In the evening, the first reaction after success having passed off, they thought of defence. Auda went back to Guweira and three other defensive posts were set in a semi-circle about Akaba. Lawrence decided to go to Egypt at once with the great news and ask for food, money and arms to be sent at once by sea as reward. He chose eight men to go with him, mostly Howeitat, on the best camels of the force. A bad ride was ahead of them, and it was difficult to decide whether to go gently, sparing the animals, in which case they might fail with hunger; or whether to ride hard, when they might break down with exhaustion or sore feet in mid-desert. Lawrence decided in the end to keep at a walk; if they could hold out, they would reach Suez in fifty hours. But in such cases the test of endurance is harder for the man than for the camel, and Lawrence was near the end of his strength, having ridden an average of fifty miles a day for the last month, with very little food. To make halts for cooking unnecessary they carried lumps of boiled camel and cooked dates in a rag behind their saddles. The camels were trembling for weariness early in the night, for the road wound up across the Sinai hills with a gradient of one in three and a half. When they reached the top one camel had to be sent back as unfit for further travel. The others were allowed to graze for an hour. About midnight they reached Themed, the only wells on the journey, watered the camels and drank themselves but did not stay many minutes. They rode all that night and when the sun rose gave the camels half an hour’s grazing, then on again all day until sunset, when they halted for an hour. They rode all that second night at a mechanical walk, over hills, and when dawn came saw a melon-field sown in this no-man’s-land between the armies by some adventurous Arab. They halted for an hour and cracked the unripe melons to cool their mouths, then again forward until Suez came in sight, or something that probably was Suez, a jumble of points bobbing about far away in the mirage. They reached great trench lines with forts and barbed wire, roads and railways; but they were all deserted and falling into decay; the war had long since moved on a hundred and fifty miles to the north-east. At last in the middle of the afternoon of the third day they arrived at the Suez Canal. They had ridden for forty-nine hours without sleep and with only four short halts and had come a hundred and sixty-eight miles. When it is remembered that they were tired men before they started, and that the camels were exhausted too, this must rank as a good ride, though Lawrence surpassed it himself later.