Word: hejaz
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...crash road-building program, Feisal plans 6,000 miles of new roads by 1970. He is also rebuilding the Hejaz Railway-in ruins ever since Lawrence of Arabia blew it apart during World War I-from Medina through Jordan to Syria. In Jeddah, he is putting up a $14 million water-desalting plant that will daily convert Red Sea water into 5,000,000 gallons of potable water and produce 45,000 kw. of power...
...terrific roar, and the line vanished from sight behind a spouting column of black dust and smoke." So wrote T. E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of his World War I dynamiting raids on the Hejaz Railway, the 782-mile "pilgrim express" whose single track linked Damascus with the Islamic holy city of Medina. Lawrence of Arabia reduced most of the line to a snarl of sprung steel and splintered ties. Nearly half a century of desert winds and systematic depredation have done the rest. Bedouins ransacked the abandoned stations, pried loose wooden ties for cooking fires. In Medina...
...more romantic figure emerged from World War I than the shadowy desert raider in flowing white burnoose known as Lawrence of Arabia. Here was a pint-sized Oxford archaeologist who could outride the fiercest Bedouin warrior, a galloping ghost who had blown up 79 bridges along the Turkish-held Hejaz Railway (and mourned he had not made it 80), an Englishman hailed by the Arabs as El Aurens, who in 2½ years had led the revolt in the desert from the Red Sea port of Jidda to the gates of Damascus. Then, with his chosen prophet, Emir Feisal, about...