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

Автор книги: Michael Korda

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Those who were closest to Lawrence and Dahoum, such as Leonard Woolley, have all emphasized that the close friendship between them was perfectly innocent; indeed had this not been the case, there would almost certainly have been a strong reaction among the local Arabs, and either Woolley or Hogarth would have felt obliged to deal with it. If Lawrence had had a physical relationship with Dahoum, it seems unlikely that he would have brought Dahoum home to Oxford to meet his family, as he would do in July 1913, or that he would also bring Sheikh Hamoudi, an unapologetic killer and not by any stretch of the imagination a tolerant soul, or that Hamoudi would have accompanied them had there been anything improper about their relationship.

That Lawrence loved Dahoum is certainly true, and sensing in Dahoum a degree of ambition rare in most Arabs at that time and place, he did his best to provide for Dahoum’s education, and to offer him a broader view of the world. Lawrence’s definition of love was decidedly not carnal—the boundaries he was crossing with Dahoum were those of race, religion, class, and age (Lawrence was seven or eight years older than Dahoum), not sexual. Whether Lawrence had sexual feelings toward Dahoum we cannot know. Certainly, he never expressed such feelings,though perhaps if he had ever allowed them to emerge, they would have been directed at Dahoum. To nobody else in his life was he ever so close, and with nobody else was he as happy.

In some ways, Lawrence’s concern for Dahoum was fatherly; in other ways it was that of an older brother. Certainly he saw in Dahoum the kind of natural nobility he later found among his Bedouin followers, uncorrupted in his view by European or British influence and largely untainted by Turkish overlordship, the equivalent of Rousseau’s homme naturel. That this was in some ways a romantic fantasy is certain—Dahoum was attractive, intelligent, sympathetic, and honest, and all those who met him liked him. On the other hand, he was not a Semitic version of an Arthurian hero as imagined by William Morris—but that was a fantasy Lawrence would follow right through the war to its tragic end, and even afterward, when he wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence would seek throughout his adult life the company of men, and if, in that world, he found a kind of comfort, it was only during the few years he spent with Dahoum that he ever found somebody he loved who could share it.

One does not know how the matter appeared to Dahoum—he was only fourteen when Lawrence (then age twenty-two) met him, and he would have had very little experience of Europeans; but young men mature early in the Arab world, and as a result it is sometimes Lawrence who appears younger than his protйgй. Dahoum cannot have been blind to the fact that Lawrence’s friendship raised his status, as well as opening up for him a world of literacy and education that would have been unimaginable to most poor north Syrian Arab boys in the Ottoman Empire. A degree of self-interest may well have been present in Dahoum. Lawrence was his opportunity for a way out of his small village, and out of a future of herding goats or harvesting licorice root for the local agha, and he seized it eagerly; but this does not mean he did not care for Lawrence in return, and it is possible that he may have risked his life for Lawrence during the war. In one of a famous pair of photographs taken at Carchemish, Lawrence is shown wearing Dahoum’s Arab robes, laughing as he tries to put Dahoum’s headdress on correctly; the other photograph shows Dahoum in the same place and pose, wearing his own robes and headdress, looking straight into the camera, and smiling broadly. What is most significant about the photograph of Dahoum is that he holds lovingly in both hands, with undisguised pride, a nickel-plated Colt Model of 1903.32-caliber “Pocket Hammerless Automatic Pistol,” not a weapon he could have afforded to own unless Lawrence gave it to him. Possession of a modern firearm was almost mandatory for any self-respecting Arab male, and Dahoum’s pleasure in holding the Colt is unmistakable. It hardly matters whether Lawrence gave Dahoum the pistol, or simply lent it to him for the photograph; either way, this was a princely gesture in a society where men did not give away or lend their firearms willingly, and Dahoum’s face is lit up with unfeigned pleasure.

Lawrence enjoyed the years he spent working at Carchemish not just because of the constant presence of Dahoum. Lawrence and Woolley, though in many respects an odd couple, got along well; the expedition house was one of the only two homes that Lawrence would build and decorate to satisfy his own taste; and he was living among the Arabs, whom he came more and more to like and respect. In addition, he could arrange his days and nights to please himself, reading until late into the night, going without sleep or food when he felt like it, working in exhausting bursts according to whim. He was a commanding presence among the Arabs and something of a celebrity among the rare European visitors—as well as being a gadfly to the Turkish authorities and the German railway engineers without any interference, for on this subject, Woolley and Lawrence were of one mind, whatever the kaiser may have told Hogarth.

