The Best American Travel Writing 2015 by Andrew McCarthy Read Free Book Online

tourist destination, the empty land south of town has been laced with modern roads. But those roads lead to nowhere in particular, while tattered billboards advertise the condominium complexes and industrial parks allegedly to come.
    Those in search of “old Aqaba” will be disappointed. This consists of a tiny stone fort near the oceanfront promenade and, next to it, a dusty four-room museum. Dominating the small plaza in front of the museum is perhaps Aqaba’s most peculiar landmark, a 430-foot flagpole—the second highest freestanding flagpole in the world, according to the local tourism bureau. It was at just about this spot that, on the morning of July 6, 1917, Lawrence and his exultant rebel followers would sweep through the streets to take a “victory bath” in the sea.
    By odd happenstance, Lawrence had visited Aqaba just a few months before the war began. From that firsthand experience, Lawrence knew that the “gateway” into Syria was actually through a winding, 20-mile-long mountain gorge that the Turks had laced with trenchworks and forts designed to annihilate any force advancing up from the coast.
    Lawrence also perceived a political trap. If the British and French took control of Aqaba, they could effectively bottle up their Arab allies and contain their rebellion to Arabia. That done, whenever the two European imperial powers did manage to push into Syria—promised to the French under Sykes-Picot—they could renege on the promises made to Hussein with a clearer conscience.
    Since any advance inland from Aqaba would be murderous, Lawrence’s solution was to first take the gorge and then the port. And to thwart his own nation’s imperial designs, he simply kept his plan to himself. On the day he set out from the Arabian coast, embarking on a 600-mile camel trek through the desert to fall on Aqaba from behind, not one of Lawrence’s fellow British officers knew where he was headed or what he intended to do when he got there. Accompanying him were a mere 45 rebels. On their journey, a two-month ordeal that would take them across one of the world’s harshest landscapes, each of the men started with only water and a 45-pound sack of flour as provisions.
    Forming the dramatic centerpiece of Lean’s
Lawrence of Arabia
is the moment when Lawrence and his rebel band launch their surprise attack on Aqaba from behind. Led by a triumphant white-robed Peter O’Toole, the rebels bear down on the stunned Turks.
    In reality, the crucial battle for Aqaba occurred 40 miles to the north, in the “lost” wadi of Aba el Lissan. It was there, with the hellish two-month trek through the desert completed and Aqaba almost in his grasp, that Lawrence learned a Turkish relief force was marching in his direction. Even if his rebel army—swelled to nearly 1,000 with recruits—continued on to Aqaba, Lawrence reasoned, this enemy column would soon catch up; there was no choice but to destroy it first.
    They found the Turks camping in Aba el Lissan on the night of July 1, 1917, and what ensued there was less a battle than a massacre. The Turkish force of 550 soldiers was virtually wiped out at the cost of 2 Arab dead. With the path cleared, Lawrence and his men rushed on for Aqaba, the Turkish garrison there surrendering after barely firing a shot.
    Â 
    Clad in worn sandals and lifting the hem of his robe to avoid the snag of thornbushes, Abu Enad Daraoush picks his way over the hillside. To the untrained eye, the wadi of Aba el Lissan is indistinguishable from a thousand other windswept valleys in southern Jordan, but Daraoush, a 48-year-old farmer and shepherd, knows its secrets. Reaching a rock outcropping, he points out a feature on the level ground below: five or six circles of cleared earth, each about 10 feet across and delineated by rings of large boulders. Resembling oversized fire pits, the circles are the traces of a Turkish Army encampment, where