Word: hejaz
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...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...
Forty years ago a young Arab officer rode triumphantly up the old Hejaz railway beside Prince Feisal and Lawrence of Arabia toward the ancient desert capital of Amman. Last week, still pursuing his old dream of an Arab nation filling the Fertile Crescent from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, General Nuri asSaid, 70, returned to Amman to put into being a new union, the Arab Federation, joining the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan...
...slashing night ride, he and a handful of followers recaptured the ancestral capital and palace of Riyadh. Soon after World War I, he had united all the tribes of the Nejd under his rule; next, he overthrew the Saud enemy, Sherif Hussein of Mecca, and blended the Hejaz into his domain...
...Hussein into exile and seized his lands, Ibn Saud had feared the Hashemites would return for vengeance. Recently, the old man had become obsessed with the fear that the British would allow Jordan to use its Arab Legion-the most formidable force in the Arab world-to reconquer the Hejaz. Talal, for his part, evidently wants to prove that he stands with the Arabs and, if necessary, against the British. He is said to be ashamed of his father's pro-British role...