Текст книги "Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia "

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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Perhaps inevitably, Hogarth has been treated as a kind of Edwardianequivalent of John Le Carrй's spymaster George Smiley by some of Lawrence’s biographers, as if he had recruited his young protйgй for Britain’s secret service while Ned was still bicycling in a schoolboy’s shorts over to the Ashmolean with his finds, but this is to overemphasize that side of Hogarth’s life, as well as to underestimate Lawrence’s lifelong aversion to moving to anybody’s pace or orders but his own. Still, Hogarth was certainly one of that informal circle of learned and adventurous men and women who passed information on to the government, in his case about the Balkans and the Near East, though he was not by any stretch of the imagination a spymaster who recruited and trained undergraduates. In the days before World War I, professional spies were employed by the continental powers against one another, but the British, particularly in the far reaches of the empire, relied on an informal and above all amateur web of explorers, archaeologists, adventurous businessmen, and travel writers for information. Given the secretive nature of the Ottoman Empire and its increasingly feeble hold over large areas of its territory, British explorers, adventurers, archaeologists, students of religion, and Arabists proliferated in the great empty spaces of Syria and Arabia, to the alarm of the French, who themselves had designs on Lebanon and Syria; and it would have been unlikely for some of these people not to have gathered such information as they could for friends in the government and the diplomatic service, without feeling that they were, in any organized way, “spying.”

Certainly Hogarth encouraged the young Lawrence to combine his interest in the Middle East with his passion for archaeology; and Hogarth may also have been sensitive enough to guess that Lawrence would benefit from a long period away from home and away from the pressures placed on him there by his mother. Not that Lawrence would necessarily have confided all this to Hogarth, however sympathetic a listener he was, but there was no need for him to; Hogarth, Lawrence would later write, was “the only man I had never to let into my confidence—he would get there naturally.”

While Lawrence was finishing his research in Rouen, Hogarth had just returned from Turkey, where he had been discussing with the Ottoman authorities British interest in the ruins of the ancient Hittite city of Carchemish, then a mound of rubble covered by sand, dirt, and the debris of later cities overlooking the Euphrates near Jerablus. The Hittites—unlike the ancient Egyptians—were an archaeological problem of great importance to scholars because there were few excavated Hittite sites and their language remained undeciphered. The Hittites had lived in a broad, crescent-shaped area of Anatolia and northern Syria, stretching as far to the south along the Mediterranean as modern Lebanon and as far to the east as the border of modern Iraq. The history of their kingdom began about 1750 BCE and came to an end about 1160 BCE, when internal strife, and warfare with the Egyptians to the south and the Assyrians to the east, brought about the collapse of what had once been a great empire. The British had a great interest in the Hittites, in part because dazzling new discoveries of whole cities seemed likely to be made in the area (in contrast to what was now the patient, painstaking excavation of Egyptian tombs), and in part because here, as elsewhere, rivalry between Britain and Germany played a major role. Hugo Winckler’s discoveries at Bogazkцy in Anatolia in 1906–1907 had put the “Hittite problem” on the map—until then there was some doubt that the Hittites had ever existed—and it now became an urgent matter of academic prestige for the archaeology department of Oxford and the British Museum in London not to lag behind the University of Berlin. The British had known about the mound at Jerablus since the eighteenth century, and had made several attempts to dig there, revealing the presence of immense ancient ruins buried under the shattered remains of a Greek and a later Roman city. But these excavations were being made in what one archaeologist described as “a dreary and desolate waste” in the Syrian desert north of Aleppo, and between that desolation and the difficulties raised by the hostile local inhabitants and the Turkish authorities, work did not progress swiftly. Now, doubts in the British archaeological world that the Hittites had existed gave way to the conviction that the mound at Jerablus was of greater importance than the one Winckler was working on at Bogazkцy, and must be excavated systematically as soon as possible. Hogarth, with his knowledge of Turkish, Arabic, and the area, was naturally an enthusiast for a project that combined patriotism and scientific knowledge. He had already visited the site in 1908, and pronounced favorably on it to the British Museum, which had applied for permission to dig there to the Imperial Ottoman Museum in Constantinople; authorities there let the matter rest for two years, owing to civil unrest, rebellion, and the overthrow of the sultan.

