"I am", he continued raising his voice and repeating his favourite phrase, "I am a simple preacher. My mission is to spread the Faith, if possible by persuasion and if not by persuasion then by the sword".

With his arguments the Wahabis had no sympathy. For them all good Moslems were Wahabis. The rest were mushrekin, worse than heretics. They, the Wahabis, were the only true Moslems and the only true Arabs. The only sanctions they needed were their own consciences.

The book as printed is represented below the bar - there was no table of contents.

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Lord of Arabia

A Biography of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud
by H. C. Armstrong

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR TURKEY IN TRAVAIL TURKEY AND SYRIA RE-BORN GREY WOLF - MUSTAFA KEMAL

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PUBLISHED BY KHAYAT'S COLLEGE BOOK COOPERATIVE 32 and 34 Rue Bliss Beirut, Lebanon

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Lord of Arabia

IBN SAUD

An Intimate Study of a King

By H. C. ARMSTRONG

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PRINTED IN HARISSA, LEBANON BY THE ST. PAUL'S PRESS . DESIGNED
BY THE GRAHAM ASSOCIATES CORPORATION • BEIRUT, LEBANON

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I desire to express my thanks to
HIS MAJESTY KING ABDUL AZIZ
for his hospitality and many kindnesses
on my last visit to Arabia

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I WISH to thank innumerable friends and acquaintances who have placed their personal knowledge at my disposal, but who must remain unnamed, and also:

The British Museum,

The Daily Telegraph,

The Editor of the Umu-al-Kura of Mecca,

The Imperial War Museum,

The Royal Geographical Society,

The Royal Institute of International Affairs,

The School of Oriental Languages,

The Times,

The Near East and India,
for placing much material in my hands and treating me with unfailing kindness.

H. C. A.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

TO DESCRIBE, so that he may live before the reader, a Moslem and an Arab of outstanding personality, in terms that come within the everyday consciousness of Christians and Europeans has not been easy.

The Europeans and the Arabs have much on which they do not agree. They differ in experience, outlook, and manner of expression. Often their standards of right and wrong are not the same. Thus the desert Arabs are aghast at the unpunished adultery and fornication of the Europeans, while the Europeans are shocked at the legal polygamy of the desert Arabs. Polygamy is punished by imprisonment in Europe. Adultery is punished by death by stoning in Arabia.

I have, therefore, boldly translated both ideas and phrases, so that the reader shall grasp the correct meaning easily, rather than that his mind should boggle with uncertainty over meticulous details set down in unaccustomed language.

Arabic is full of complicated sounds which cannot be produced correctly with Roman characters. It has twenty eight letters which can be made into intricate combinations and which change in shape as they combine.

For the spelling of Arabic words I have kept one rule that, while keeping as close to the sound as possible, the written word shall not torment the English reading eye. Thus Saud may be written Saoud, Sa'ud, Sa'oud, Seoud, Se'aoud, Si'oud, Esseoud, and in a dozen more ways. I have kept it as Saud.

Again an Arab delights in complicating names. Given any name he will quote a whole genealogical table for it. Thus he will describe Ibn Saud as Abdul Aziz ibn (son of) Abdur Rahman al-Feisal al (of the family of) Saud. He will add more generations if he is in the mood. To increase the complications he may call Ibn Saud, Abu Twrki, the Father of Turki, Ibn Saud's firstborn son.

In this book I have for each personality chosen one name and retained it throughout.

On the life of Ibn Saud there is little documentary evidence, such as books and articles and records. The two principal authorities are Mr. St. John Philby, an English Moslem, who was at one time in the Indian Civil Service, and is now trading in Arabia for English and American firms, and Mr. Ameen Rihani, an Arab Christian from Syria of American nationality. The major portion of the evidence collected has been from word of mouth. The books of Mr. St. John Philby and Mr. Ameen Rihani I have used freely. They are full of valuable material. I have, however, used them only after careful corroboration, whenever possible, with persons present at the events described.

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INTRODUCTION

FAR back in Time, when Europe lay shrivelled and cold under the glaciers of the Age of ice, Arabia was a land of forests and pastures, and watered by three great rivers.

Then as the earth spun over on its axix and its crust heaved, rising here and falling there, the seasons and the climates changed; and, as the ice melted, Europe woke to life.

But Arabia became a desert, for the rain came no more; the rivers dried up; the forests withered away; over the pastures swept shifting sand.

For many centuries it remained so. On its frontiers civilizations grew to maturity and decayed; countries became rich; great empires rose and fell. To the east along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rose Babylon and Nineveh; and beyond them Persia; to the west, Egypt and the Pharaohs with all their pomp and majesty; to the north, by the shores of the Mediterranean, Phoenicia and the Roman Empire.

But Arabia remained isolated and, except for rare travellers' tales, unknown. The merchants who came trading across the ocean from the Indies and Africa up the Red Sea, bringing jewels and ivory, spices and myrrh and frankincense to the trading-posts which the Jews had made at Mecca and Medina, told tales of great cities hidden behind the desert; but they were only travellers' tales. In the century before Christ the Emperor Augustus sent his Governor of Egypt to invade Arabia and find these cities. The Governor found only a barren land inhabited by wild tribes; and many of his men died of thirst in the great wastes.

Arabia remained isolated and unknown, for it was a brutal country and inhospitable, a land of cruelty and violence.

Where there was a little water, round wells, in an oasis, and on the sea-shores some built villages of mud huts, and with their primitive irrigation fought for existence against the sand that for ever came thrusting in on them persistent and relentless. The rest were shepherds, bedouin, who wandered throughout the seasons driving their flocks across the vast steppes in search of grazing.

Both villagers and bedouin lived hard and dangerously. They were pagans and savages, unclean, poverty-stricken, debased in their habits, idolaters with crude and brutal beliefs. They were proud men, fiercely independent and prepared to sacrifice themselves for their freedom. Untamed and untamable, they were split up into small tribes, which were continuously at war with each other and were savagely intolerant of any stranger or of any innovation.

Suddenly out of this monstrous chaos was born a Great Man, preaching a Great Religion-the Prophet Mohamed preaching Islam. Islam united the Arabs, purified them, bound them into one people. Mohamed filled them with a great Faith. His power increased rapidly. Within ten years he controlled all Arabia. His successors and followers advanced across the Euphrates into Persia and beyond. Northwards they went through Syria into Asia Minor and stormed at the walls of Constantinople. Westwards they swept along the African coast across the Sahara to the Atlantic and up into Spain and threatened France. Within a hundred years they had expanded their rule until the Arab Empire stretched from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Indus River and from Central Africa to the Persian frontier.

Islam itself went farther: to Constantinople and from there with the victorious Turks across the Balkans to the gates of Vienna to threaten all Christendom; across the Black Sea to the Crimea and Russia; and by Persia across Central Asia to the Great Wall of China.

But as the Arab Empire expanded and Islam became the Faith of many people, Arabia itself ceased to be the centre. The centre moved to Damascus, and then to Baghdad and Cairo. Out of the Desert had come the faith and the driving force, but Arabia, having given birth to these, sank back into its old state. Once more it became a land of ignorance and violence, shut off from the outside world.

Many more centuries passed. The Middle Ages, the Crusades, the Empire of Byzantium came and went. Tamerlaine the Tartar and Jengis Khan swept by, destroying. The Turks came conquering, seized and held all the gates to the East, and then in turn began to lose their grip and fail.

In all these events Arabia took no part. Shut away behind the barriers of the Desert, its people lived their own lives, strove with the sand for their bare existence, raided, murdered and fought each other in their eternal tribal wars and their blood-feuds. The Turks claimed suzerainty over them, but it was without reality.

Map 1

So a thousand years passed, and then once more, late in the eighteenth century, came a man with the fire of religion in him to weld the Arabs into one people and to inflame 'them into action. There came Mohamed ibn Abdul Wahab preaching a revival of Islam.

Ibn Abdul Wahab was a fanatic. He ripped away the heresies and abuses which had grown up round Islam and he preached the Faith in its original simplicity. He called on the Arabs to purify themselves, to forswear all pleasure and luxury, and with rigid asceticism to serve God, the One True God.

For a while he was persecuted, until he took refuge in the Principality of Nejd and claimed the protection of one Mohamed ibn Saud, who ruled in the towns of Diriya and Riad.

The centre of Arabia is a plateau shut in on three sides by desert and on the fourth by steppes where the bedouin graze their flocks. This plateau is the Principality of Nejd.

Over this plateau are scattered many villages and oases. The people of Nejd, the Nejdis, who live in them, are hard-working and stolid. Through the centre of the plateau runs a long valley rich in water and filled with palm-groves and gardens. In this valley stands the town of Riad.

Riad is the core of Nejd, and Nejd is the core and the very heart of Arabia. Who rules in Nejd may rule all Arabia.

Saud, the Amir of Diriya and Riad, was ambitious. He recognized the value of the Abdul Wahab. He made an agreement with him: together by preaching and the sword they would bring the Arabs back to the true Faith of Islam.

Their success was immediate. Saud was a leader and a soldier; Abdul Wahab was a preacher whose preaching caught the imagination of the desert Arabs. First they cleansed Diriya and Riad and then Nejd: they destroyed the idols and tombs of the saints; they enforced the orders of the Koran to the letter, the five daily prayers and the keeping of the Fast; they forbade smoking, drinking wine, and, as a dramatic warning, they stoned to death in the open market a woman guilty of adultery.

Tribe after tribe submitted to them and was filled with a savage fanaticism. Their enemies nicknamed them Wahabis. Led by Saud, known as the Great, they swept out beyond Nejd conquering and converting by the sword. Within sixty years they had established their rule across all Arabia, from the Persian Gulf to the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina and from the Indian Ocean to the Lebanon mountains of Syria. They were masters of the desert, and they refused to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Caliph and Sultan of Stamboul and his Turks. They raided into Mesopotamia and destroyed the sacred city of Kerbela. With the hunger of desert-men for the wealth of the fertile lands beyond, and as their ancestors had done before them, they pressed on northwards to attack Syria and the shores of the Mediterranean, and so to burst out into the world beyond, attacked Aleppo and made it pay tribute, and looted the outskirts of Damascus, and raided down to Basra.

The Turks woke to the danger, and ordered Mohamed Ali, their Viceroy in Egypt, to march into Arabia.

Mohamed Ali defeated the Wahabis, invaded Nejd, captured the Wahabi capital and sent the Wahabi ruler in chains to Constantinople. There before the Mosque of Santa Sophia where the Great Square runs down to the foot of the Bosphorus, the Turks beheaded him with much ceremony.

Then, weary of the harsh land, the Turks and Egyptians established a few garrisons and went gladly home, leaving the Arabs to themselves.

Like sand before the wind the Wahabi Empire of Saud the Great was gone. Nejd lay broken. With no strong man to unite and lead them, the Arabs split once more into quarrelling tribes. All Arabia was ripped into pieces by wars, raids, tribe raiding tribe while their sheiks plotted and intrigued, murdered their kinsfolk and rivals and were in turn murdered. Throughout the nineteenth century Arabia was again a land of bloodshed and strife, a land of brutality and violence where no man's life was safe and to which few travellers came.

Thus it was when, in 1880, on a November morning, at the time when the muezzins were calling to the dawn prayer, there was born, in the palace at Riad, to Abdur Rahman, one of the descendants of Saud the Great and to Sarah his wife, a son whom they named Abdul Aziz, but who was known, after his great ancestor, as Ibn Saud.

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PART I

CHAPTER I

IBN SAUD was brought up in a wing of the palace. He was suckled by his mother, who was the daughter of one Ahmed Sudairi, a headman of the Dawasir tribe from the south, a big-built woman of a stock from which big men had come. Like all Arab women of good family she had been veiled since the age of seven and shut away indoors with the other women behind latticed windows and locked doors in the palace harem. She rarely went out, and then only heavily veiled, with a negro slave as escort, and to visit other women. Like other Arab women also, she had never been taught to read or write, and except for women's gossip she was ignorant of what went on in the outside world, so that she could neither be a companion nor take any part in the active lives of her men, but she had a shrewd judgment of values. She was devout, and with an innate common sense that made her wise in advice, so that at home she had much influence with her husband and her children.

The palace was an immense, sprawling building of halls and chambers and dark twisting corridors, built round a central courtyard and inside a high wall, but it had no plan, for it had grown haphazardly. As more rooms were required, new houses had been built, connected into the rest by passages and overhead bridges, and the outer wall extended to take them in, until the palace filled all the centre of the town.

