Both before and after lunch scores of Arabs filed into the tent to kiss Feisal’s hand. He never allowed them to touch it with their lips, but pulled it away just before they had an opportunity to kiss it, to show them how reluctant he was to be treated with special deference.
Both Feisal and Lawrence owed much of their authoritative leadership to their recognition of the traditional independence of the tribes. The gallant old brigands who had roamed freely all their lives over the vast stretches of Arabia, making little private wars of their own, were not to be commanded or conscripted; they had to be gently cajoled into the bigger war and made to feel the sense of their own importance.
“By the grace of Allah, I, Auda Abu Tayi, warn you to quit Arabia before the end of Ramadan. We Arabs want this country to ourselves. Unless this is done, by the beard of the Prophet, I declare you proscribed, outlawed, and fair game for any one to kill.”
This was the official and personal declaration of war issued by Auda Abu Tayi, the Howeitat chieftain, the greatest popular hero of modern Arabian history, the most celebrated fighting man the desert has produced in four generations. The proclamation was addressed to the sultan of Turkey, to Djemal Pasha, the viceroy of Syria, Palestine, and Arabia, and to the mutesarif of Kerak, who was the Ottoman governor of the important district on the edge of the desert near the southern end of the Dead Sea where Auda lived. The Arabian revolution appealed to the Bedouin Robin Hood, largely because it furnished him with an ideal excuse to declare personal war against the Turkish government.
When Auda heard that Shereef Hussein had started a revolt against the Turks, he and his fearless Howeitat followers jumped into their saddles, galloped across the desert sands to Feisal’s headquarters, and swore on the Koran that they would make the shereef’s enemies their enemies. Then they all sat down to a banquet in honor of the occasion. Suddenly old Auda uttered a potent Moslem oath and reminded himself and his friends that he was wearing a set of Turkish false teeth. Cursing the Turkish dentist who had made them, he dashed out of the tent and smashed them on a rock. For two months he was in agony and could eat only milk and boiled rice. When Lawrence came down from Egypt, Auda’s mouth was giving him so much trouble that he had to send to Cairo for a British dentist to make the old brigand a special set of Allied teeth!