In 1910, after Turkey had settled down in the firmer hands of the “Young Turks,” the British ambassador in Constantinople was asked to raise the matter again, and this time, permission was granted. Hogarth’s choice of Lawrence was a natural one. Lawrence had clearly demonstrated a flair for digging up relics of the past, as well as for bargaining for them; he had bought a number of Hittite seals for Hogarth during his walking tour of the Holy Land; he was physically tough and fearless; he had a smattering of Arabic; he was a keen amateur photographer; and he had actually come very close to Carchemish while he was in Syria. Lawrence himself, when he heard about Hogarth’s trip to Constantinople in 1910, had asked his old friend E. T. Leeds, at the Ashmolean, if there was any chance of his being included in the party going to Jerablus with Hogarth.

This raised any number of difficulties, since Lawrence was receiving a scholarship from Jesus College to support his research on medieval pottery for a BLitt degree, which, on the face of things, seemed incompatible with excavating a Hittite site in Syria. But despite Leeds’s doubts, Lawrence demonstrated his lifelong ability to get his own way. Hogarth agreed to take Lawrence, and then, with superb diplomatic skill, managed to secure for his young protйgй a “senior demyship,” a kind of research fellowship, at his own college, Magdalen,* which meant that the British Museum would not have to pay anything but Lawrence’s living expenses at thesite. This was not an inconsiderable feat—Lawrence’s demyship would bring him Ј100 a year for four years (about the equivalent of $12,500 a year today).

With equal skill Jesus College was placated by the suggestion that Lawrence would not only continue his research on medieval pottery but extend his survey of crusader castles in Syria, enabling him to expand his BA thesis into a book; and the British Museum was informed (a little optimistically) that his services were necessary to the expedition because of his command of Arabic, his familiarity with the area, and his knowledge about pottery. All this was the academic equivalent of a carom shot at billiards, and speaks volumes about Hogarth’s talent for manipulation, and Lawrence’s ability to claim convincingly many different skills at the same time. If Lawrence’s parents had any doubts, Hogarth no doubt dealt with those as well—he seems to have gotten along well with both of them—and moved swiftly to send Lawrence to Syria to improve his Arabic, for which so much had been claimed.

Lawrence sailed for Beirut at the beginning of December 1910, hardly more than two months after Hogarth’s return from Constantinople, leaving in his father’s hands the problem of the printing press that Vyvyan Richards and Lawrence were to have founded together. On the way to Beirut, Lawrence managed to visit Athens and Constantinople for the first time. Like many visitors to Greece, he was puzzled by how little the modern Greeks resembled the ancient ones, and compared the former unfavorably with the latter. The voyage, Lawrence complained, was very slow, and the meals were huge and endless (it was a French ship, of the Messageries Maritimes).

By December 10, he was able to write home from Constantinople, where he had an unexpectedly long stay when the engines of his ship broke down, leaving him free to do rather more sightseeing than he had expected. He reported home cheerfully that “the cholera has ceased to all practical purposes,” and he was probably the only tourist in the city’s long history to have found Constantinople “very clean.” He praised the “disorder” of the city, the noisy and colorful variety of its open-airmarkets, and the fact that there were hardly more than “twenty yards of straight street” in all of Stamboul. He attempted to interest three Canadian priests whom he had befriended in the pleasures of sightseeing in Constantinople, but they found everything very dirty, prompting Lawrence to express the broad-minded point of view that would enable him to lead the Bedouin in warfare: “They were always talking of quel salйtй, of the dirt & disorder of things, of the lack of shops and carriages and what they were pleased to call conveniences (which are more trouble than they are worth). They seemed too narrow to get outside their civilization, or state of living…. Is civilization the power of appreciating the character and achievements of peoples in a different stage from ourselves?” This was a question that Lawrence was to answer for himself, over the next few years, with his attempt to live like a Bedouin and even to exceed the capacity of the Bedouin for living on the borderline of human existence.