As soon as he was weaned, Ibn Saud was taken from the women's quarters and handed over to a negro slave who became responsible for him and his safety. As he grew up he often visited his mother, was petted and spoiled by her and the other women of the harem, and played with his elder sister Nura, but from that time on his place was with the men.

With him were brought up a number of slave boys of his own age, who were his companions until he grew up and then they became his comrades and the most trusted of his body-guard. Almost as soon as he could walk his father, Abdur-Rahman, took him in hand.

Abdur Rahman was both devout and strict. He was the Imam, the Leader of the Wahabis. Their ulema, their Elders or Doctors of the Law, ruled them with a rod of iron. They were dour men, lean in body and outlook, who saw all life with the uncompromising eyes of the fanatic. They allowed themselves no luxury or even comfort. Their houses were bare and drab, their mosques without minarets, domes or any decorations, and they refused all the pleasant things: wine, fine food, tobacco, soft clothes. Singing and music they forbade, and they even frowned on laughter, and they stamped out of life all joy, lest their thoughts might be led away from concentration on God. Their only indulgence was sex and their women. Their God was a stern God demanding absolute service of them. To those who served Him He was kind and merciful, but to the forward and unrepentent He was hard and unforgiving. They were His devoted people, lifted up over the heads of all mankind, with a mission to make all men His servants, even by the sword.

Abdur Rahman made no exceptions for his children. He brought them up as strict Wahabis. He sent Ibn Saud to school in Riad. The boy idled and played and showed no inclination for book-learning but, by the time he was seven, he was devoutly and regularly attending the public prayers with his father in the Great Mosque five times a day, keeping the Fast, and could intone verses from the Koran.

Abdur Rahman had but one purpose in life. Either he, or, if he failed, his sons after him, must refound the Empire of Saud the Great, knit all Arabs into one people, and convert them into devout Wahabis.

He taught his sons that this was their duty: that this was a task for which God had chosen them. It would mean war, hardship, fighting, and for these he prepared them. He taught Ibn Saud to use a sword and a rifle, to leap in one on to a horse and gallop without saddle or stirrups. To harden him to fatigue he sent him on long journeys. He made him rise regularly two hours before dawn, even in the winter mornings when the winds swept cold and bleak down from the plateau. He made him walk bare-footed at midday on the blistering rocks and the sand under the fierce summer sun, and he encouraged him to test his strength, to wrestle and compete with other boys, and to ration himself in food, water and sleep.

Ibn Saud grew up rapidly into a lanky boy, tall and big-boned in contrast to his father who was short and thick-set. He was muscular and hard, full of energy, rarely still, and with a temper that flashed out like lightning and died away as quickly as it came.

But he knew nothing beyond the narrow life of Riad. Behind the desert the town was shut off from the outside world. Its people were haughty as well as puritan. They despised and disliked all foreigners. Their only contacts with the outside world were the caravan merchants, who at rare intervals dared the trade-routes which ran through the empty deserts and which were infested by bands of raiding bedouin; and who brought to Riad cloth and brass-work from Ojair and Kuwait on the Persian Gulf; or those from the Red Sea Coast who came with coffee from the Yemen, and with incense, spices and negro slaves from Africa, and who couched their camels and unloaded their bales in the open space before the palace and passed their news.

CHAPTER II

THOSE were days of danger and constant alarms. The country round the town of Riad itself was full of raiding parties of uncontrolled bedouin. Away to the north the Shammar tribes had united under one Mohamed ibn Rashid, a capable, ambitious man, who had made his capital in the town of Hail and who coveted Riad and the other rich villages of Nejd.

Riad was strongly fortified. Round it ran a high wall, turreted, bastioned, and loopholed, along which sentries kept watch night and day. No one entered without being inspected and cross-questioned. At sundown and three times a day, when all the men were in the mosques at prayer, the iron-studded gates of the town were swung to and bolted against all comers.

The palace was a fort also, for Riad itself was torn with civil war. Abdur Rahman was one of four brothers. For ten years his elder brothers Abdullah and Saud had quarrelled and fought backwards and forwards for the mastery. Abdullah had driven out Saud, who had escaped and settled with the Ajman tribes who lived in the province known as the Hasa, to the east. Allied with the Ajmans he had raided back into Riad, and driven out Abdullah. He died suddenly, and Abdullah returned, but the sons of Saud kept up the quarrel.

FAMILY OF KING IBN SAUD

Between the two, the people of Riad were split into factions. They brawled and fought in the streets, and murdered and fought in the palace itself.

Abdur Rahman, together with his fourth brother, Mohamed, tried to act as peacemaker. He pleaded with both sides, warning them that the Rashid would take the first chance to attack them, but he failed, for they were full of venom and threatened him as well so that he had to defend himself and his family in his own wing of the palace.

Finally the sons of Saud collected the Ajman tribesmen once more, took Riad, and imprisoned Abdullah.

In the confusion the Rashid swooped down, captured Riad, drove out the sons of Saud, took Abdullah prisoner to Hail and put in his own governor, a sheik of the Shammar, called Salim.

In the fighting Mohamed was killed by Obaid a cousin of the Rashid.

Abdur Rahman, because of his reputation as a peacemaker and because he had great influence with the Wahabis, the Rashid left in the palace with his family.

Abdullah fell sick. A Persian doctor, passing through Hail on his way to Mecca for the pilgrimage, was called in and warned the Rashid that Abdullah was dying. The Rashid, not wanting to be accused of murdering Abdullah, called Abdur Rahman to Hail and ordered him to take his brother back to Riad. Hardly had they arrived before Abdullah died.

CHAPTER III

ABDUR RAHMAN was now head of the family. Abdullah had been a poor, weak-kneed, sickly creature, but Abdur Rahman was proud and stout-hearted. He would not sit placid while Riad lay helpless in the hand of the foreigner. He meant to rule. He would chase the Rashid out and free the town.

He set to work without delay. He tried to come to terms with his nephews, the sons of his brother Saud, and get their help, but they refused: they treated him as an usurper and claimed that they, and not he, had the right to leadership.

None the less he planned a rising in the town simultaneous with an attack from outside. He held secret meetings with the Nejdi leaders and urged them to rouse the townsfolk of Riad. He sent messengers through the villages and the tribes, but he met with little response. The people were afraid. There was a strong garrison of the Rashid's men in the fort which dominated the town. Once before they had risen and failed, and Salim had hanged and imprisoned many without mercy.

Abdur Rahman worked on undismayed. He was in constant danger, for he was surrounded by spies and traitors, the enemy's spies and the confederates of his nephews, who would have betrayed him at the first opportunity to their common enemy.

Before he could make any effective preparations, however, the Rashid found out what he was at and sent orders to

Salim to do away with him and to teach the town a lesson. Salim decided to take drastic action. Once and for all he would be finished with these turbulent Sauds. They were all stiff-necked and quarrelsome. As long as any remained, there would be neither peace nor security in Riad. The Great Festival was coming to an end, and on the last day it was customary to make visits and exchange congratulations. He decided to catch Abdur Rahman by a trick-he would pay him a formal visit taking his guards with him and after he had talked for a while he would ask for the males of the Saud family to be called so that he might speak with them all. As soon as they were assembled his guards should surround and kill them.

But Abdur Rahman had news of this. Prepared or not, he would fight: better to be killed fighting than to have his throat cut without resistance, so he armed such men as he had, and set them ready.

Salim arrived at the appointed hour, his guards round him, and Abdur Rahman received him in full state in the Audience Chamber of the Palace. To one side, so that Salim should have no suspicions, sat a few of the family, and among them, though still only a child, was Ibn Saud with his negro slave.

The two men exchanged greetings and congratulations full of fair words. With ceremony they performed all the courtesies, begged each other to be seated first, drank coffee together, talked pleasantly of trifles, while each hid what was in his mind as he watched the other and waited for the time to act-until Salim asked that the rest of the family might be called.

Then Abdur Rahman motioned to a slave and gave the arranged signal. His men came swarming into the Audience Chamber with their swords drawn. Overwhelming and killing his guards, they seized Salim and dragged him away.

Standing behind the huge negro slave who protected him, and peering out under an arm, the boy, Ibn Saud, for the first time, saw blood shed in anger.

Immediately the whole town flared up, chased out the Rashid garrison, and prepared to resist. The villagers and the neighbouring tribes joined in.

The Rashid hurried down to crush the revolt, and Abdur Rahman went out to meet him. For weeks they fought in the desultory manner of the desert, a raid here, a skirmish there, but always Abdur Rahman was beaten back, until he was besieged in Riad, and all the country round was in the hands of the Rashid.

As the weeks went by, food and water began to run short in the town. The enemy were cutting down the palms, destroying the irrigation channels and the wells, and making a desolation of the gardens. The townsfolk demanded that Abdur Rahman made terms, but he refused. When they threatened to rise against him, very reluctantly, for he would have fought to the bitter end, he sent out a party with a flag of truce. With the party, as surety for his father, went the boy Ibn Saud.

They found the Rashid ready to treat, for he wished to be gone: his men were deserting, tired of the drudgery of the siege, and because there was no loot for them, so he quickly agreed. As soon as Salim had been handed over to him uninjured, he appointed Abdur Rahman to act as his governor in Riad and then withdrew.

But, as he retired, the tribes rose against him, and Abdur Rahman collecting his men hurried out to join them.

With him he took Ibn Saud. The boy was now ten years old, and the time had come to blood him for war. Perched up on a camel, with his negro slave gripping on behind the saddle, he rode with the fighting men as they raided out after the Rashid.

But the Rashid turned. He smashed the tribes and came tearing back on Abdur Rahman. This time he would be finished with these vipers of Sauds.

CHAPTER IV

ABDUR RAHMAN could not stand for a fight. His men were a handful and afraid of the Rashid: they had begun to desert: the tribesmen who had joined him had already dispersed, so he must make for Riad. To get behind its walls was his only chance.

Slinging Ibn Saud up into a saddle-bag on his camel, and almost alone except for his fighting slaves, he hurried back and prepared to defend the town. But the townsmen would not listen to him. They would not have another siege. It meant ruin for them. They wanted peace.

Close on his heels came the Rashid, swearing vengeance. Salim had been right, he said: the Sauds were a brood of snakes, treacherous, dangerous, not to be trusted; this time he would show them no mercy; he would wipe them out.

Late one night Abdur Rahman roused his family; they must be gone-and at once; they must run for safety; there was no time to spare; the Shammar scouts had been seen only a few miles away, coming down from the north; the enemy would be at the gates in a few hours. In the dark the women packed up into bundles all that they could carry, while the slaves carried the bundles out to the courtyard and roped them on to the camels. The women clambered up above the bundles. Ibn Saud and his brother Mohamed rode one camel, and before the dawn broke Abdur Rahman led the caravan out by the eastern gate of the town.

Travelling rapidly through the palm-groves and so into the Dahna Desert beyond, with scouts thrown out on the flanks to defend them against a sudden attack, they came safely into the Hasa country. There Abdur Rahman claimed sanctuary with Hithlain the Sheik of the Ajman tribes.

The Ajman gave him protection-the code of the desert forced them to do that - but with a bad grace. The sons of Saud, who were living among them and had intermarried with them, went through the encampments urging that the refugees be expelled. The Rashid demanded their surrender.

Abdur Rahman decided that there was no safety among the Ajman: they might turn on him at any moment. He distrusted them, for they were always treacherous and unstable, so he arranged for his family to go to the Island of Bahrain, the Island of the Pearl Fishers, in the Persian Gulf, and Ibn Saud who had been ill with a type of rheumatic fever, he sent with the rest.

Then, refusing to accept defeat, he turned to look for helpers to recover Riad, but none of the sheiks would ally with him, so collecting a few bedouin, who were always ready if there was promise of loot, he raided up to Riad, but the people of Nejd gave him no help, and he was easily driven off by the Rashid garrison.

As he returned, the Turkish Governor of the Hasa sent for him. The Turks were nominally the suzerain lords of all Arabia. In reality they held only the rich fringes, the Yemen, the Asir and the Hejaz on the Red Sea coast, with Syria on the north, and southwards by Mesopotamia down to Baghdad, and the provinces of Kuwait and of the Hasa, which ran along the western shore of the Persian Gulf and where they had garrisons in Hofuf, its capital, and in the other towns. In the interior and the inner desert they had no power or control.

Their policy was simple. Their object was to keep the tribes of the Interior from attacking them and from breaking out. To do this they played for a balance of power, setting one sheik against another, creating rivalries, helping the weak against the strong and supporting the defeated. The complete defeat of the Sauds did not suit them, for the Rashid had become too strong and upset their calculations.

