Текст книги "Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia"
Автор книги: Michael Asher
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This was the situation when Lawrence arrived in Aleppo. He sent Haj Wahid a telegram to let him know he was on his way, but the Haj replied that he had already resolved to kill Contzen, and in preparation had sent away his wife, downed an entire bottle of whisky, and loaded his rifle. Alarmed, Lawrence sought out Contzen’s superior in Aleppo – the Director of the railway – and burst in on him at a dinner party, saying that unless he wired Contzen to desist immediately, the engineer would be a dead man. The Director found this highly amusing. He quickly changed his mind, however, when Lawrence threatened to sign an affidavit in front of the British Consul swearing that the Director had not lifted a finger to defuse the situation. The Director put an electric trolley at Lawrence’s disposal, and he arrived at Carchemish the next day to find that Contzen’s men were about to pull apart its venerable walls. With the help of the local Minister of Public Instruction, Fuad Bey, he persuaded Contzen to retire and remove his rails. Contzen received a public upbraiding, and the Haj was warmly commended. Woolley returned at the end of September to find peace in the camp.
Work began again, and almost at once they were rewarded by the discovery of a Hittite door-frame with a perfect inscription. Woolley had ordered a light railway to be delivered from Europe, but it had been delayed, and a huge workforce of 200 men was required in consequence. Retaining them proved a headache, for Turkey was now at war in the Balkans and the Porte was recruiting every able-bodied man for the army. The Englishmen used their diplomatic immunity to protect their labourers, however, and gave sanctuary to those fleeing conscription in the Expedition House. Woolley forbade any policemen or soldiers from entering the dig. The ploy was effective, because while the railway camp was decimated, the Carchemish crew lost not a single man. This raised the prestige of the British enormously, and gave them a certain amount of protection against local insurgency, for minorities such as the Kurds and the Armenians were preparing to take advantage of the Balkan war to settle old scores with the Turks. In autumn 1912, Lawrence and Woolley visited Busrawi Agha, chief of the Milli-Kurds, a nomadic folk whose great leader, Ibrahim Pasha, was believed to have been poisoned by the CUP. Busrawi was talking openly of getting rid of the Turkish government once and for all, and the Englishmen learned to their dismay that the Milli-Kurds were planning to ransack Aleppo in revenge for the death of their paramount chief. As autumn turned to winter, news of Turkey’s defeats in Bulgaria and the advance of the Bulgarian army towards Istanbul was received with delight by the Kurds and Arabs. Ironically, perhaps, as long as the old Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II had remained in power as Khalif, these people had remained loyal to the Porte. With the coming of the CUP, though, the old loyalties had been sundered. It cannot have escaped Lawrence’s notice that they now regarded Hussain ibn ‘Ali, Emir of Mecca, as their religious chief. If the first faint clarion-call of revolt against the Turks sounded at this moment in Lawrence’s inner ear, it was drowned out by fears for the safety of the excavations and his countrymen in Aleppo, where, he heard, the Kurds had sent an agent to mark out the best houses for possible plunder. Woolley and Lawrence suspected that one of these might well be the British Consulate.
It was at this troubled time that Lawrence chose to try out his newly acquired skill of disguise in native dress. Though his Arabic was now fluent, he knew that he could never be taken for an Arab – he was too fair in appearance, and his mastery of grammar too poor for a native speaker. But northern Syria was inhabited by many non-Arab peoples, some of whom were fair-skinned and spoke Arabic imperfectly. Lawrence believed he might be able to pass himself off as a member of one of these minorities. Just how good was Lawrence’s Arabic? He later tended to be misleadingly modest about his mastery of the language, and even told Robert Graves that he did not know a word of classical (written) Arabic, which differed a great deal from the various spoken dialects. This was untrue: Lawrence had studied written Arabic with Fareedah al-Akle at Jebayyil in 1911, and at least once wrote part of a letter to her in the language. There is also extant a single Arabic letter signed by Lawrence and addressed to Sharif Hussain of Mecca, the language of which, while comprehensible, displays a mixture of dialects and styles. It has been authenticated by Dr Basil Hatim of the School of Arabic Translation and Interpreting at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, as being the work of a non-native speaker, precluding the idea that Lawrence might have dictated it to a scribe. As for Lawrence’s colloquial Arabic, that too eventually became a hotch-potch of dialects, mainly Syrian and Hejazi. Lawrence had an