Lawrence arrived in Beirut shortly before Christmas—it had taken him the best part of a month to travel from Britain to Lebanon—and moved immediately to Jebail, the ancient Greek city of Byblos, where he was to attend the mission school and “perfect” his Arabic.* His teacher, Fareedeh el Akle, who was still alive in 1976, was more realistic about her pupil’s knowledge of the language than Hogarth had been. She praised his exceptional intelligence, and his determination to master the language, but pointed out that “in a short time he could speak and write a little,” which is significantly less than the command of Arabic that Hogarth had attributed to him. It is curious that this supposedly “crash course” consisted of only “one hour [a day] on a red sofa in the large hall,” though Lawrence surely also did a lot of reading and practiced his Arabic on the streets of Jebail. Fareedeh el Akle not only admired her young pupil, but appreciated his keen interest in the Arabian people, and “the spiritualside of his character.” Once, when she was talking to Lawrence about some matter of spiritual significance, he replied, “Help comes from within, not from without,” which might stand as the definition of his peculiar, lonely strength throughout his life. The inner strength of all the Lawrence boys was extraordinary, perhaps the most important quality they inherited from parents who had, by their own action, virtually cut themselves off from the rest of the world without any apparent regret.

Toward the end of her long life, after being questioned by John Mack, a biographer of Lawrence who was also a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Fareedeh wrote to a friend, “Lawrence seems to me like an oyster which has, through pain and suffering, all through life developed into a pearl which the world is trying to evaluate, taking it to pieces layer by layer, without realizing the true value of the whole.” There is some truth to this, even today. Lawrence’s detractors and admirers alike tend to dissect his personality into thin slices, separating the soldier from the scholar, the hero from the teller of tall tales, the victim of neuroses from the man of action, and in the process losing sight of just what an attractive and interesting person he was, even at his most infuriating. Fareedeh clearly recognized this, and understood early on that Lawrence was always more than the sum of his parts. Provocative as Lawrence could be, there was about him a certain sweetness of disposition, a spiritual quality, and above all a sense that he was a special person, destined for greatness, even though it was not yet clear what kind it would be.

Lawrence remained at Jebail studying Arabic until mid-February, keeping up a steady flow of correspondence with his family and friends. The entire Lawrence family seems to have been engaged in writing an endless series of letters and postcards, so that Lawrence seems to have known as much about what was going on at 2 Polstead Road as if he had still been living there, and there was hardly a detail of his own life in Jebail on which he did not report home at length. Apparently his parents were in the habit of showing his letters to Hogarth, since Lawrence asks them to stop doing so, perhaps fearing that Hogarth would be bored by the humdrum details of his life at Jebail, and that his correspondencewith Hogarth ought to be kept on a higher level than worries about Thomas Lawrence’s health, or promises of coins and stamps for Arnie’s collection.

A long letter from Vyvyan Richards reminds Lawrence uncomfortably of the promise to go into business with him. Richards, who seems to have been unable to take a hint, was in the process of planning to build “the hut” where they would live together, and Lawrence asks his father to send Richards some money on his behalf, but in rather lukewarm terms, surely aware that his father will be reluctant to do any such thing.

On January 24 he responds to his mother’s copy of a long letter from Richards—Lawrence describes it as “huge"—attempting to deal with the practical problems Richards is raising about the project. Lawrence asks his father to bear in mind that printing, as he and Richards envision it, is “not a business but a craft,” which pretty well sums up Thomas Lawrence’s objection to the scheme, and argues that he and Richards cannot be expected to “sit down to it for so many hours a day, any more than one could paint a picture on that scheme,” although in fact that is exactly what printers and painters do.

By February 18 he was back in Beirut again, to meet Hogarth. Those who think of the Middle East as uninterruptedly hot should bear in mind that Lawrence reported the railway line between Beirut and Aleppo was blocked by “snow 30 feet deep for 7 kilometers,” a factor which would play a part in the later stages of his campaign against the Turks in 1917–918. Hogarth, who had been delayed by bad weather in Constantinople, arrived accompanied by his assistant R. Campbell Thompson, a “cunei-formist” and specialist in Semitic languages, whose presence Lawrence managed mostly to ignore in his letters home; Hogarth’s “archeological overseer” Gregorios Antoniou, a Greek Cypriot who had supervised the excavating on Hogarth’s previous expeditions, joined the party in Beirut. They were stuck there for some days, since snow continued to fall in the mountains while a ferocious storm prevented them from sailing, but they finally managed to get on a vessel bound for Haifa and from there went on by train to Damascus, on one of the railway lines that Lawrencewould later spend much time and effort blowing up. They passed on their way Nazareth, which, Lawrence wrote for his mother’s benefit, was “no uglier than Basingstoke,” and journeyed on to Deraa, the vital railway junction where Lawrence would be taken prisoner, beaten, and suffer his worst and most painful humiliation. They lunched at the station buffet, which “was flagrantly and evidently an exotic” and served French food in an eastern decor. Hogarth dazzled Lawrence by speaking, with equal fluency, “Turkish & Greek, & French, & German, & Italian & English,” and even Lawrence remarked on how weird it was “to be so far out of Europe.” This was no longer the rocky, hilly landscape of the Holy Land, which had once been fertile under Roman rule, and over much of which he had walked on foot. Alongside the railway line lay “the Lejah, the lava no-man’s-land, and the refuge of all the outlaws of the Ottoman Empire … almost impassible, except to a native who knows the ways.” One senses Lawrence’s fascination with that vast, empty space—he had glimpsed from the train the fabled “great Hajj road,” the pilgrim way over which Doughty had approached on camel to the very outskirts of Mecca. That evening they reached Damascus, and from there, via Homs, went to Aleppo.