The Governor treated Abdur Rahman with great respect. He offered, with the help of regular Turkish troops and artillery, to send him back to rule Nejd, on condition that he accepted a Turkish garrison in Riad, acknowledged Turkish suzerainty, and paid tribute.

To this Abdur Rahman gave a blunt refusal. He was first and foremost an Arab and a Wahabi. The Turks were for him invaders and worse than infidels. He would not let them come interfering into Riad. He told them so without compromise, and they marked him down as a dangerous man. They remembered that twenty years before he had led a rising against them in the Hasa itself. At that moment there was trouble throughout the province: the Sheik of Qatar was known to be involved : Abdur Rahman had been visiting the sheik. The Turks suspected that he was behind the present trouble, so they increased their garrisons and threatened both the sheik and Abdur Rahman.

With danger pressing on his heels, driven from pillar to post, a refugee, with the Rashid, the Ajman, with his nephews and the Turks after him, Abdur Rahman, taking with him Ibn Saud, who was now recovered of his fever, made southwards until he came to the palm oasis of Jabrin, and then on into the Great Waste, the Ruba al Khali, the Empty Quarter of Arabia, which stretched five hundred miles of empty desolation and sand down to the Indian Ocean. By the salt-water wells of Khiran he found the encampments of the Murra tribesmen come out of the Great Waste to graze their droves of camels in the low scrub. From them Abdur Rahman claimed protection.

Map of Arabia in 1900

CHAPTER V

For many months Ibn Saud lived with his father among the Murra tribes. With them were his younger brother, Mohamed, and his cousin, Jiluwi, a dark, saturnine youth, very dour in manner, who rarely spoke, but was always ready for any adventure. His mother and the women were safe in Bahrain.

The life was crude and brutal. The Murra were the most primitive of all the tribes of Arabia, long-haired, lean men with wild eyes and crafty faces. They lived almost as the animals and but little above the starvation line. Their food was a few dates gathered in the season at Jabrin and carefully rationed out to last the year, camels' milk-for the water of the wells of Khiran was salty and bitter and unfit for men to drink-and occasionally meat, when the hunters killed a gazelle, a sand deer, or a hare. More often their only meat was the jabru rats which lived in the rocks, and the tough horny dhab lizards, and sometimes a few ostrich eggs found in the sand-things not fit for the pious Moslem to eat. Their greatest luxury was a little camels liver rubbed in salt and eaten full of blood.

They had no villages, but moved continuously, driving their camels in search of scrub fodder, and wherever there was a little grass. They were the terror of all the other tribes, for without warning they would raid out of the Great Waste, killing and plundering, attacking caravans, and then race back into the safety of the vast waterless steppes where no one could follow them. They raided even as far as the Hadramaut, four hundred miles to the south, and stole the famous milch camels of the Terim and the red riding camels of Oman.

Among them Ibn Saud became the complete bedouin, living in the wide desert, often without a tent or any covering, under the open sky and the stars. He traveled with them, raided and hunted, and they taught him the ways of the desert: how to track by footmarks and the signs in the sand; how to handle camels on a long journey, doctor their pads and cure them of mange; how to travel distances with only a handful of dates and a skin of curdled milk.

From a boy he became an unkempt bedouin youth. The constant danger, the everlasting alarms, and the hardships toughened his body, and taught him reliance. It made him as lean as leather and at all times ready for action.

But for Abdur Rahman this life was purgatory, for he despised the Murra. They were unclean, loose livers, worse than infidels; they were all but pagans with no religion. To be a refugee among them hurt his pride and roused all his religious indignation. He had at times persuaded them to raid into the Rashid country, but the Rashid was too powerful for such raids to have any effect. Though he never lost heart and was for ever urging it on his sons, he saw little hope of attaining his great ambition of reforming the Empire of Saud or even of recovering Riad. He was over fifty and tired of this life, and he wanted to get back where he could have his wives and his children round him. He sent messengers to many of the sheiks asking for protection, but without success, for he had many and powerful enemies and would be a danger. At last, when he had all but given up hope, Mohamed, the Sheik of Kuwait sent him an invitation to visit Kuwait, and promised him a monthly allowance while he stayed there.

The reason was simple. There had come to the Hasa a new Turkish Governor, Hafiz Pasha, who realized that he needed Abdur Rahman. The Rashid had grown so strong that he had become a menace both to the Turks and to Kuwait. Abdur Rahman would be the best counterpoise to the Rashid: he could use the Sauds against the Rashids and so quiet the Rashid. Knowing Abdur Rahman's pride he agreed secretly with Mohamed of Kuwait to invite Abdur Rahman and his family, and he guaranteed Mohamed an allowance from the Turkish Government to keep his guests.

Abdur Rahman accepted the invitation gladly, collected his family from Bahrain, and with a tired sigh of satisfaction settled down in Kuwait.

PART II

CHAPTER VI

KUWAIT lay at the head of the Persian Gulf, an Arab town of sun-dried bricks of yellow clay and twisting alleys, crouching on a low shore-the houses coming down to a sandy beach and a shallow harbour protected by some primitive breakwaters. In the sunlight it lay a patch of staring yellow between the sea glare and the red desert that stretched away beyond it into the heat haze. There was not a garden nor a patch of green nor even a tree to rest the eye-except a few stunted tamarisk trees which fought with the sand.

The Sauds lived in a small one-storied house of three rooms grouped round a courtyard. The rooms were low, with windows of unglazed glass and heavily barred and shuttered. The roofs were flimsily built of thin rafters on which were laid palm-mats covered with beaten mud. It was in a street which was a twisting alley that ran down to that end of the foreshore where the shipwrights and the sailmakers worked and where the pearl fishers hauled up and beached their boats. The filth of the town and the offal of the harbour covered the shore and stank under the sun and the flies.

The Sauds were crowded in their three rooms, for they were a large family. After the spacious palace at Riad with its servants and slaves and the open life with the Murra, this drab town existence weighed heavily on them, and they were very poor.

The Sheik rarely paid the allowance he had promised because the Turkish Government rarely paid him, and though he was friendly he was also close-fisted and had no intention of supporting the Sauds. Eventually the allowance stopped altogether, for the Turks once more offered to send Abdur Rahman back to Riad with Turkish soldiers, and when he refused as bluntly as before they took no further interest in him. When Abdur Rahman heard from whence his allowance had come he was furious. He would have paid it back if he had had the money, but he had none, and often the family were so short of food and clothes, that he had to swallow his pride and borrow money.

When Ibn Saud was fifteen his mother found him a bedouin girl to marry, but when the time came Abdur Rahman could not pay for the celebrations, so the marriage was postponed until a rich merchant put up the money.

It was a dreary life, full of such humiliations: the empty, loafing, objectless life of exiles living under a cloud, not wanted, homesick for Riad with its clean air from the desert, and hating the dankness and the fever of the Gulf and the mud and stenches of the port.

In the town were many men of Nejd and Riad. A number lived in Kuwait as shopmen and traders. The rest came and went with caravans for the Interior or to man the pearling fleet when it set out for the season at Bahrain. They brought the news of Riad, but they brought no hope: the Rashid held the land in a firm grip: no one dared rise against him.

For Ibn Saud, Kuwait was full of new experiences. Hitherto all he had known had been the sour puritans of Riad and the brutal wild Murra of the Great Waste.

Kuwait was the Marseilles of the Persian Gulf. Its population was good natured, mixed, and vicious. As it was the outlet from the north to the Gulf and hence to the Indies, merchants from Bombay and Teheran, Indians, Persians, Syrians from Aleppo and Damascus, Armenians, Turks and Jews, traders from all the East, and some Europeans came to it. From Kuwait the caravans set out for Central Arabia and for Syria.

Ibn Saud lived the ordinary life of an Arab youth. He loafed in the harbour and listened to the sailors. He sat on the edge of the cafes and sucked in the talk of the traders, the travellers, the sheiks from the desert, and picked up the news of Baghdad, Damascus and Constantinople. He played knuckle-bones with the other youths in a corner, quarrelled and fought with them -or went down the alley-ways of the bazaars holding hands with his friends in the easy, intimate friendship of Arab with Arab, and played jokes on the shopmen until chased away. At the hour of prayer he joined his father in the mosque, and when the Fast came he kept it devoutly. The town was full of the vices of a seaport. Ibn Saud was intensely virile, but his puritan upbringing and his early marriage saved him from the harlots.

He was big-built for his age and very strong, with a quick wit and an open, frank manner.

CHAPTER VII

AMONG those who often visited Abdur Rahman was one Mubarak, the brother of Mohamed the Sheik of Kuwait.

Mubarak was on bad terms with his brother. Many years before, when he was still a young man, they had quarrelled, and Mubarak had gone to Bombay. There he had spent all his substance in gambling and riotous living. He had even sold his mother's jewels to pay his debts, and he had lately returned penniless.

His brother still hated him. Being mean himself he hated his generous, free-handed ways. He was afraid of him too, for the people of the town liked him. He kept him short of money and humiliated him whenever possible.

Mubarak took a great liking to Ibn Saud. He treated him as a son, invited him often to his house, talked much to him, and taught him much worldly wisdom during these empty years of exile.

Suddenly, when Ibn Saud was seventeen, all was changed. Mubarak, stung into action by humiliations and insults and being ambitious, crept one night with a cousin and an Ajman servant into the palace, murdered his brother, and made himself ruler of Kuwait. The people, tired of his skinflint brother, who had taxed them heavily and spent nothing on the town, accepted him gladly.

A few weeks later Mohamed ibn Rashid died. With wisdom and a strong hand he had ruled a great area from north of Hail down to the Great Waste south of Riad. His successor, Abdul Aziz ibn Rashid, was however, no more than a filibustering chieftain out for loot, and in a short time he had set all the tribes by the ears.

At once the Sauds became persons of importance: they were the friends of Mubarak; they were the enemies of the Rashid. Soon from Riad came messengers to say that the town was ready to rise, and that throughout Nejd the tribes were restless and would revolt if led.

Ibn Saud was in a fever to be off. He borrowed a camel, persuaded some friends to join him, and went raiding towards Riad. The messengers had been over-optimistic. The tribes did not rise. Mubarak gave no help, for he did not want a quarrel with the Rashid. Ibn Saud's camel was old and mangy. It went lame, fell, and refused to get up, and he was forced to start walking home until a passing caravan gave him a lift back on a baggage camel, and all Kuwait laughed and sneered at him.

Then, almost in a night, Kuwait became of world importance. For a generation Germany had been over-crowded with men and vitality. The Kaiser saw that she must expand or explode, and that the only road for expansion was to the East with India as the objective. But the English held all the roads to the East except the one that ran by Turkey through the Arab countries into the Persian Gulf. So the Kaiser allied with the Sultan of Turkey, proclaimed himself the friend of the Caliph of Islam and Protector of the Arabs, sent out his agents and pressed eastwards out of the West. As the backbone of his expansion he planned a railway from Constantinople through Aleppo down to Baghdad and with its terminus at Kuwait, for Kuwait held the door to the Persian Gulf.

For a century the English from India had been pressing up the Gulf from the East, allying with the local sheiks of the coast and so obtaining control. At Kuwait in 1897, the year that Mubarak became sheik, the two great World Powers came face to face, for the English were determined that the Germans should not come that way.

Mubarak listened to both. He received the consuls, and the representatives of England, Germany, and of Russia also, for the Russians, too, wanted a hand in the Gulf. He talked with secret agents of all sorts who came to him with offers.

He was shrewd. Position and power had changed him. He had ceased to be the wild, gambling, roystering spendthrift. He was as generous as ever, but he had become staid, steady, calculating, a crafty manipulator, an elusive diplomat and a strong ruler, and he knew what he wanted. Nominally he was a subject of the Sultan of Turkey; but he was determined to keep Kuwait independent and for himself.

He saw that the English, like himself, were on the defensive and not out to annex, but that if the Germans with this railway came there would be an end of Kuwait. He played for time, giving nothing, postponing with empty promises, until the Germans, tired of this, eager to press on with the railway, urged the Turks to depose Mubarak. He was their subject, they said, he had murdered his brother and seized power: they had never recognized him: there was every justification for replacing him with someone more amenable.

Word of this came to Mubarak. Without delay he agreed with the English, and when the Turks threatened him they found the English behind him and were afraid to act.

