The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [39]
Twice it has been Taif’s unfortunate fate to stand in the way of the consolidation of Arabia, first spiritually and then politically. In 630 C.E., the Prophet Mohammed laid siege to the walled city, which until then had resisted his authority. The Muslim forces gained permission from their leader to use a catapult to breach the city’s defenses despite the fact that women and children would be harmed. (Later, al-Qaeda would use this precedent to justify the killing of noncombatants on September 11, likening the use of airplanes to that of the catapult so long ago.) In that instance, the siege failed and Mohammed withdrew from the city, but within the year the town’s leaders converted to Islam and the last outpost of paganism fell. Then again, in 1924, when Abdul Aziz was waging his campaign to unify Arabia, the city surrendered to the Ikhwan, only to see the town pillaged and more than three hundred men slaughtered, their throats slit, their corpses thrown into the public wells. With the fall of Taif, the rest of the Hijaz lay open to the Saudi forces.
In the aftermath of that massacre, Faisal, who was then one of the teenage warrior sons of Abdul Aziz, led the Saudis down the precipitous caravan trail that spiraled toward Mecca. He had a vision at the time that one day a genuine road would connect the Hijaz with the nation that his family was forging, however bloodily.
Until Faisal became king, however, a road to Taif remained an unattainable dream. The sheer mountain wall defied even the most muscular and sophisticated approaches of modern construction. Apath could be blasted through the rock, but there was still the strategic problem of getting equipment to the site—the excavators, bulldozers, backhoes, dump trucks, and graders necessary for modern construction. Otherwise, the road would have to be built almost like a tunnel, with one segment completed before the next could be started. Faisal invited many foreign companies to bid on the project, but none of them could figure out how to do it, even with an extravagant budget. Then bin Laden offered to build the road. He even provided a timetable.
Bin Laden’s brilliant solution for getting the equipment to the site was to disassemble the giant machines and mount the pieces on the backs of donkeys and camels. Once in place, the bulldozers and tractors were put back together and set to work.
In Taif, there is a legend that to establish the route, bin Laden pushed a donkey over the edge of the mountain and followed him as he picked his way down the course of the future highway. For twenty months, beginning in 1961, he lived with his men on the side of the mountain, personally setting the dynamite charges and marking the path for the bulldozers with chalk. Despite his timetable, work went slowly. Occasionally King Faisal would arrive at the site to inquire about the mounting unbudgeted expenses.
The two-lane road that bin Laden built tiptoes down the granite escarpment in long winding loops, past the circling raptors, through geological time zones. In the distance, the Red Sea underscores the horizon; just beyond lies the barren shore of Sudan. The craftsmanship of the workers is evident in the stone walls and bridges that echo the caravan trail nearby. About two-thirds of the way down the mountain,