Lawrence wrote home from Aleppo that he found Thompson “pleasant,” by which he seems to mean that Thompson was no competition for Hogarth’s attention, and drops the news that he may not get back to England “this year,” that is to say for at least another nine months. Hogarth’s preparations for the excavation included, Lawrence notes with approval, nine kinds of jam and three kinds of tea; between the three men they carried the complete works of Shakespeare (Thompson), Dante (Hogarth), and Spenser (Lawrence), as well as large quantities of pistachio nuts and “Turkish delight.” Lawrence was in a part of the world where his taste for sweet things and his dislike of alcohol were shared by most of the local population. Aleppo he found muddy and filthy, though he seems to have enjoyed the souk, since he was always on the hunt for local pottery and brassware that might please his mother. His brother Frank was apparently practicing pistol shooting, and Lawrence advises him to shoot withouttaking aim: “The only practical way is almost to throw your bullet like a stone, at the object.” This is excellent advice for somebody with good eyes and a steady hand, and from one who knows what he is talking about—those who saw Lawrence in action during the war marveled at his marksmanship, including the Bedouin, who set great store by it.

The winter weather was so bad that they did not arrive in Jerablus until March 10, having made the journey from Aleppo by camel and horse (eleven baggage horses, ten camels), except for Lawrence, who walked. The only local industry was the raising of Glycyrizza glabra, a desert plant resembling fennel, from the roots of which licorice is extracted; and the headman of the nearest village was also the agent for the licorice company, who had put the company’s house at the disposal of the British archaeologists. The village consisted of about forty fairly new houses—it was clearly something along the lines of what we would call a “company town"—with a good water supply, about half a mile west of a bend in the great Euphrates River, and about three-quarters of a mile south of the great mound of Carchemish, which loomed over the countryside. To the northwest the snow-covered summits of the Taurus Mountains were clearly visible, and the wind from them reduced the daytime temperature to the low forties. Provision for sleeping in the open on the roof of the one-story house, however, suggested that conditions in the summer might be radically different. (Lawrence included in his letter a helpful sketch plan of the house.)

To say that Lawrence found himself in his element would be putting it mildly. He was far from home, and fully occupied day and night. Indeed, he did not write home for another ten days, being busy with establishing their living quarters. For the moment, Lawrence seems to have been in charge of the food supply (with two servants to prepare it), and was pleased to find excellent goat’s milk and an ample supply of lentils; how pleased Hogarth and Thompson were is unrecorded. Gregorios the Cypriot, Hogarth’s man Friday, had the task of rounding up about 100 men to do the digging, while Thompson surveyed the site, Hogarth wrote up the results for the British Museum, and Lawrence did the drawingand “squeezing” of the inscriptions.* Lawrence was also charged with putting up doors and shelves, the kind of hand work he delighted in, invariably producing something finer than what was expected or required. Indeed his transformation of their living quarters soon became something of an obsession—oddly enough, for a man who would spend many years of his life in the desert or in barracks, he had a passion and a real talent for domestic improvement and decoration. As for the digging, they began in the area where the British had stopped work thirty years ago, and soon uncovered “a great entrance staircase” and a number of large bas-relief slabs. The work was difficult, involving the movement, without machinery, of huge rocks, slag, and shattered stone fragments of a later city, and went slowly. The kaimakam (police chief) of the Biridjik district, prodded by the government in Constantinople, had provided a small, tented garrison of Turkish soldiers to guard the archaeologists from any local hotheads, and Lawrence noted with interest the numerous deficiencies in these soldiers’ equipment and training. At the end of a letter home, he adds briefly that they are expecting a visit from a “Miss G. Bell,” the desert explorer, archaeologist, traveler, and author of Between the Desert and the Sown, then forty-two years old and already a famous and glamorous figure.