Outmaneuvered, the Turks took a new line. They decided to rouse the Rashid to attack Mubarak. They would tell the Rashid that whoever ruled Central Arabia must have Kuwait: they would give him arms and money and promise him Kuwait, and he should agree to the railway: they would point out that Kuwait was full of his enemies, and that Mubarak was protecting his rivals, the Sauds. The English would have no valid reason for interfering between two Turkish subjects; and the Rashid, always ready for a fight, agreed at once and began to prepare.

CHAPTER VIII

MUBARAK saw his danger. He had no army: the people of Kuwait were not fighting men: even the town walls had been allowed to fall into ruins. He must find allies to meet the Rashid, and he sent out messengers across the desert and found many of the tribes disgruntled with the Rashid. The Murra and the Ajman with the Mutair, joined him, and then Sadun the Sheik of the Muntafik who lived up on the Basra frontier. He saw that Abdur Rahman and Ibn Saud might become important allies to be used to rouse Nejd when the time came, and he brought them into all his plans and conferences.

Abdur Rahman had, however, grown to disapprove of Mubarak for he had heard of his past life. He had learned that he was unorthodox in his manner of praying and, by Wahabi standards, his life was lax and immoral, for he had many foreign ways and habits. He wore fine clothes of silk. He prayed irregularly. He kept up a great state, riding through the bazaars in a carriage with black stallions and liveried coachmen, and ordering all to bend and salaam to him or be beaten by his guards. In his palace he had luxurious furniture, sofas covered with brocade, coloured windows, and worst of all, panelled ceilings inset with pictures of naked girls. He received his guests and presided at his conferences seated in a gilded arm-chair like a European king; and he smoked tobacco; and when he wanted entertainment he sent to Basra for dancing women and musicians to amuse him.

All these things-dancing, music, tobacco, pictures, especially of women, luxury in clothes or furniture, and this haughty pomp-were anathema to Abdur Rahman. He would not go to the palace. He disapproved of Ibn Saud visiting Mubarak, so that Ibn Saud, who went often, had to do so in secret without telling his father.

Mubarak however, developed a great affection for Ibn Saud. He encouraged him to visit him. He took him with him in his work, his audiences, and his conferences, and for Ibn Saud it was a fine schooling.

Of ordinary schooling, reading, writing and book-learning he had done none since he left Riad. But here with Mubarak he was surrounded by new ideas, new people, novel customs and ways of thought, many of which were forbidden and unknown in Riad. He met foreigners of all sorts, traders, merchants, travellers, representatives of the French, English, Russian, and German Governments. He saw how Mubarak handled them and how the problems of the outside world affected him. Moreover, Mubarak taught him much of the art of ruling.

To rule Kuwait was no easy task. The population came from all the tribes of Arabia. The caravan-followers were lawless. The pearl-fishers were the worst rapscallions in Arabia. The traders of all nationalities would cheat, quarrel, and brawl if he gave them the chance, but Mubarak knew how to deal with them. He was severe, and a dictator; his pomp was calculated to impress them. He did justice, quick and emphatic justice, to all alike. Under him in Kuwait there was absolute security of person and property, and the town prospered exceedingly.

Ibn Saud learnt quickly and readily. He was intelligent and shrewd and with a judgment beyond his years. Usually he was good-tempered and genial, but sometimes silent and depressed and with occasional bursts of wild anger. When with his companions of his own age, he often boasted, struck attitudes, telling them how he was the heir to Riad and Nejd: how he would one day chase out the Rashid and force the tribes and villages to accept him until he ruled the whole Empire of Saud the Great. They laughed at him, jeered at him, reminded him of his one attempt with the mangy camel that went lame. Their jeers made him angry, but they did not affect his belief in himself.

When with Mubarak he was always quiet and reserved. At audiences and conferences he would sit in a corner, his feet curled up under him, his brown Arab cloak drawn round him, playing steadily with the amber beads of a prayer-chain, but watching always, alert, absorbing all that happened, learning always.

CHAPTER IX

MUBARAK decided to strike before the Rashid was ready, so he called up his allies. From Nejd came many volunteers. When he had collected 10,000 he marched out. With him he took Abdur Rahman, but he sent Ibn Saud south with a small force to rouse the country and create a diversion by attacking Riad.

Ibn Saud took with him Jiluwi his cousin and a number of men of Nejd from the town. Here was the chance he had hoped for. At last, after all these years, the tribes were rising against the Rashid. At the head of them he would smash the old enemy. He would prove to those who had laughed at him that he was not merely boasting. At last he was on the move, fighting and leading his own men.

Sweeping wide across the desert and travelling very fast he roused the villagers and the tribesmen of Nejd who answered him gladly. They were tired of the Rashid, and they were overjoyed to see a Saud, and they came swarming in to help him, so that by the time he reached Riad he had a large force.

Suddenly there came news from the north. Mubarak had found the Rashid before the village of Sarif. He had attacked. His allies had failed him. The Muntafik had bolted. The Ajman, as treacherous as ever, had left him in the lurch. He had been defeated. Only a sudden storm of rain had saved his army from being wiped out. He was retreating helter-skelter to Kuwait.

Ibn Saud's force broke up at the news. The tribesmen slunk home: the villagers bolted in panic: the fear of the Rashid was on them. Ibn Saud with a few men hurried back to Kuwait to find that Mubarak and his father were organizing resistance.

After them came the Rashid, and as he came he burned the villages of Nejd as punishment. In the town of Buraida he hanged 180 of the head-men and placed heavy fines on all. Having cowed the people back into submission, he turned on Kuwait, beat Mubarak's last troops at Jahra, a village close outside the town, and prepared to storm the town itself.

Mubarak was finished: he was without troops: his town unfortified: his allies dispersed: his confederacy broken up. Kuwait was all but in the hands of the enemy. For the Sauds there was no hope: they could expect no mercy. Once more Abdur Rahman prepared to be up and away before the enemy came on them.

At that moment the English stepped in. Mubarak was their ally, they said. They warned the Rashid back. They sent a cruiser to enforce the warning. The Rashid halted and retired. Once more they had saved Mubarak and also shut this door to the East in the face of the Germans and their Turkish allies.

CHAPTER X

THE Rashid had defeated them, but Ibn Saud refused to accept defeat.

He was a man now, twenty years old, a great swaggering, rough bedouin buck, full of fire and spirit and spunk, spoiling for a fight, a giant of a man, a foot taller than the average Arab, and broad, with a big manner, and of great strength. He had brown eyes that usually were steady or smiling, but when he was roused were full of fire. He cursed the Ajman: they were treacherous curs. He spat with fury at the news of the Rashid murdering his men in the villages round Riad. He blamed Mubarak for mishandling his army. He tried to rouse Mubarak to fight again, and when he failed looked for helpers among the neighbouring sheiks, but without success. They had all had their bellyful at Sarif. They would not stand up to the Rashid.

Abdur Rahman tried to dissuade him. The time was not yet. He had better wait. Later on they could organize something new.

But Ibn Saud refused to listen. Proud as Lucifer, he was afire to be up and doing. He had had enough of idling. For six years he had sat in Kuwait, loafing, eating out his heart, listening to the hopeless grumbles of the exiles. That was no life for a man. It might do for shopmen and clerks, but not for a Saud. He was a fighting man. This mooning cafe-life drove him to fury. He wanted action. To be up and out in the desert, with a camel or a horse between his knees. The desert was full of chances. With God's help he would win. He was sure of himself and of the people of Nejd. If he gave them the lead they would rise and join him and throw out the Rashid. Only he must have camels, money, and arms; and he had none of these.

Week after week he argued with Mubarak, using all his persuasion. He approached the English representative in the town asking for help but got no reply. At last Mubarak gave way. After all it would be good to harry the Rashid and he could always disown Ibn Saud if it were necessary. So he gave him thirty camels, some of which were bitten with the mange, thirty rifles with ammunition; and 200 riyals in gold and let him go.

Ibn Saud wasted no time. Since his marriage he had lived in a separate house. His first wife, the little bedouin girl, had died six months after their marriage. He had taken two more wives, and by the first one he had a son whom he had called Turki, and he arranged with his father that they should stay with him.

He quickly found thirty of his friends as eager as himself and ready to let him lead them. Jiluwi and his brother Mohamed joined him, and he distributed the arms and ammunition. Then he went to the house by the harbour and said good-bye to his family. His mother, like his father, would have persuaded him against going. With tears she begged him to wait awhile. She was sure he was going to his death or at least to ignominious failure, but his sister Nura urged him with every encouragement to act. She was as ambitious and turbulent as himself. Now that he was decided to go, Abdur Rahman gave him his blessing.

It was late summer when he started. One hot night before the moon was up he went silently and without advertising the fact, with his companions, through the twisting alleys to where the open market led to the encampments of the bedouin and then out into the country beyond to the rendezvous where the camels waited (vouched, with the slaves squatting beside them. A fighting man to a camel, the lurch of the rising camels, and they were away in the dark, making for the open desert.

CHAPTER XI

At first Ibn Saud had success. He had learned from the Murra to move with speed, and his men had each only a raider's kit, a blanket under the camel saddle, a rifle with ammunition, a handful of dates, and a bag of dried curds for a week's ration.

He knew how to cover his tracks and how to camp so as not to show against the skyline, in some hollow, the men in a circle, the camels hobbled and couched within the circle, and outside the sentries squatted, each with a camel saddle for cover and with rifle ready, watching for danger.

Working across the trackless sandhills he would come swooping down on to a caravan or a village, his men behind him yelling his battle-cry, raid, loot, and be away fifty miles by the following evening to raid again somewhere.

Nothing tired him. When the others slept exhausted, he was often away scouting out on his own. He slept little, just lying down, making a place for himself in the warm sand for an hour or two, and then up and on again. He was in his element in a fight. He loved fighting, especially hand to hand. Bellowing like a bull he would come racing into a crowd, towering above them, hacking and laying about him with his sword, scattering them this way and that with his great strength, so that no man dared to face him, and he inspired his men with his own energy and courage.

Skirting down the Hasa he first raided an Ajman and then a Rashid encampment and found good loot. News of his success went out, and, as he had gold and was liberal-handed, the bedouin joined him in numbers, and he harried the allies of the Rashid half across Arabia.

But he had not come raiding just for loot or the intoxication of fighting. He was not a common freebooter. He knew the Bedouin themselves were of little value to him. He had come out to rouse his people of Nejd and Riad to revolt against the Rashid.

But they did not rise. They had risen when he had come in the previous year. They had made a mistake and they had suffered. Ibn Saud must prove his worth before they would rise again.

Then came a lean time: Ibn Saud's raids failed; his money came to an end; his camels were overworked and in poor condition; his ammunition was getting short; the bedouin, seeing neither gold nor loot, deserted him; the Rashid sent men to Nejd who chased him out. He turned into the Hasa and was chased from there by the Ajman and by the Turks who pressed Mubarak to recall him. Cursing the Ajman and the Turks, and finding all roads closed to him, he turned south towards the Great Waste. A messenger from his father and from Mubarak found him. "We are anxious about you", they wrote, "and advise you to return to Kuwait. The time is not ripe for action".

In the palm-groves at Jabrin, Ibn Saud called his men together and put the facts before them; he was himself determined to go on; nothing would persuade him to give up even if he had to fight on alone; with the help of God he would take what chances the desert brought to him; those who wished might go.

Some left him. There remained with him only stouthearted, taciturn, grumpy Jiluwi, Mohamed his brother, the original thirty who set out with him from Kuwait, and ten new men from Riad. Some fifty in all with their slaves. These Ibn Saud bound by oath to stand with him to the end.

His position was precarious. He had set out with high hopes, believing that he had only to show himself and all Nejd would join him against the Rashid and that he would be leading an army. Yet he was no more than an outlaw there were spies watching him and reporting on his moves, and scouts out in every direction to see which way he went; he was an outcast to all the tribes; the hand of every man in the desert was against him, for, in the desert, failure made an enemy of every man.

But he did not lose heart. He was always most dangerous when things went wrong. His belief in himself was as strong as ever.

"Go back", he said to the messenger, "go back and tell my father what you have seen and heard. Tell him that no more will I endure with patience that our country be under the heel of the Rashid and that our family be trodden in the dust. I will gamble success against death. I will not return until I have succeeded. Death is better than failure. All things are in the hands of God the Most Merciful".

CHAPTER XII

IBN SAUD considered carefully what next to do. He saw that this raiding was useless, especially with only a handful of men: it could effect no definite result. His one hope was to make a coup so dramatic as to startle. He decided to make a dash at Riad itself.