excellent vocabulary, but his pronunciation was poor, his grammar ‘an adventure’ – as he himself admitted – and he spoke with a noticeable English accent. Alec Kirkbride, later one of his colleagues, who had grown up in Egypt and really did speak Arabic ‘like a native’, commented that Lawrence’s accent and pronunciation alone would have marked him as a foreigner. However, Lawrence was game to see whether he could pass as a native, and the opportunity arose near the end of November, when a villager arrived at the dig reporting that a sculpture of a woman riding two lions had been discovered near Khalfati, north of Birejik. Believing that the piece might well be Hittite, Lawrence dressed himself up in local costume and set off with Dahoum to investigate. They found the countryside seething with unrest. Thousands had been conscripted for the army, and whole villages had been depopulated. Kurdish tribesmen were being told by their Aghas to enlist in the Imperial army and then to desert as soon as they were given rifles. The whole district was awash with rumours of marauding bands. The Turkish police were trigger-happy and tense, constantly on the lookout, and no sooner had Lawrence and Dahoum entered Khalfati than they were arrested as suspected deserters by a military patrol. They were kicked downstairs into a filthy dungeon so harshly that Lawrence was badly bruised and Dahoum’s ankle sprained. In one version of the story, Lawrence suggested that he was beaten severely enough to be put in hospital. Whatever the case, they managed to escape by offering a bribe, and, abandoning the Hittite find, walked briskly back to wards Jarablus. Their way took them through the district of Nizib, where they found the Kurds excited, running about looking for a Christian to kill. Only Lawrence’s disguise saved him, and when they reached Nizib village they discovered what lay behind this bizarre behaviour. Two days earlier a horde of armed Kurds, under a chief called Derai, had looted the place and shot dead a Christian Armenian doctor whose fly-blown corpse still lay in the street. In Nizib and Birejik the native Christians were all in hiding.
Despite his bruises, and the alarming knowledge of having been within a hair’s breadth of death, Lawrence made his way back to the site with some satisfaction. First, his disguise had worked, and he had been taken for a native peasant. Second, he had gained some exclusive news about the Kurds. Third, and perhaps most important for his own psyche, he had acquired, in his treatment at Khalfati, the elements of a fantasy upon which his masochism could feed. From boyhood, he had nursed a masochistic reverie about the army, a reverie acted out at the age of seventeen, when he had enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery. The idea of being a ‘deserter’ from the army appealed even more strongly to that fantasy: it represented resistance to an overwhelming authority, and provided a justification for the punishment which he enjoyed. He derived no pleasure from the actual beating he had received from the Turks at Khalfati, but the scene, relived and elaborated upon over and over again in his mind, would provide rich material for his imagination in years to come.
8. Peace in Mesopotamia Such as Has Not Been Seen for Generations
Britain and Syria 1913
The Bulgars were turned back at the gates of Stamboul and the threat to Aleppo evaporated, but Lawrence had had his first whiff of revolt, and found it intoxicating: ‘As for Turkey, down with the Turks,’ he wrote in April 1913. ‘… Their disappearance would mean a chance for the Arabs, who were at any rate once not incapable of good government.’ 1In June, when the excavations closed once again, he finally persuaded Dahoum to come home with him to Oxford. Previously the boy had been chary of accompanying him to a country of which he knew nothing: he had heard stories of Englishmen luring unsuspecting Arabs off to their homes and turning them into tinned meat. Even Hammoudi, the reformed bandit, for all his superior experience, was inclined to believe such tales. Seeing that Dahoum would not consent to come alone, Lawrence made the same offer to Hammoudi, and only a courageous leap of faith made the Hoja accept.
They stayed in the cottage at the bottom of the garden at 2 Polstead Road, and Dahoum’s beauty caused a stir among Lawrence’s acquaintances, particularly Charles Bell, who commissioned the painter Francis Dodd to make a portrait of him. Dahoum found that he enjoyed being the centre of attention, and once, when Dodd was interrupted at a critical moment by Lawrence’s brother Will and some friends, the boy turned to look at them in annoyance. This was just the expression of sultriness the artist had been looking for, and he captured it precisely, leaving Lawrence to rave over the portrait’s ‘absolute inspiration’. 2While Hammoudi was pushed off onto Woolley some of the time, Dahoum stayed with Lawrence, lending a hand at the Ashmolean with the unpacking of antikaswhich had come from Carchemish. They were old friends, and it gave him some relief to discover what actually happened to them once they disappeared from the site.