In his letters home from Carchemish Lawrence sounds like a man who has at last found his place in the world. Increasingly, he joined Gregorios in directing the men as they labored to move huge stones, some weighing many tons. He “devised a derrick” to help pull upright fallen statuary, repaired equipment, learned how to make his own paint, and wrote home to have another pair of boots made and sent out to him, “with slightly thicker soles” and leather laces, since the rocky terrain was already wearing out his present boots.

Hogarth was preparing to return to England, where he would publish the results to date in the London Times; he was taking Gregorios withhim, effectively leaving Thompson and Lawrence in charge of the site. Since Thompson was basically a language expert, that would put Lawrence in charge of the dig—no small responsibility for a young man of twenty-two. To replace Gregorios as overseer of the workforce, Hogarth selected a local man, Sheikh Hamoudi, surely a good choice, since he was “tall, gaunt … long-armed and immensely powerful,” boasted that he had in his youth “provoked other men to fight for the sheer pleasure of killing them,” and “admitted to six or seven murders.” Hamoudi was to become a great friend and admirer of Lawrence’s, and taught him much that would come in handy later, when Lawrence was dealing with the blood feuds and intertribal violence that were endemic in the Arab army.

Lawrence seems to have devised ways of keeping the workforce happy and active, by encouraging contests of one team against another in raising large stones, rather like a tug-of-war, and by instituting a system of small additional payments for each object found, though no matter how hard they dug, layer after layer of the ruins of the Roman city remained between them and the Hittite city below. Hogarth was disappointed, though realistic—some digs worked out; others didn’t—but Lawrence continued to be almost irrationally happy. Between Thompson and himself, they managed to get rid of an incompetent and intrusive Turkish “commissaire,” whose job it was to ensure that the Turkish Museum got its correct share of the finds; and to Lawrence’s joy they were witnesses to a lively, romantic desert abduction, when a “black-bearded … & picturesque” young man galloped up on a horse, picked up a girl who had been washing at the spring, “set her before him on his horse, and galloped out of the village, offering to shoot anyone that stood in his way.” They were cousins, and her parents had refused to give her to him. Her male relatives immediately mounted and sped after the eloping couple. A few days later there was an unrelated double marriage, in which “the whole people turned out, the men afoot, or on horse in such as had them, the women perched in threes and fours on the humps of camels: everybody in the most brilliant colours, new or clean.”

This was a long way from Oxford, indeed about as far as Lawrencecould get, and far outweighed Thompson’s regret that they had not so far unearthed something like the Rosetta Stone, a stone or seal with writing in Hittite and in Assyrian cuneiform, without which most of what they were unearthing in the way of epigraphical specimens would remain unreadable. In the same letter, on May 16, Lawrence took the trouble of drawing the Carchemish “mound” and the surrounding countryside, in three-dimensional detail. He ends the letter with the reassuring note that the countryside has been peaceful, since “the Kurd chief of Kiranshehir was poisoned … by the Vali [governor] of Aleppo,” a nice comment on ethnic politics in the Ottoman Empire.

On May 23, he reported home on the long-awaited arrival of Gertrude Bell, who at first took a rather high-handed approach to the work of her two young rivals in archaeology, but as the day went on was eventually dazzled and silenced by the sheer breadth of Lawrence’s erudition. He thought her “pleasant,” but “not beautiful (except with a veil on, perhaps).” Already a celebrity, Bell had traveled in the Jebel Druze against the wishes of the Turkish authorities, camped in Petra, and conducted her own expedition across the Syrian desert all the way to Baghdad, boldly pushing deeper into the life of the desert tribes than any European woman had ever gone (though her most daring journeys were still ahead of her). She was bold, fearless, impatient, formidably well educated, a chain-smoker in an age when women did not smoke in public, inured to hardship, and never at a loss when faced with Turkish interference with her plans or Arab hostility toward a foreign woman traveling alone.