He sent one of his men to spy. The man reported that there was a strong Rashid garrison in the town which was holding the Almasmak fort and the principal points: the Governor, a Shammar sheik named Ajlan, lived in a house opposite the fort. The people of Riad and of all Nejd were dissatisfied; they hated the Rashid and prayed for a Saud to come back to rule them, but they would never rise by themselves. They must have a leader.

It was clear that with his few men Ibn Saud could not attack openly. His attack must be a surprise.

The first thing was to hide his intentions. He must disappear and lie low. Giving out word that all his men had deserted him, he made with them into the empty, people-less country to the south.

For fifty days he made no raid nor showed himself; but it was a difficult time. His men, like all desert Arabs, were easily swayed by passing events. Success stimulated them to any heights and failure dragged them down to the depths. Inaction they could not stand. It needed all Ibn Saud's personality to keep them together. They had lived hard before, but with the excitement of loot and raiding to spur them on. Now they almost starved. For food they had a few dates rationed out and occasionally some meat when they shot a sand-deer. Water they got from the rare desert wells. They would creep up-taking all precautions that they were not seen-uncover a well, fill their skins, cover up their traces and creep away. The water they rationed carefully. By the time it was finished it was slimy and stank of the skins. Where they could find a little scrub for the camels they halted, sleeping in the open, but all the time they had to be on tiptoe, watching and scouting out to see that they were not observed, as the news would travel at once through the tribes.

As day passed day without action the men grew restless, muttered and argued. They wanted action or to get back to their women. A life without fighting or their women was not worth living. But Ibn Saud refused to let them go home even for a day or two: they might talk: or they might never come back. He strove with them. With all his persuasive skill he argued with this one, threatened that one, appealed to the pride of another, and gripped them all so that he held them to the one purpose. He had the quality, rare among desert Arabs, of persistent, sustained, dogged effort. Nothing would turn him once he had made up his mind.

The strain was all the greater, for the Month of Fasting had begun. Ibn Saud, Jiluwi, and many of the men kept the Fast rigidly, neither eating nor drinking for an hour before the dawn until the sunset.

Map showing King Ibn Saud's conquest of Arabia

On the twentieth day of the Fast, after they had said the evening prayer and broken bread, Ibn Saud gave the order to move. They travelled cautiously, moving by night, avoiding any tracks or paths, and halting by day. The moon was in the last quarter, and the nights were black dark, so that they put out scouts well ahead to avoid stumbling into an encampment or across stray shepherds. They were forced to move slowly, for their camels were in a bad state, very lean and full of mange.

At the wells of Abu Jifan they kept the Festival of the Id, which ended the Fast, and then reached the foot of the Tuwaiq hills which run northwards close past Riad. Here Ibn Saud gave the order to move quickly: there were villages in the hollows: they might be seen: they must reach Riad before a warning could get ahead of them. They must force the camels to speed.

At the groves of Dil Alshuaib, which were an hour and a half by foot from Riad, he left the animals with twenty men and ordered them to join him only if he sent for them; but that if they heard nothing within twenty-four hours they should take the road to Kuwait and tell his father that he was dead or a prisoner with the Rashid.

Now on foot he led the way through the palm-groves that stretched some miles to the south of the town. With him he had forty men. He had no clear plan of action. He had no confederates in the town. Trusting in God alone he would take what chance offered, seize any opportunity that came to him, and act as seemed good in the circumstances.

At Shamsieh, where the palm-groves ended and the gardens began, he halted. First he cut down a palm-tree, which with its rough bark made a passable ladder. Then picking out Jiluwi and six men, he left the rest under his brother Mohamed, with orders to keep in touch with those behind and to await his orders.

"Look you", he said, "if by to-morrow no message comes to you, haste away home also, for you will know that we are dead. There is no Power or Might save in God".

CHAPTER XIII

WITH Jiluwi and the six men behind him carrying the palm-trunk, Ibn Saud crept forward through the gardens, by twisting paths, over mud walls, and across irrigation channels, listening for a watchman or a dog to give the alarm, until they came close under the town wall near by the great cemetery where the road to Mecca runs. Crouching in the dry moat, they listened. From far overhead they could hear the sentries in the fort. A watchman cried as he passed on his rounds and was gone. There was silence again. They had not been seen.

Putting the palm-trunk against the wall they swarmed up it one by one, keeping low, and dropped into the street beyond. It was mid-January. The night air was sharp. All the townspeople were indoors. Having muffled their arms in their clothes against noise, in single file they made down the empty streets to the house of Jowaisir the cow-herd, which was close to that of the Governor.

Ibn Saud knocked. A woman cried out asking who was there.

"I am from the Governor", he replied, "come to see Jowaisir about buying two cows".

"Go away", called the woman, "do you think we are harlots? Go away. This is no time to come knocking on the door of a house where there are women".

"If you do not open", he answered, "I will tell the Governor, and to-morrow Jowaisir shall suffer". Then he stood aside and waited, with his men ready.

After a time a man looked out with the light of the room behind him. Two seized him so that he could not cry out, and all pressed into the house and closed the door. The man was an old servant from the palace.

"It is our master", he cried as soon as he saw Ibn Saud, and all his family crowded in to do obeisance. He had the information they required.

The fort, he said, was full of Rashid soldiers. They took no special precautions and did not appear to expect an attack. The Governor usually went to the fort to sleep the night. A little after dawn his horses were brought for his inspection. After that he either went riding or walked over to his house. He never moved out without guards round him. His home was two doors off, and there were no sentries on it.

Reconnoitring stealthily, Ibn Saud and his men crept up and over the flat roof-tops. In the next house was a man and his wife asleep. Muffling them in their bedclothes they tied them up.

The Governor's house was next door and joined this house, but stood a story higher so that to get on to it they had to clamber up over each other's shoulders. Once up, they lay stretched out on the flat roof, listening. There was no sound of alarm. They had not been seen or heard.

Moving silently on bare feet down into the house, they found the servants in the basement and locked them together in a room under a guard. On the second floor they found the Governor's bedroom.

Ibn Saud slipped a cartridge into the breach of his rifle. Leaving his men at the door and with Jiluwi beside him carrying a lighted candle, which he shaded with one hand, he tiptoed across the room to the bed against the farther wall. There were two people in it, but they were both women. They were the Governor's wife and her sister.

The wife sat up in terror. Ibn Saud clapped a hand over her mouth while Jiluwi dealt with her sister.

The Governor's wife was a woman of Riad called Mutliba, whose father had worked in the palace for Abdur Rahman, so Ibn Saud knew her.

"Be quiet, Mutliba", he said, "or I will kill you. I see you have played the slut and married one of these Shammar swine".

"My lord", she replied, when he had released her, "I am no slut. I only married after you had left us. And for what do you come here?"

"I have come to kill Ajlan".

"Ajlan is in the fort", she replied. "He has at least eighty men with him; so escape before he finds and kills you".

"When does he come back to the house?" he asked.

"Not until the sun is an hour up the sky", she replied. "Then keep quiet, for if you make a sound we will cut your throats", he said, and locked the two women in with the servants.

The night was now far spent and there were but four hours before the dawn. He reconnoitred to see what to do.

In the front of the house was a large room, and in the room an alcove with latticed windows. Below the windows was a square, and opposite, across the square, the fort with a big double and iron-studded door in a high wall. Above the wall a sentry paced. Ibn Saud decided to rush the Governor when he came out and then in the confusion to burst into the fort.

First, he sent off two men to fetch Mohamed and his party, and when they had come he set watchers by the windows, and with his men settled down to pass the hours that move on leaden feet before the dawn. Squatted round on the floor they listened to one who recited passages from the Koran. They prayed, each man to himself, sat in contemplation, and settled any quarrels there were between them. After that they slept a little.

When it grew towards morning the servant brought them coffee, bread and dates. After they had eaten they performed the morning prayer softly, drawn up in two lines across the room with Ibn Saud in front leading and did their obeisances towards Mecca. Then they looked to their arms and got ready for what the day should bring them.

CHAPTER XIV

A LITTLE after sunrise one of the watchers called. Ibn Saud crept to the window. Outside in the square some slaves were leading up the Governor's horses. In the fort there was movement.

Ibn Saud gave his final orders. Four men were to stay at the window and as soon as they saw him running across the square to open fire on the guards at the fort gate. The rest to follow him.

He watched while the double gates were thrown open, and the Governor, Ajlan, came out with his guards behind him and walked across to his horses.

Now was the time. With a call to his men, Ibn Saud ran down the stairs, out of the house into the square, and with a great shout raced straight at Ajlan, who whipped round, drew his sword and struck at him. Ibn Saud parried the blow with his rifle and grappled with Ajlan and both fell fighting to the ground.

The guards scattered and ran for the fort. One made a thrust at Ibn Saud and was cut down by Jiluwi. Ajlan fought back furiously. He struggled free and made a run for the fort gate, shouting the alarm. Ibn Saud snatched up his rifle and fired at him, wounded him in the arm so that he dropped his sword, dived at him, and caught him by the legs as he got to the gate and clung hold of a post. The sentries from inside rushed to the gate. Ibn Saud's men rushed up from the outside. On the steps they fought, a mob of men struggling, shouting, slashing at each other. From above on the wall and through the loopholes the garrison opened fire and hurled down blocks of stone. A man next to Ibn Saud went down shot: another was wounded and lay writhing. Ajlan's guards grappled with Ibn Saud. Ajlan got one leg free and kicked back, hitting Ibn Saud a tremendous blow in the groin, which sent him reeling in pain. He let go of Ajlan and the guard dragged him through the gateway and tried to swing to the gate. Jiluwi with three men hurled himself on to the gate and heaved it open. Ajlan was running for the mosque across the fort courtyard. From all the walls the garrison was firing down. After Ajlan went Ibn Saud and Jiluwi, with their swords drawn, and Jiluwi cut him down on the steps of the mosque.

Then they made for the staircase. They were completely outnumbered. Two of Ibn Saud's men lay dead: four were seriously wounded. They were thirty against eighty, but they had the drive of victory behind them. Led by Ibn Saud and Jiluwi they stormed their way up to the parapets, killed or wounded half the garrison and threw their bodies down into the courtyard where they were dashed to pieces, and drove the rest into a room where they surrounded them.

At once Ibn Saud sent criers through the town, on to the mosques and the fort wall, to warn the people that he had captured the fort.

The population of Riad rose. They were tired of the Rashid and his' injustices. They wiped out the other posts of Rashid soldiers in the town, and welcomed Ibn Saud with open arms. The remainder of the garrison in the fort surrendered. Ibn Saud was master of Riad.

PART III

CHAPTER XV

IBN SAUD had taken Riad, but he held little else. The villagers and tribesmen of Nejd still would not rise and join him. They had often before seen a town taken by a raid and lost within the same day. For twenty years the Sauds had been continually beaten by the Rashid. They waited cautiously. Only a few hundred hardy ones joined him. With these, his old companions, and the people of Riad he could not hope to stand up to the Rashid with his prestige and all his thousands of fighting men of the Shammar tribes behind him.

Riad he was determined to hold at all costs, so he set to work to make it impregnable before the Rashid counter-attacked, and the whole population turned out to help him. In many places the walls were broken. They built them up with feverish energy, expecting an attack at any moment. They re-dug the moat and built towers and loopholes for rifles. They brought in provisions and stored them, and unearthed rifles and ammunition which had been hidden during the rule of the Rashid. Ibn Saud worked out the details of the defence and organized the men into a garrison.

When the news of this came to the Rashid he sneered.

"The poor fool", he said, "he is as a bird that has flown into the snare". For the moment he was busy with other things. He considered Ibn Saud of no great importance. As soon as he was ready he would come down and teach this cheap, filibustering raider and the people of Riad a lesson: he would show them that they could not murder his Governor and flout him in this way.

Ibn Saud had no intention of being caught in any snare. He had no military training: he knew nothing of the maxims of Napoleon, but he had an instinctive military sense which warned him not to get caught in the walled town by a superior force. Riad he would make able to stand a siege, but he himself would get out into the open country and keep his mobility of action.

He sent word of his success to his father begging him to come to Riad as he would trust the defence of the town to no one else.

Abdur Rahman slipped quietly away out of Kuwait with his son Abdullah, and taking the road into the Hasa made for Riad. He had to travel with caution, for the whole countryside was full of the Rashid's men, and the Rashid himself was advancing on Riad. Ibn Saud sent Jiluwi with 150 horsemen to meet him. By taking unfrequented tracks across the Dahna Desert, they came at last, after many difficulties, safe to Riad.