The Arabs found Britain fascinating, but their views were disappointingly rational: ‘… unfortunately,’ wrote Lawrence, ‘they are too intelligent to be ridiculous about it.’ 3To Dahoum it seemed a fat country, full of fat people, luxuriant, green, wet – a vast garden without villages but with peaceful, populous towns with towering buildings. He found the food rich and plentiful; he stumbled about London on the Underground, enjoyed riding a bicycle up and down Woodstock Road in his dishdasha,and once stood in a public lavatory stroking the white-glazed tiles and murmuring ‘beautiful, beautiful bricks’. 4He thought that Syria was a mere flea-bite compared with England, and that the Arabs were too few in comparison with the English ever to count in world politics. Lawrence approved this view: it had been partly to impress these men with the reality of British power and munificence – as opposed to the weakness and corruption of the Turks – that he had brought them here in the first place. As regards his own people, though, his purpose had been to shock: to enhance his reputation as an eccentric Englishman. He was fond of declaring that Dahoum had ‘Hittite blood’ – a statement which was entirely meaningless in any literal sense, but which virtually established the boy as the pi и ce de rй sistanceof the Hittite collection from Carchemish – a living archaeological exhibit. People came from miles around to photograph the two Arabs in national dress as if they were exotic beasts, and even Woolley conspired in the ‘Hittite’ fantasy, by claiming that Dahoum’s face was reminiscent of some of those found on Hittite sculptures. If he had understood this claim, Dahoum would probably have considered it ludicrous: he was an Arab Fellah who lived on the banks of the Euphrates, and to whom the Hittites meant nothing. To Lawrence and his colleagues, though, he was the epitome of noble savagery: ‘The picture of Dahoum still comes back to me,’ Edward Leeds wrote; ‘… he seemed too spruce and fine for any menial task – a noble figure.’ 5Neither Leeds nor Lawrence was able to see that they had fallen into the intellectual trap of confusing ‘nobility’ – a moral quality – with ‘beauty’ – an aesthetic one. This aesthetic, quasi-zoological objectivism was expressed unselfconsciously by Will Lawrence, who visited Ned in Syria later that year, and wrote of the Bedu that ‘the Hoja [Hammoudi] does as a type, but I have seen many better specimens’. 6Lawrence was sensitive to the charge of ‘exhibiting monkeys’, however, and sought to preserve his Arab friends’ dignity by refusing offers of money on their behalf from the numerous people he allowed to photograph them. Hammoudi, for one, was not amused. He did not believe that his dignity was impaired by being so photographed, and for him the practice of honouring a guest with a gift was commonplace. Leeds thought the Arabs ‘child-like’, and was hugely tickled to hear that when asked what he would like to take home with him, Hammoudi had chosen a water-tap, which he thought would always provide water, and a ‘Keep Off the Grass’ sign, which seemed to him to have some talismanic power to prevent people from straying where they were not wanted. Only one disquieting moment marred their stay. This was when they encountered an Egyptian called ‘Abd al-Ghaffar, who was an undergraduate at St John’s and a friend of Will’s. They claimed later that he had said to them, ‘Soon we will cut the throats of these dogs!’ – meaning the British – upon which the two Jarablus men had rushed back to Polstead Road and demanded a gun to shoot him with. Lawrence, who had ordered that they should be kept out of the way of any other Arabs, was irritated by this incident: he despised educated Arabs and he despised Egyptians – what could be worse than an educated Egyptian? Yet the story had a satisfying ring to it – proving the instinctive loyalty of the ‘noble’ Arab to the European, as opposed to the treachery of the Arab ‘corrupted’ by education. Lawrence wanted freedom for the Arabs, but for the Egyptians ‘freedom’ meant liberation not from Turkey, but from Britain, which had annexed their country in 1882.
When the two Arabs returned to Jarablus with Lawrence that August they boasted about their experiences ad nauseamto the other labourers, much to the annoyance of the Cypriot overseer Grigori, who was profoundly jealous. For his part, Lawrence became even more proprietorial towards Dahoum than before. Later in the year, when he was visited by a young army officer named Hubert Young – an excellent Arabic speaker who would later fight alongside Lawrence in the Arab Revolt – they sat down to sculpt two gargoyles for the roof of the house. While Young produced the head of a woman, Lawrence made a naked model of Dahoum. Woolley was shocked to find the figure on the roof when he returned. To him, it seemed an obvious declaration of Lawrence’s homosexual nature, and he wrote that it was regarded as such by the other Arabs, who were scandalized by the idea. Though Lawrence later delighted in representing homosexuality as a practice casually accepted by the Arabs, this was far from the truth, and very much a product of his wishful thinking. In the European tradition of Orientalism the East was a cultural dumping-ground for those traits European society despised in itself, and the stereotype of the lascivious Arab formed part of this tradition. In fact, homosexuality was neither accepted nor flaunted by the Arabs, and if practised at all was practised discreetly behind closed doors. Though Lawrence’s affair with Dahoum was most probably platonic, the naked statue seemed to proclaim otherwise, and much of the reputation that had accrued to him was lost by this heedless but compulsive act.
