiency in their dialects, and his rare knowledge of their religion, an inestimable factor in settling disputes between antagonistic factions, and even more, perhaps, because of his fearless- KING OF ARABIA." 53 ness and reckless courage, his ability to outdo them in nearly everything in which they themselves excelled. Rarely did he take them on an expedition that failed, but if, by some mischance, things did go wrong, he promptly took the same organization of Arabs on another expedition to convince them that there was no such thing as defeat. And in going into action against the Turks, Lawrence always charged at the head his. troops and was in the thick of every fight. The Germans and Turks were not long in discovering that there was a mysterious power giving inspiration to the Arabs. Through their spies they learned that Lawrence was the guiding spirit of the whole Arabian revolution. They offered a reward of £100,000 for him, dead or alive. But would the Bedouins have betrayed their leader for all the gold in the fabled mines of Solomon ? Was there a Judas among them ? Would "thirty pieces of silver" tempt an Arab chieftain ? THE THRILLING EVENTS IN THE NEXT INSTALMENT. In the next instalment Mr. Lowell Thomas will tell us how Colonel Lawrence was transformed from an archæologist into the world's champion train-wrecker. One reason why the Germans and Turks offered rewards amounting to over £100,000 on the head of this shy Oxford scholar was because of the millions of pounds of damage which Lawrence and his wild Bedouins did along the Pilgrims (or Hejaz) Railway, Turkey's only connecting link between Constantinople and the great Ottoman Army which remained in Medina until after the fall of Damascus and Aleppo. During the Arabian campaign young Lawrence, the lover of Greek drama and Gothic architecture, blew up seventy-nine Turkish railway bridges and trains. He did more damage to the enemy lines of communication, took more prisoners single-handed, and captured more loot than any other single individual during the war. He studied the use of high explosives with the same zeal that he studied the Crusades for his Oxford thesis. The act of slipping out from behind a sand dune after the passing of a Turkish mounted patrol along the Hejaz Railway, placing a charge of nitro-glycerine in a hole between the sleepers, and touching off the mine with an electric switch under the first Turkish train going by, Lawrence playfully termed "planting tulips." He, of course, had scores of narrow escapes while engaged in such hazardous work-or sport, as he regarded it. On one occasion he touched off one of his "tulips" under a train carrying the Commander-in-Chief of the Turkish Army and a thousand officers and men. Lawrence escaped on his racing camel by a narrow margin. In the second instalment Mr. Lowell Thomas will describe in full this and many other of Lawrence's thrilling adventures. He will also describe how Lawrence captured Akaba, the ancient seaport of King Solomon, and the battle of Abu-el-Lissan, in which the young archæologist and daring Arab lieutenant, Auda Abu Tayi, the Bedouin Robin Hood, with handful of followers mounted on racing camels and fleet Arabian steeds, charged a picked Turkish regiment and cut it to pieces. In this charge Lawrence's camel was shot from under him and his followers rode right over him, and seven bullets passed through Auda Abu Tayi's robes. Digitized by Google Original from CORNELL UNIVERSITY