The people of Riad received Abdur Rahman as their ruler with acclaim. A few days later he summoned the ulema, the Doctors of the Law, and the notables and before them abdicated his rights and nominated Ibn Saud as his successor. He gave him as a symbol the sword of Saud the Great, which, for a hundred years, had been handed down by the Sauds from father to son. It was a fine sword, the blade of Damascus steel, the handle covered with gold, and the scabbard inlaid with silver.

Though a man of action and a fighter, even in his youth Abdur Rahman had been studious and devout. As he grew older he became more sedentary and even more religious. He spent long hours in reading the Koran and the Holy Writings. He shut himself away in contemplation. He was always ready to advise and encourage his sons, but he did not wish to lead them any more. It required a young man to lead in the fighting that was ahead.

Ibn Saud treated his father as before with great respect. At public prayers he stood behind him, letting the old man take the place of Imam, Leader of the Prayers. He deferred to him often, listened to his advice, but from now on Ibn Saud was the ruler of Riad and the claimant to rulership of Nejd and beyond that of all Arabia.

CHAPTER XVI

As SOON as Ibn Saud was satisfied that the town could stand a siege, he handed over the defence to his father and brothers. Taking a force of picked men with a hundred camels and forty horses, and his brother Sad, he set out. Sad was his favourite brother, much like himself in build and temperament. He was only a youth, but he had the same great shoulders, the same genial manner, the same courage and love of a fight, and the same sudden bursts of fierce anger; but he had not Ibn Saud's judgement or self-control.

Keeping Riad as his base Ibn Saud made to the south, into the districts known as the Aflaj and the Harj, which formed the southern half of Nejd. Here the sheiks were of the Dawasir tribes and related to his mother, and the people were stout-hearted and had always been hostile to the Rashid.

He worked on a definite scheme. He went from village to village, rousing the people, organizing their defences, giving them arms, and now and again putting in a few fighting men to encourage them.

The Rashid soldiers came after him, but they could never corner him, for he never stopped to fight, but moved at a great speed. They found the whole countryside bit by bit prepared against them. If they went into a village they might be caught in an ambush. If they attacked the villagers would resist, and suddenly out of the blue would come Ibn Saud on their rear. He raided their camps at night. If a detachment were isolated he surrounded and wiped it out. They had successes, took a village, beat Ibn Saud off with loss, but always he came back, and the villagers and tribesmen were filled with a new spirit and fought them.

The fear of Ibn Saud grew on them. He came tearing down on them unexpectedly from all directions. He became a legend. His taking of Riad with six men was told all round the camp-fires and grew in the telling. He had throttled a man with one hand. The legend grew until he was a giant twice the size of ordinary men. He had taken on three men at once and split all three open with his sword. He had carried off a man in a fight, picking him up at full gallop, slinging him across the horse, and then let him go with a present as if he did it out of pure devilment. He covered distances with such speed that he appeared to be in two places at once.

The Rashid determined to be done with all this. Though a bad ruler, he was a good soldier. He realized that he had under-estimated Ibn Saud. Collecting a large force of Shammar tribesmen he came south from Hail to deal with him.

When he was near Riad his spies warned him that the town was now walled and garrisoned and ready to resist him: he would have to besiege it if he wished to take it. His advisers urged him to occupy the wells round the town and cut off the water supply, but he did not want a siege: he wanted a dramatic capture when he could make an example of the rebels. He had heard that Ibn Saud had bolted south and was afraid to meet him. He would go after him. Dilam, the capital of the Harj, which lay south of Riad, had declared for Ibn Saud. He would feint at Riad, but pass it and make straight for Dilam.

His maneuvre succeeded. He reached the village of Najan, four miles to the north of Dilam, unnoticed, and rested for the night. He would march into Dilam by daylight in full state and make an example of the town.

CHAPTER XVII

IBN SAUD was far away down in the south. As soon as he heard of the Rashid's advance he realized that the crucial time was come. His taking of Riad was a quick raid, of no great permanent military value except that it had given him prestige. Now he must meet the Rashid in the open and fight him. He had sent out the reports of his own flight to draw the enemy as far south as possible.

He set to work to collect a force. His own men were a mere handful, good for a raid but useless for a battle. Day and night he travelled up and down the country, urging the headmen of the villages and the sheiks of the tribes to join him; but they were fearful and lagged. They came only reluctantly. They were still afraid of the Rashid and his Shammar fighters. Gradually Ibn Saud drove out their fears and roused them to enthusiasm.

He worked continuously. He slept little. He ate sparingly and as he travelled. He covered great distances and spent all the hours of rest in earnest argument, more wearying than travelling, until even his constitution felt the strain. At last he had collected a thousand fighting men and given them a rendezvous at the village of Hauta, when late one afternoon a scout riding hard brought the news that the Rashid lay at Najan, ready to attack Dilam.

There was no time to lose. It was seventy miles from Hauta to Dilam. With all the men who had arrived he set off. He must get there before dawn. To mislead any spies he gave out that he was going westwards and rode north along the foot of the Tuwaiq hills.

He urged his men to hurry. His own riding camel was fast, but she was tired so that in the dark she often stumbled on the rough ground and once, when he struck her with his riding cane, she fell and threw him. A bedouin riding close behind him tripped over him and came down with a crash with his camel on top of him. Behind came more men and camels. Out of the tumult, camels roaring and struggling, men shouting, confusion, his guards dragged Ibn Saud free. He was badly bruised and partly stunned.

As soon as he could sit up he climbed back into the saddle. He would not halt a minute. All that night he drove his men, whipping up the laggards, keeping the straggling column of camel and horsemen together, urging them forward. He was in great pain, but refused to give in and allowed neither his men nor himself any rest, so that they reached Dilam while it was still dark.

To the north of the town towards Najan was a belt of palm-trees. In these Ibn Saud distributed his force. Entering the town with his guards he ordered the gates to be closed and the walls to be manned.

Then he collapsed. He was worn out. For seven days he had been continuously on the move without sleep and with only a handful of dates for food. His guards carried him into a house, rubbed him with oil and wrapped him in blankets, and he slept until the call to the midday prayer. Then he woke, stiff and sore from his fall, but refreshed and ready.

CHAPTER XVIII

MEANWHILE as soon as it was day, the Rashid advanced with a screen of mounted scouts ahead of his main body. As they came to the palm-groves Ibn Saud opened fire on them: four horses and six men were killed, and the rest galloped back.

The Rashid sent more men ahead, but when these were held up he realized that he had in front of him, not the townsfolk of Dilam but some regular fighting men. All that day and the next morning he tried to find out their numbers and dispositions by raids and small attacks, but Ibn Saud held his men in. He had allotted places in the line for the coming fight to each tribe, and given them orders to keep concealed, using only the minimum force to hold off the enemy's raids; and so to mislead the Rashid into thinking that he had only a few men in front of him.

He had just returned to Dilam and was sitting down to the midday meal when the alarm was sounded. The enemy were advancing across the open in a long double line. The Rashid, piqued at the holding up of his plans, had determined to walk through the resistance and brush it aside. He marched with his banners flying, his footmen in the centre, and on the flanks his cavalry brandishing their swords and shouting.

Still Ibn Saud held his fire. It was not easy, for his men were wild with excitement at the coming fight, straining to be let go. When the enemy were close he gave the order. The sudden burst of rifle-fire staggered and broke their lines. They had expected a few stray shots and not a solid hail of bullets. They hesitated. At once with his men behind him, yelling his battle-cry, Ibn Saud rode straight at them. They gave back. They started to run. The run became a panic. After them at full gallop came Ibn Saud with his tribesmen and the people of Dilam. They smashed into the running enemy, broke them up, and drove them over the plains in full retreat with the Rashid leading the way, up past Riad and beyond until the pursuit was stopped only by lack of ammunition and the weariness of the animals.

The news went out like a flash. It was a victory: the first time for many years that a Saud had beaten the Rashid. All the Harj and the Aflaj rose, drove out the remainder of the Rashid's men and joined Ibn Saud. All southern Nejd was with him.

But the Rashid had a stout heart. He was not finished so easily. He realized that he must fight for his life, and without delay, before Ibn Saud grew any stronger. As soon as he reached Hail he collected a new force and feinted at Kuwait. Mubarak called to Ibn Saud for help. Ibn Saud marched out of Riad eastwards towards Kuwait.

This was what the Rashid wanted. Having drawn his enemy away he turned south and made a rush at Riad, but Abdur Rahman was ready for him and held him off from the walls.

As soon as the news reached Ibn Saud he did not hurry back to Riad, but cut westward across the enemy's line of retreat and harried his villages. The Shammar, afraid for their homes and families, broke up, scattered and made homewards as fast as they could. The Rashid's army had disappeared.

Taking his chance, Ibn Saud took village after village and threw out the Rashid's men from Shagra, Thamida, and Thadiq, until he controlled the country of Nejd for fifty miles north of Riad.

CHAPTER XIX

THESE successes gave Ibn Saud a new position. He held half Nejd. He had made a name for himself as a fighter. He had driven the Rashid almost back on to his own ground. He had a considerable force, more men were coming in daily, and he could fight the Rashid in the open.

Backwards and forwards they fought all that autumn of 1902 and the spring of 1903 until a great drought and famine in that year held them up. Bit by bit Ibn Saud established himself.

It was a personal duel between Ibn Saud and the Rashid. The Rashid could count on his Shammar tribes round Hail. Ibn Saud could count on the people of Riad and the surrounding districts. These formed a nucleus. Beyond these their forces were constantly changing. Other tribes joined them, the Mutair, the Harb, the Ataiba, the Ajman, but they had no loyalty to one or the other. They were fickle and treacherous. They would change sides in a night. The pique or ambition of a sheik, the promise of gold or loot, a small defeat would set them attacking their own allies or raiding them as they retreated. There was no regular army on either side. The personalities of the leaders were the decisive factors.

The Rashid was short, dark, lowering in looks, brusque in manner; a harsh, unlovable man and ungenerous. He had no patience and no ability to handle the tribesmen. He understood force only. He ruled by force. He fought for loot. He was a freebooter and a destroyer.

Ibn Saud was open-handed and large-hearted. He had unlimited patience. He knew how to deal with the tribesmen, how to flatter their pride and how to ignore their follies. He had the characteristics which the Arabs admire: he was generous and liberal: he was a great lover, a brave and skilful fighter, and, despite his Wahabi upbringing, he enjoyed laughter and boasting. Moreover, he had youth and faith. The Rashid was getting old and casual. Ibn Saud believed in himself. He believed in his people and that once again he would make them great. He could inspire his men with his own inspiration. He conquered not to destroy but to rule, and as he advanced he did not loot but consolidated what he had taken by promises of prosperity.

Late in 1903, when the first rain had come and the famine had broken and there was grazing to be found and water in the wells, Ibn Saud advanced northwards. Between him and the country of the Shammar was the Qasim, the richest district of old Nejd, of which Anaiza and Buraida were the principal towns. The Rashid still held the district, but the people were for Ibn Saud.

He swept quickly over the Qasim, meeting with little resistance-for the Rashid was far away in the north dealing with a revolt of his own tribesmen-defeated and killed Husein Jarrid the Rashid Governor of the district, took Anaiza, and surrounded and besieged Buraida, which was strongly fortified and garrisoned and had shut its gates against him.

Collecting such men as he could the Rashid sent them under Obaid one of his cousins to the relief of his garrison in Buraida.

Ibn Saud turned on Obaid and beat him back in a fierce fight. The Shammar tribesmen broke and ran for home. Obaid was captured.

Ibn Saud was seated on his Arab mare when Obaid was brought before him.

"So", he said, looking down at him, "it is Obaid ibn Rashid, he who murdered my uncle Mohamed in Riad". Dismounting he drew his sword, which his father had given him and which now he carried always. For a while he balanced the sword in his hand.

"Do not kill me, O Abu Turki", cried Obaid.

"This is no place for mercy", replied Ibn Saud. "I will do justice, the justice of just revenge for murder".

He struck three times, deftly with the wrist and forearm. With the first he struck low to hamstring, and as Obaid swayed to the blow he struck higher cutting deep into his neck so that the blood spurted out as from a broken pipe, and with the third, quick and supple as a whip lash, while the man sagged but before he fell, he cut him open so that his heart lay exposed as it beat and shivered and palpitated.

Then he kissed the sword, drew the blade clean and sheathed it.