Lawrence thought of north Syria now as his ‘own Arabic country’, and his proprietory attitude extended to all ‘his’ men. He wrote only half jokingly that he would like to become ‘The Sheikh’ of Jarablus, and when Will visited him in October 1913 he found that his brother was treated as ‘a great lord’: ‘Ned is known by everyone,’ he wrote, ‘and their enthusiasm over him is quite amusing.’ 7In Aleppo he had many friends – not only Arabs but also Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Circassians. His sense of noblesse obligewas marked, to the extent that he thought of himself as the local doctor, treating everyday complaints, nursing his friends, dispatching sick villagers to the hospital in Aleppo, and even trying to make arrangements to vaccinate the entire village against cholera when an epidemic broke out in Aleppo in 1912. He also saw himself as an unofficial local magistrate, and was very proud when eighteen Kurdish chiefs turned up at his house to arrange a peace settlement between opposing factions which had been at feud for forty years: ‘… in our house they met on neutral ground,’ he wrote, ‘and fell upon each other’s necks (like a rugger scrum) and kissed. Since then there has been peace in northern Mesopotamia such as has not been seen for generations.’ 8He was the defender of his people’s interests, once threatening to whip a German engineer who had had Dahoum beaten up, and reporting in delight that when the Carchemish dig opened in 1912, almost the entire German workforce abandoned the German camp for the British – even though the railway company paid higher wages. He took this as a personal compliment, but it was actually a triumph for benevolent paternalism: in the German camp the workers were beaten by aggressive Circassian henchmen if they misbehaved, were not allowed to talk to their overseers, and were given no baksheesh.
The atmosphere in the British camp might well have been jollier –though it is a matter of record that there weredisputes with the workers – but Lawrence’s relationship with the Arabs remained essentially one of privilege. He enjoyed the power that being a European in the East gave him. His travels alone and on foot, sometimes in native dress, had enabled him to learn a great deal about the aspirations of the ordinary people, ‘to learn the masses’ as he put it, and his great sensitivity allowed him to see the world through their eyes more than most Europeans, but ultimately his loyalty lay with the ruling йlite, as his remarks about ‘the feudal system’ make clear. Lawrence claimed that he always found it difficult to deal with people, and loved to portray himself as an eccentric intellectual with his head among exotic objects and ideas. In fact, he emerged from his time at Carchemish highly skilled in man-management.
The most complete expression of Lawrence’s romantic view of Arabia and the Arabs at this stage appears in his essay for Isismagazine, The [Qasr] of Ibn Wardani(actually ibn Wardan), written in 1912. That summer he and Dahoum had visited the Qasr or castle, which had been built by the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. The building was said to have been constructed with floral scents kneaded into the clay, so that each room had a different smell. Lawrence was led through the ruins by Dahoum, who, sniffing the air, announced: ‘This is jessamine, this violet, this rose.’ Then, drawing him to an open window, he bade him smell the ‘sweetest scent of all’ – ‘the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert’ – which had no taste. ‘My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘to choose the things in which mankind had no share.’ 9The Arabs, Lawrence was pointing out, regarded material civilization as a mere encumbrance which interfered with the real purpose of life. It was a sound philosophical point, and no doubt the idea went down well in pre-war Oxford, but it is as unlikely that Dahoum would have understood Lawrence’s romanticism, written from his high pedestal of material well-being, as it is that he actually said the words Lawrence puts into his mouth. The peasants of the Euphrates, struggling for survival, were not given to waxing poetic over the glories of a wind that was more enemy than friend. It is unlikely, too, that Dahoum, who wanted desperately to be able to read and write – presumably so that he could get a better job – would have turned his back on luxuries if they had been available to him. Only they were not, for Lawrence and Woolley forbade their men to use Western products, and would even send them home if they turned up in boots. The Arabs wanted the luxuries the Englishmen enjoyed: the Englishmen were prepared to force them to remain themselves, and thus maintain the romantic vision they admired. The story of Ibn Wardani purports to express the spiritual leanness of the Arabs: in fact it remains a peculiarly Western, peculiarly Orientalist view.