Bell was disappointed not to find Hogarth; she had ridden across the desert from Damascus on her mare to see him, accompanied by her servant Fattuh, and dressed in her desert explorer costume: a long, divided khaki skirt and a linen jacket, with an Arab head cloth wrapped around her hat. She was prepared to be skeptical about the excavations carried out so far, but was immediately struck by Lawrence, about whom she wrote in her diary, “an interesting boy, he is going to make a traveler.” Lawrence appears to have dressed for the occasion—for news of Bell’s approach had preceded her—in his Magdalen blazer, white shorts, red Arab slippers with upturned pointed toes, and a crimson woven Arab belt with extra-long tassels hanging over the left hip, which indicated that he was a bachelor.

After lunch, the three of them proceeded to the mound, where Bell observed the men excavating and condemned the methods being used as “prehistoric” (she was notoriously outspoken and critical), compared with those of the Germans. Lawrence maintained that the German methods, while they looked neater, involved a great deal of reconstruction, but eventually they made peace over dinner, and parted friends and mutual admirers when she retired to the tented camp Fattuh had set up for her. They would remain friends until her death, despite many furious arguments. On her departure, at five-thirty in the morning, Bell was dismayed that the villagers gathered to jeer at her—she did not realize that they assumed she had come to Carchemish to marry Lawrence. In order to calm them Lawrence had explained that she was too plain and old for him.

Hogarth was not certain that it was worth continuing the dig at Carchemish for a second season, but, always looking out for Lawrence’s interests, suggested that he might benefit from a season or half a season of “tomb digging” for the great Flinders Petrie, the dean of Egyptian archaeology and the head of the British School of Archaeology in Cairo. This would represent a substantial step up in Lawrence’s professional qualifications as an archaeologist, a career about which Lawrence remained nevertheless unsure—he toyed with the idea of becoming a newspaperman or a novelist, and continued to speculate on how best he might find a local source of fine vellum, to be “stained [purple] with Tyrian die,” for the artistic binding of the books that he and Richards were still planning to print. Meanwhile, Hogarth, never one to delay once a plan had occurred to him, wrote about Lawrence to his colleague Petrie: “Can you make room on your excavations next winter for a young Oxford graduate, T. Lawrence, who has been with me at Carchemish? He is a very unusual type…. If he goes to you he would probably come on foot from north Syria. I may add that he is extremely indifferent to what heeats or how he lives. He knows a good deal of Arabic…. I can assure you that he is really worth while.”

Lawrence did not learn until early in June that the excavation in Carchemish was to go on until August, though perhaps without a second season. By now the level of the Euphrates was falling, exposing sandbanks and islands, and the area was experiencing a plague of locusts, one of which he dried and sent to his youngest brother, Arnie. There was also an invasion of vast numbers of fleas and biting sand flies as the weather warmed. The constant company of Thompson seems to have been getting on his nerves—"any little thing upsets [him],” Lawrence remarked.

Lawrence was making something of a name for himself by producing miracle cures with such things as ammonia and Seidlitz powders, a popular nineteenth-century remedy for stomach distress which fizzed and bubbled furiously when added to water, and which terrified the Arabs, who had never seen such a thing. One of the two “water boys” was persuaded to take half a glass, and this is the first mention in Lawrence’s letters of his name: Dahoum.

Dahoum means “darkness,” and may have been an ironic nickname, in the same spirit that the friends of a very short man might call him “Lofty,” or a very tall man “Tiny,” since Dahoum seems in fact to have had rather light skin for a boy of mixed Hittite and Arab ancestry (his family actually lived on the Carchemish mound). He has been described as “beautifully built and remarkably handsome,” but in photographs taken of him by Lawrence (and in a pencil sketch made of him by Francis Dodd, when Lawrence brought Dahoum and Sheikh Hamoudi home to Oxford in 1913) he looks not so much beautiful—his face is a little fleshy for that, very much like the faces on the Hittite bas-reliefs that Lawrence was uncovering—as good-humored, intelligent, and amazingly self-possessed for such a young man. It is possible that Dahoum’s real name may have been Salim Ahmed—he was also referred to at least once as Sheikh Ahmed too, but that may have been one of Lawrence’s private jokes. In any event, Dahoum, who was fourteen when Lawrence met him, would play a role of increasing importance in Lawrence’s life, and becameone of the many bonds which would tie his life firmly to the Middle East, in peace and in war, over the next seven years.