The garrison in Buraida, now without hope of relief, surrendered, and all the Qasim up to the country of the Shammar accepted Ibn Saud. He had forced the Rashid out of Nejd. Nejd was once more under a Saud.

When Ibn Saud marched back to Riad even the most sour-faced Wahabis came out to meet him with joy. In the Great Mosque, with the consent of the Elders, the religious leaders, the governors, and the sheiks, after the midday prayer he was solemnly declared by his father to be Amir of all Nejd and Imam of the Wahabis.

PART IV

CHAPTER XX

THE RAPID success of Ibn Saud did not, however, suit the Turks. As before they were the nominal rulers of all Arabia, but they held only its fringes with troops and their governors, in the Yemen, up the Red Sea Coast through the Hejaz, across Syria and down the Euphrates river to Baghdad; and along the Persian Gulf to the Hasa -a ring of rich lands round the Inner Desert. And as ever they played the tribes one against the other, backing the weak against the strong. They had opposed the Rashid when he was strong. Now they opposed Ibn Saud.

Lately old Abdul Hamid, the Turkish Sultan, had become ambitious. He wished to revive the Ottoman Empire; to become a great Sultan and Caliph as his ancestors had been before him; and to rule in Central Arabia itself.

The Germans encouraged him. They had already started building the Baghdad railway towards the East, and were sending out traders and agents into the Persian Gulf, and watching for the chance to outwit the English, to push them out of the Gulf and to take Kuwait.

For them Ibn Saud was dangerous. He was in alliance with Mubarak of Kuwait. He was said to be friendly with the English. He was farther away and more difficult to control than the Rashid. They encouraged Abdul Hamid to use the Rashid.

Sultan Abdul Hamid sent more troops to the Yemen and the Hejaz, increased the garrisons in Baghdad and the Hasa, ordered a railway to be built from Damascus down the Hejaz to Medina, and made an agreement with the Rashid that he should rule Central Arabia as his representative. Ibn Saud was interfering with his plans. The Rashid, his nominee, was calling for help. He ordered the Governor of Baghdad to send troops to smash Ibn Saud.

Early in the summer of 1904, eight battalions of regular Turkish troops with six light guns slung between mules marched out of Samarah, a village on the Euphrates River, to the rendezvous to which the Rashid had called the Shammar tribes, and with them advanced into Nejd and threatened Anaiza and Buraida.

Ibn Saud collected every man he could to meet them. Finding them entrenched in a camp near the village of Bukariya he camped over against them.

The Rashid was well supplied. Besides arms and men the Turks had sent him money. Ibn Saud was short of all supplies. He had not enough rations for his men. That night they must sleep hungry. Except for a handful of dates they had nothing to eat all day. They were grumbling and disheartened. It was a poor preparation for a fight, but he could only promise them food when they took the enemy's camp.

Towards evening he went out to reconnoitre the ground ahead, when he saw away to the east a cloud of dust up against the evening sun. More men for the Rashid, he concluded, but his scouts reported that it was not fighting men but a small raiding party bringing sheep into the enemy's camp.

At once Ibn Saud called his men to horse. There was no time to saddle or bridle. Leading the way he galloped them close past the Shammar camp, straight for the sheep, cut down the escort, and each man heaved a sheep up over his horse's cruppers and turned for home.

Already the Shammar were out after them, far outnumbering them, firing from the saddle and shouting as they came.

Ibn Saud with a few men dashed across their front to head them off. After him they went, realized their mistake and turned back too late to cut off the rest. It was a running fight at full gallop in the gloaming.

That night Ibn Saud's camp was full of life; the raid had excited and put new life into the men. They were boasting of the exploits of Ibn Saud and what they would do with the Shammar on the morrow. They ate meat and were satisfied.

Before dawn Ibn Saud attacked--it was July 15th, and the heat was intense. He sent his men at the enemy's flanks. Time and again they drove the Shammar tribesmen back, but always the Turkish infantry stood firm in the centre and the tribesmen rallied round them.

In the late forenoon the Turks opened with their guns. Ibn Saud's men were not used to shells and began to give way. He rode ahead, exposing himself, to encourage them. A shell burst close beside him; a splinter took away half a finger of his left hand and the shrapnel wounded him in the left knee. Streaming with blood he was forced to draw off. His men began to panic and run. With difficulty he held them together, gave them heart and retired back in some formation.

The Rashid was too badly mauled to come after him. He had lost a thousand men. The Turks could do nothing in the great heat. They made camp outside the village of Shinanah, let Ibn Saud go, and turned instead to subdue the villages of the Qasim and northern Nejd.

CHAPTER XXI

NEVER did Ibn Saud show himself better than in defeat. When things were bad and everyone round him in despair he grew genial and optimistic.

His wounds, which would have incapacitated an ordinary man, hardly held him up. He had them bandaged and laughed at them. He set to work at once to find allies and make a confederacy.

He sent messengers to the Mutair, the Ataiba, and the Dawasir and even far away to the north to the tribes of the Muntafik and the Anazah.

With infinite patience he dealt personally with the quarrelsome, touchy sheiks. It needed rare skill and tact to persuade them to settle their differences, smooth over their feuds, and combine to one object. It was as if one collected the thousand jagged pieces of a broken vase, and joined the pieces together, knowing that one mistake, one blow, would smash it again into a thousand jagged pieces. He argued that they must all fight the Rashid, for he had brought in the Turks, and that if the Turks came with the Germans behind them it would be the end of their freedom.

Hobbling from his knee-wound he went among his own people, rousing them, cheering them, collecting every man with a rifle, and before the Rashid and the Turks realized it, he was at them with a new force.

He found them marching up the dry bed of the Rima river. They were coming back to the camp at Shinanah after subduing some of the Nejd villages. Before they could form to meet him Ibn Saud attacked.

Again his men drove the Shammar back on the flanks and, again the Turkish regular troops stood firm as a rallying point, but the Mutair who were on Ibn Saud's left wing began to give. He realized that if he was defeated a second time he was done. Collecting all the men he could, leading the way with his bodyguard behind him and shouting the name of his sister Nura as his war-cry he charged on horseback straight at the Turkish centre.

The Turkish line bent and broke. Ibn Saud burst through them and then back again, cutting them down. The Shammar, seeing the Turks break, scattered and ran.

The Turks re-formed. Ibn Saud surrounded them. That night they started to retreat in formation. The next day they plodded on across the sand. They were parched by the blistering sun. They ran out of water. They lost their way. They were in thick uniforms and heavily laden, a desperate column of weary men plodding forward with their heads down.

Round them Ibn Saud sent his light-moving Arabs, swarming like flies, harrying them with incessant raids and sniping. Some fell out and the bedouin women cut their throats. Some straggled and were cut down by the horsemen. Some surrendered and a few limped painfully back to Basra.

CHAPTER XXII

THE TURKS could not allow such a defeat to go unrevenged. It struck at the basis of their prestige in Arabia. They began to prepare a large force on the Euphrates to deal with Ibn Saud decisively.

Those round Ibn Saud, his advisers and the Wahabi leaders were arrogant with success, full of boasting and war talk, but he had no delusions. He saw clearly that, though he had defeated the Turkish nominee, the Rashid, and the few Turks with him, yet if the Turkish Empire put out its strength it could crush him. He must avoid that. He would go slowly and fob the danger off while it was still far away, and he got into touch with Muklis Pasha, the Governor of Basra, and persuaded Mubarak to act as intermediary.

Mubarak arranged a meeting at which Abdur Rahman on behalf of Ibn Saud and Muklis Pasha met and came to terms: the Turks recognized Ibn Saud as the ruler of Nejd including the Qasim on condition that they kept a nominal force in the district and garrisons in Anaiza and Buraida.

The danger of serious attack was for the moment postponed.

The Turkish garrisons arrived but very soon found themselves isolated. Ibn Saud gave them no help. They could not keep order or security. All the roads became infested with raiders who looted the convoys which brought their ammunition and supplies from Basra. They could do nothing in retaliation. If they moved outside the walls of the towns in small numbers, they were surrounded and killed. If they went out in large numbers they moved too slowly to catch the light-moving bedouin.

At the end of a year the Turkish soldiers were in rags, almost reduced to starvation. In some places they were eating the pith of the date-palms for their only ration. Many were selling their arms for a little food. They had nicknamed the Qasim "The Devil's Daughter". They were without heart or spirit. Dying of disease and the violence of the sun they were deserting in numbers.

The Turkish Government pressed Ibn Saud to give them active help. He gave them fair words but no help. They tried him with a subsidy in gold. He needed gold. It was the handle to all power. It meant arms and allies. He needed it urgently, but with a gesture he refused and returned a present the Turks had sent him.

He had in fact realized that conditions had changed. The Turks were in difficulties. The Yemen and the Hejaz were in revolt. Syria was honeycombed with revolutionary committees, working for Arab independence and to eject the Turks. In the Balkans, in Egypt, in Turkey, and in Constantinople itself there was disorder and the threat of upheaval and revolution.

He knew that now the Turks could not concentrate against him nor even supply or help their garrisons in the Qasim. He might have attacked them, defeated them, and driven them out by force and so gained renown and prestige. Those round him urged him to take action. He preferred to wait and to let time and necessity work for him.

As he had foreseen, needing every man they could mobilize and realizing their helplessness, the Turks reduced their garrisons in the Qasim and then withdrew them. They had learned their lesson. Leaving a few garrisons along the Hasa coast they went and returned no more to Central Arabia.

CHAPTER XXIII

HAVING jockeyed the Turks into going without making war, Ibn Saud was once more face to face with his rival the Rashid. He was on the top of the tide now, winning. His renown was growing. More and more tribesmen were joining him, but he could not relax.

Rashid was as stout-hearted as himself. The desert was full of chances. One serious error and his fickle, treacherous allies would leave him and his patchwork of alliances would tear to pieces under him.

During these years he lived in constant danger. He must be always ready not only for the enemy's raids and sudden night attacks, but also for treachery in his own camp. Any night his closest allies might turn on him and murder him. His tent was always pitched either clear of the camp or so that there were no other tents before or behind it; his bodyguard close round him. He slept but little, some two or three hours a night.

When on active service he never used a bed but lay on a rug on the sand with his drawn sword beside him. Sometimes he did not even he down but squatted on his heels, his chin on his hands and his hands folded over the hilt of his sword stuck upright in the sand.

From sleep he could, like a coiled snake, in one movement come straight into the striking position.

Once a servant blundered into his tent without warning and Ibn Saud had sliced his shoulder and arm away before the man could call out. His horse stood picketed by the tent, and if there were an alarm he was up and away riding without saddle or bridle.

He became as lean and muscular as a wild animal. The desert life kept his body taut and as firm as marble. He had no liking for sedentary town life. He ate and drank sparingly. His vigour was immense. He worked all day and most of the night. He would sit in the mouth of his tent interviewing all who came, hearing complaints, deciding cases, listening to reports, and judging the truth of the news. He had a great knowledge of the country and the lives and histories of all the tribes, and he saw personally to the details of camp and food arrangements and gave his own orders and made the plans of action. Even when he was busiest he performed his religious observances strictly, fasted, read the Koran, and prayed five times a day.

When there was a raid or a fight he was the first on the move, eyes afire and as excited as a boy going out to play.

Except for his very few hours of sleep he was never still. He wore out those round him and he fought the Rashid steadily back until at last he cornered and finished him.

The Rashid had been raiding. After a long march he came to the village of Muhanna and camped. His men were tired. He himself was growing more and more disheartened and casual as he grew older. Believing that Ibn Saud was many miles away he took no special precaution for the night.

Ibn Saud was in fact many miles away, but as soon as his scouts brought him the news he made a forced march in the dark. At dawn a thick dust storm blew up. Under cover of this he attacked, caught the enemy unprepared, and smashed them into flight.

The Rashid could have escaped, but he stood his ground, shouting his battle-cry to rally his men. Almost alone he was shot down at close quarters. His head was stuck on a pole and paraded through the villages so that the tribes should know he was dead.

At once among the Shammar and in the Hail there was confusion. The Rashid's successor was a weakling. All the males of the family fought between themselves for power, killing and murdering each other. The tribes, without a strong man to lead them, dispersed to their homes to quarrel and fight among themselves.

They would have combined against an invader, but they had no desire to go conquering. For the time being they were no more danger to Ibn Saud.

PART V

CHAPTER XXIV

IBN SAUD was twenty-seven, enormous in build, strong, lean, and hard, an accepted leader with a reputation as a fierce fighter and all the prestige of victory behind him, a tremendous virile force of a man who had defeated the Turks, overthrown the Rashid, and conquered Nejd by the strength of his own right arm.