This is not to suggest that some of the Arabs did not like and admire Lawrence tremendously. Hammoudi said years later that from the very beginning Lawrence had been able to outride, outshoot, outwalk and outlast the best of them, and possessed a unique clarity of mind and purpose: ‘… while we would twist and turn with our object far away,’ he said, ‘he would smile and point out to us what we were after, and make us laugh, ashamed.’ 10Dahoum apparently told Fareedah al-Akle in 1912 that there was nothing the Arabs could do which Lawrence could not do, and that he even excelled the Arabs in doing it: ‘he takes such an interest in us and cares for our welfare,’ Dahoum said. ‘We respect him and greatly admire his courage and bravery: we love him because he loves us and we would lay down our lives for him.’ 11Lawrence’s years at Carchemish were the happiest of his life, and by 1913, even the idea of printing with Vyvyan Richards had been dropped. It was, he wrote Richards, a place where one ate the lotus almost every day: ‘like a great sport with tangible results at the end of things’. 12Very soon, though, that idyll was to end, as a great wave of history finally crashed over the world, washing away all innocence.
9. The Insurance People Have Nailed Me Down
Sinai, Syria, Britain 1914
At the end of December 1913, Woolley received a telegram from Sir Frederick Kenyon at the British Museum, requesting him and Lawrence to join an officer of the Royal Engineers for an archaeological survey of the Negev and northern Sinai under the aegis of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Its objectives were to trace an ancient caravan route from Palestine to Egypt and identify some of the sites associated with the forty years’ wandering of the Children of Israel. Lawrence guessed at once that these objectives were a red herring. The real purpose of the survey was military – an espionage mission inside Ottoman territory. Though Turkey had long been an ally of Britain, the far-sighted Lord Kitchener – British Agent in Egypt – suspected that in the event of a war with Germany the Ottomans would take the German side. Sinai protected the British Empire’s jugular – the Suez Canal – and beyond Sinai lay Palestine. It was, Kitchener thought, vital to the future of the canal that the area be thoroughly surveyed.
On 10 January they met the expedition leader, Captain Stewart Newcombe, at Beersheba. Newcombe was nonplussed to find them so young. ‘British Museum’ had evoked a vision of cobwebby old greybeards with fifteen tons of camp furniture, but instead Woolley and Lawrence travelled light and ‘looked about twenty-four and eighteen years of age respectively’. 1Newcombe decided that his letters had been too deferential and that deference should stop immediately. He dispatched them into the desert with instructions to rendezvous at Qusayma – a desert post across the Egyptian border – in a few days’ time, and they promptly disappeared. When they failed to turn up on the appointed day, Newcombe grew worried. He sent a detachment of Egyptian Police Camel Corps looking for them, and the troopers returned having rounded up their camels, but having found no trace of the missing men. The result was wild telephoning back and forth across the border, and a squadron of Turkish border-guards was alerted on the Ottoman side. The local Bedu were suspected of having taken them prisoner and forty tribesmen were arrested as hostages. A day later, though, Woolley, Lawrence and Dahoum arrived at Qusayma, somewhat footsore, and were amazed to discover that the Camel Corps were hunting them. Lawrence explained that the camels had simply gone crazy and rushed off in the night. They had walked to Qadesh Barnea expecting to find the camels there, and had inadvertently taken a path through the hills which no camel could follow: this was why the Camel Corps had not found them: ‘It shows how easy it is,’ Lawrence wrote, ‘in an absolutely deserted country to defy a government.’ 2It was a lesson he would not forget. They remained at Qadesh Barnea – perhaps once the desert capital of the Children of Israel – for a few days and parted, Woolley for the Dead Sea, Lawrence for Aqaba where he was to meet Newcombe. Five days later he arrived at the head of the escarpment, and saw the Gulf of Aqaba for the first time.