But he was by no means established. Difficulties and dangers came crowding in on him from inside as well as from out. The desert Arabs would not accept anew master so easily. They were like sand, each tribe and individual a fiercely independent unit. Like sand they could be held together between strong hands, but they could not be moulded into one plastic piece. And if the strong hands grew slack or loosened, like sand they escaped and fell strewn out into units as fiercely independent as before.

They had joined Ibn Saud not out of loyalty but because they thought they would have more liberty to raid and loot, when the Rashid was beaten. But the hand of Ibn Saud was heavy on them. He forbade them to raid without his permission and he punished, without pity, all who disobeyed him, and the tribesmen grew restless and rebellious under the restraint.

In Riad itself the ulema looked at Ibn Saud sideways. He was devout it was true. He prayed, fasted, and gave alms as should every good Moslem. He neither drank wine nor smoked nor used unseemly oaths. His private life was ordered in accordance with Islam and the conventions. As a strong, virile man he delighted in many wives, but he had no concubines, no stealthy liaisons or mistresses. No man could throw stones at him in this matter.

Nevertheless the Wahabi Elders were distrustful of him; he was too genial for their way of thinking; he was often gay and even laughed, which was indecorous behaviour to their sour minds: he was known to have allowed his fighting men to sing on the march; he had found that the people of Anaiza smoked tobacco openly, and he had not punished them; and he had been a friend of Mubarak who, as all the world knew, was very irregular in his ways: and he hobnobbed with foreigners and even encouraged them to visit him.

For help Ibn Saud turned to his father. Abdur Rahman had a great reputation for sanctity and the Wahabis trusted him. They would listen to him when they would listen to no one else.

Nevertheless Ibn Saud had to walk delicately. The Elders watched him. They considered themselves as the keepers of the conscience of every man, as did in fact every Wahabi whether elder or simple worshipper - and especially as keepers of the conscience of the ruler of Riad. They criticized and checked him. They would have raised the country against him if they had proved him unorthodox.

Naturally hot-blooded Ibn Saud was irritated by their interference and their acid criticisms, but he held himself in, hid his thoughts, and bore with them.

From outside came greater dangers. Ibn Saud's success suited Mubarak no more than it suited the Turks. His policy was the same as that of the Turks. He wished always to protect Kuwait by creating a balance of power among the tribes in Central Arabia. Ibn Saud had upset that balance. He had become too strong and a threat to Kuwait itself.

Moreover, between Mubarak and Ibn Saud had arisen much ill-feeling. While Ibn Saud had been a penniless refugee Mubarak had treated him kindly. He still continued to treat him as a refugee, sent him advice and expected him to follow it without question.

But Ibn Saud refused; he was no more a youth to be instructed; he was master of Nejd and a person of importance. He resented Mubarak's attitude of patronage and control. He was irritated at Mubarak's tone, and Mubarak was jealous of the success and the independence of his protege. They met and corresponded with all due politeness but Mubarak began to work against Ibn Saud and to make alliances to counter-balance him; and he came quickly to an agreement with the Turks who gave him money.

Between Kuwait and Nejd lived the Mutair tribes. They were surly and ill-natured. They resented all control, and Ibn Saud had already claimed the right to rule over them. Mubarak bought over Feisal al Dawish their sheik, an uncompromising, salt-pickled warrior. He persuaded the Rashid family to end their quarrels and to loin with the Mutair. Finally he persuaded the Governor of the town of Buraida to refuse to recognize Ibn Saud. He himself stood in the background and did not appear openly, but Ibn Saud knew that he was the master-mind behind the confederacy.

As soon as Ibn Saud heard that the Governor of Buraida had shut the gates against him, he marched out. He found a force of Shammar tribesmen between him and the town and attacked at once. During the fight his horse slipped. He was thrown and broke a collar-bone. At sunset both sides drew off without either having gained the superiority.

All that night Ibn Saud lay in agony in his tent on the sand. He twisted and turned and sweated with the pain of his shoulder, but he refused to give in. His men had lost heart when they had seen that he was hurt. Unless he lead them personally they would break and run.

At dawn he led them out and by midday he had driven the Shammar back. Then he turned on the Mutair, beat them, and chased them into their own country.

He decided to make an example of them. The Mutair had changed their allegiance so often. They had submitted to him before and then joined his enemies. They were traitors. He had shown before that he could hold his hand and be patient. Now he would show them that he could use force.

He lashed out at the Mutair without mercy. He raided them, looted and burned their villages right up to the frontier of Kuwait. He hung their headman and drove out Sheik Dawish. Having made up his mind that it was necessary, Ibn Saud was utterly ruthless. He branded his mark on the Mutair so that all the tribes should see what he had done and be afraid. He harried them relentlessly - "I draw the sword in the face of the bedouin", he said. "It is the argument they understand"-until they crawled to him and submitted.

Finally he turned on Buraida. The Governor he had appointed himself. The gates were still closed against him and the town prepared for a siege, but there were some of his men in the town who at the hour of evening prayer, when the garrison was in the mosque, opened the gates to Ibn Saud. The Governor brought to him fell on his knees. He expected that Ibn Saud would have him executed at once; but with a sneer Ibn Saud told him to stand up and then to take his family and be gone out of Nejd.

But he was determined that there should be no more trouble in Buraida. The town was strongly fortified. Its people were well known for their ill-natured malevolence. It was the key point of northern Nejd and the centre of all its trade. It had always been rebellious. He made his cousin Jiluwi the Governor.

Already Jiluwi was feared far and wide. From the taciturn youth who had helped Ibn Saud to raid Riad he had grown into a short thick-set man with stern features and great bodily strength, a renowned rider and judge of horses and camels, very silent, quick in decision, and ruthless in action. He was utterly loyal to Ibn Saud. He had no personal ambition, but he was rigidly conscientious. He carried out the law to the letter. His judgments were swift and terrible. He kept rigid discipline among his people. While Ibn Saud was feared, Jiluwi instilled into all he ruled such terror that his word was law even to the most distant bedouin; and from the date he became Governor of Buraida there was no more trouble in Northern Nejd.

CHAPTER XXV

HARDLY had Ibn Saud returned to Riad before the new troubles were on him. Away in Constantinople there was revolution. The leaders, who called themselves the Committee of Union and Progress, led by a young officer named Enver, deposed the Sultan, old Abdul Hamid, but they continued the Sultan's policy of reviving the Turkish Empire; and being young and enthusiastic they put more energy and zeal into their plans, and they tightened up the control of the Central Government over the provinces of the Empire and to take a firmer grip of the Arab countries, especially Syria and those along the Red Sea Coast - the Hejaz with the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina, and the Yemen and the Asir farther to the south because they were rich. To do this they hurried forward the building of the railway which was to run from Damascus to Medina for by this they could transport soldiers as well as pilgrims; and they appointed one Husein ibn Ali as the Grand Sherif of Mecca and their Governor of the Hejaz.

Husein was a typical Arab - Turkish official, of which there were many in Constantinople. He had spent many years in the city, where his sons were brought up. He had held many official posts and was a Councillor of the Empire. In looks and manner he might have been a Turkish Pasha of the Sultan's court, a dignified old man already over fifty with a short well-kept beard, slow and pompous in speech using long and antiquated words in preference, conservative and religious, subtle in all the guiles of Turkish procrastination, very courteous yet obstinate, autocratic and suspicious. He had been chosen because he was of the Hashimite family of Mecca, which was descended from the Prophet Mohamed; and because the Turks trusted him to act as their faithful agent.

Almost at once Husein and Ibn Saud quarrelled. Between Nejd and the Hejaz lay a broad steppe of highlands where the tribes of the Ataiba grazed their flocks of sheep and camels. Through this country ran the caravan routes from Nejd into the Hejaz and to Mecca, and it was the key to the Hejaz and to the Red Sea Coast.

Over the Ataiba Ibn Saud claimed suzerainty with the right to call on them for fighting men and to levy his taxes. Husein refused to allow such a claim. He maintained that they were his subjects. Ibn Saud marched on to the Ataiba from the east and received their submission. Husein sent his son Abdullah, a fat weak-kneed youth with a mouth full of boastings, to raid from the west. Ibn Saud marched farther and sent out his brother Sad to raid even wider. Husein himself was in the south, in the Yemen, helping the Turks to crush a revolt. As soon as the revolt was crushed he made a march to demonstrate his victory, back through the Ataiba, and forced them to submit. By chance his men surrounded and captured Sad.

Ibn Saud prepared to attack Husein, when from behind came a new danger. His cousins, the sons of his uncle Saud who had chased him out of the Hasa when he was a refugee and who still claimed that they were the heirs to Riad and Nejd, had raised the Ajman and marched into southern Nejd and threatened Riad. The Hazazina head men of the town of Laila and all the disgruntled tribes had joined them.

Ibn Saud faced the facts. For him facts were far more important than pride. He was never foolhardy. He never battered his head against the wall of the impossible. He realized that, with this revolt behind him, he could not stand up to Husein, and he wanted to get his brother back. As quickly as possible he came to terms with Husein; he made a "little peace" as he called it to tide over the crisis. In return for Sad he paid an indemnity and withdrew.

Then he acted like lightning. The revolt was close to Riad. It was a blow to the heart. It threatened his personal prestige. If he was defeated, even if he hesitated, compromised, or delayed he was done. He hit hard at once. He found his cousins at the village of Hariq, dashed at them, caught them unprepared, and smashed them.

The Ajman bolted back across the border into the Hasa. His cousins fled, some to the Hasa and some to take refuge with Husein of Mecca. The Hazazina and their local supporters made for Laila where Ibn Saud surrounded them.

He made up his mind that here in the south he must, as he had in the north, make an example. They, like the Mutair, were his subjects and now traitors. Systematically and without pity he harried their land. He sent his men to kill and loot in the villages round Qutain and Hauta and then to raze them to the ground. He turned on Laila, forced it to surrender without terms and condemned to death nineteen of the headmen and the Hazazina leaders.

Giving the condemned men twenty-four hours' grace, he sent messengers out through the country-side to summon the people. Before the main gate of the town he ordered a platform to be built. On this at dawn he took his seat with his sheiks and his bodyguard round him. Before the townsmen, villagers, and bedouin from far and near were formed into three sides of a huge square, where his Wahabi fighting men kept order. Above them sat Ibn Saud, fierce in his anger, dominating and terrifying. The fate of every man there was in his hands.

He gave all the orders himself personally. From the town the nineteen condemned were marched out. In pairs they were led up and made to kneel at the foot of the platform. "There is no Might nor Power save in God", said Ibn Saud and made a sign at which a huge negro slave without his cloak and with a drawn sword in his hand stepped forward with his assistants behind him.

They carried out all the formalities of the state execution deliberately and with dignity, no savage pleasure in killing, but cold justice. The executioner with the point of his sword pricked each man as he came to him in the neck, and as the wretch stretched his neck stiff at the terror of the steel, with a backhand blow he sliced through the neck. When eighteen were dead and the nineteenth knelt ready Ibn Saud pardoned him and bade him go free to tell what he had seen of the just vengeance of Ibn Saud.

After that he rose and spoke to the people, his voice rising in a great roar, telling them of the sin of rebellion and its punishment. Then he called to them to come nearer, dropped his voice and spoke to them as his well-beloved subjects. He bade them go and choose one who should act as their Governor, and be faithful to him; and he promised them that if they remained loyal they should rule themselves in peace.

Only, all that day the eighteen dead men lay strewn out on the sand, a massed horror in the clean sunlight, a feast for the flies and the vultures, and a warning to rebels. After the sunset prayer they were taken away by their relatives and buried with the due ceremonies.

The story of Laila was told from village to village and from camp-fire to camp-fire and grew in the telling. The fierce punishment, ruthless, just, and without malice, and the unreasoning generosity caught the imagination of the Arabs. This was a man, they said, a man to rule them, a fierce fighting man, a just judge who knew his own mind and acted without hesitation or doubt, a man to be feared and obeyed.

The most distant tribesmen heard it and were afraid. They understood strength and justice. Ibn Saud gave them both. He was fit to be master and to rule them.

CHAPTER XXVI

AT LAST Ibn Saud had a breathing space in which he might organize and consolidate his position. He had ejected and killed the Rashid; the family split by quarrels could do nothing against him, and the Shammar tribes had no leader. He had crushed all internal revolts, and he had driven out the Turks. In the s