Today, the head of the escarpment stands on the Egypt-Israel border, and in order to reach it you have to make the steep ascent from the Israeli resort of Eilat. Passing through Eilat on my way back to Egypt, I decided to spend a day inspecting the old Pilgrim Road from which Lawrence had first glimpsed the Rift Valley, hiring a mountain bike for the trip, which proved to be an even harder climb than that of Safed – a gradient of one in three and a half, as Lawrence himself recorded. The day was a very hot one, and, certain that there would be some kind of refreshment-stall on the way, I had neglected to bring any water. The road took me through Eilat’s ‘neighbourhoods’ and then up abruptly into a desert of arid rock, marbled abutments of granite, sharp sabre-toothed peaks, broken peduncles, cloven hoofs. I halted breathlessly on a curve to take in the stunning sight of the Gulf of Aqaba, and the great Wadi ‘Araba, where the African Rift surfaces from beneath the Red Sea, with its vast walls of cream-coloured limestone and sea-green granite, the perfect, crescent-shaped bay with its fuzz of palm-trees, and the neat crystal-porcelain wedge of Aqaba town lying to one side. I continued, pedalling and sweating, and the day grew hotter and hotter, and my mouth drier and drier. There were no people, no houses up here, nor even any traffic. There were few trees, little vegetation of any kind – just naked flint burning in the sun. At last I came to a signpost which pointed to a fissure in the rock, and read ‘ Ein Netafim’. ‘Einmeant water of some kind, so I turned off the road and bounced for a mile down a stony track, only just stopping myself from plunging over a sheer drop into a ravine of 500 feet. Ein Netafim,it seemed, lay under the rock overhang, and to get there you had to climb down a perilous rock chimney. I was already shattered after my pedalling, but thirst was burning in my throat, and I knew I had to get down at any cost. The chimney was slippery and narrow, and I climbed down hand over hand: in places the rock had actually been polished glossy from the passage of people over the years. The wadi bed was clogged with broken blocks – the parings and crumblings of millennia – and the spring was no more than a wet seam where the rock wall touched the valley floor. Someone had made a tiny catch-basin to collect the liquid, which was full of bright green algae and mosquito larvae. I leaned over and scooped it into my mouth, larvae, algae and all: I cannot say that it was the best water I have ever tasted, only that I was so incredibly thirsty that I did not taste it at all. Then I collapsed in the shade of a rock, and listened to the calling and whistling of birds, which seemed deafening. I realized suddenly that this trickle was probably the only water-source in the entire area. I could have kicked myself for neglecting to take water in the desert, but the hardship involved in getting a drink had been, I thought, a salutary and timely lesson in respect. I climbed up the chimney and pushed my bike back to the road. A little farther on I came across a stretch of cobbled track, and a sign which read ‘Stop. Border beyond this point.’ It struck me that I was on one of the oldest roads in history: the Hyksos shepherd-kings had come this way in their chariots to invade Egypt 4,000 years ago: Cambyses III, King of Persia, had come here with his army in 525 BC and so introduced the camel into North Africa. The present road was hewn and blasted out by Selim the Grim – the Turkish Sultan who had finally smashed Mamluk power in the Middle East – in order to get his artillery up the escarpment during his invasion of Egypt in 1517. Down this road Muslim pilgrims had plodded for centuries on their way to Mecca and Medina, and down this road T. E. Lawrence had come in March 1914, taking just three hours from the plateau to the beach.
*
Eilat’s McDonald’s now stands amid traffic lights at almost exactly the point where the old Pilgrim Road touches the strand, but in 1914 there was no town called Eilat nor a nation called Israel. Instead of opulent hotels, ice-cream stalls, funfairs and bikini-clad girls lounging on the beach, Lawrence discovered only scrub and sand, a few dom palms, and a score of reed-built fishermen’s huts. In Aqaba, a couple of miles further on, he also discovered a disgruntled Newcombe. The local Governor had forbidden any mapping, Newcombe said, and though Lawrence was all for ignoring the order, the following day Newcombe rode twenty miles to receive a phone call from Lord Kitchener in person, who warned him strongly against precipitate action. Lawrence grasped the reason for the ban at once. Aqaba was the only major Turkish port at the head of the Red Sea, and thus of vital significance to any future operations which might take place inland. Automatically, he shifted into his attack-defence mode. Aqaba could be taken from the sea, of course, but any troops there, he saw, would easily have been able to retreat a few miles back to the sweeping mountains which hemmed in the port on both sides. An enemy force making a beach-head at Aqaba would be pinned down and would find it very difficult to advance. The key route to Aqaba was the Wadi Ithm, a great chasm of granite opening to the north-east of the port, so narrow and boulder-blocked in places that even camels could only pass in single file. He who held the Wadi Ithm held the key to Aqaba, Lawrence thought.