Lawrence notes in a letter home that he has not received a letter from Richards since November of the previous year—a sign perhaps that Thomas Lawrence’s pessimism on the subject of the hand press has at last sunk in. In another letter, he orders a new pair of boots, always a sure sign that he is planning a long journey on foot. Lawrence never fails to fill his family in on the process of educating Dahoum—another sign that the relationship, however intense it may be, is blameless. In mid-June Woolley was to go home to England—the months from June through August were commonly thought to be unbearable for a white man in Syria, though of course this notion did not deter Lawrence—and on June 20 he writes home to say that he and Woolley have already reached the port of Alexandretta with fifteen cases of Hittite pottery to load on board Woolley’s ship, and that they avoided Aleppo because of an outbreak of cholera. Having brought up the matter of cholera, surely alarming to Sarah, Lawrence writes home three days later from Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo—the danger of cholera apparently forgotten—to say that he wants at least three pairs of regular socks and one pair of white wool, and that people come from far and wide to offer him antikas of every kind, which he is buying for Hogarth, for himself, for the British Museum, and for the Ashmolean. He notes that it is a time of unusually intense confusion andupheaval in the Ottoman Empire, since Turkey and the Balkan states are at war. (This war would end just in time for World War I to begin, and would strip Turkey of its remaining European territory.) Lawrence exults in the fact that “for the foreigner [this country] is too glorious for words: one is the baron of the feudal system.” This is a reference to the German railway builders, who, apparently in awe of the kaiser’s message as it filtered down to them after his talk with Hogarth, had ordered their workers to stop work on the bridge while Lawrence bathed in the Euphrates, so as not to inconvenience him. It also refers to the Turkish government’s eagerness to keep the citizens of all the major European powers resident in the Ottoman Empire as happy as possible at a moment when the Turkish army was being humiliatingly defeated in the Balkans. Turkey was a police state humanized by inefficiency and corruption, but even so when an order was given in Constantinople it eventually made its way down to even such remote places as Jerablus, and for the moment the British archaeologists were the beneficiaries.

To Leeds Lawrence wrote, more frankly, about the epidemic of cholera, and about braving the heat and the epidemic to spend a day in the bazaars, “buying glue and sacking and wire gauze and potatoes and embroidery and Vaseline and gunpowder … and bootlaces and Damascus tiles.” In fact, Lawrence had bought up the entire supply of glue in the province (some twenty-six pounds of it) for his Roman tile floor. Although he obtained fulsome letters of introduction to the governors of all the towns he proposed to visit from the newly obliging vali at Aleppo ordering all kaimakams, mutessarifs, mirdirs, and other “government officials to see that I am well lodged, well fed, provided with transport, with guides, with interpreters and escorts,” and despite his request for new boots and socks from home, the long tramp he had proposed to take with Dahoum never took place.

Instead he plunged into caring for the cholera victims in the villages around Aleppo and Jerablus, as the epidemic spread rapidly. It seems to be about this time that Lawrence took to wearing Arab robes, perhaps because he thereby seemed less threatening or less unfamiliar to thosesuffering from the disease, which in those days was fatal nearly 90 percent of the time. He wrote to England for medical advice, and soon he was treating people in the surrounding villages despite the risk to himself. Indeed, he did fall sick himself, with malaria; and he soon found that he had to deal not only with cholera but with an outbreak of smallpox, for which he successfully vaccinated the local children. Giving these vaccinations was very daring, since had the children died, he would certainly have been held responsible.

He managed to get away with Dahoum to the American mission school in Jebail, to work on his Arabic and improve Dahoum’s reading skills; and briefly to Lebanon, where the Fleckers, lonely in their summer home, were delighted to have somebody well educated to talk to. In those days, consular duties were not so pressing as to keep the vice-consul in Beirut during the summer, and the Fleckers had rented a cottage in the mountains with “a big garden, where the pomegranates were in full bloom,” though the views of the sea and the colors of the garden did not serve to cheer poor Flecker up. He was still in debt; he was—correctly—pessimistic about passing his examination in Turkish; and his tuberculosis was getting worse. It may be on the occasion of this visit that “carelessly flung beneath a tree,” he talked to Lawrence “of women’s slippers and of whipping.” The subject ought to have interested Lawrence, whose personality already inclined toward a degree of masochism, but he may not have wanted to share his interest with Flecker, whom he liked but did not see as a soul mate.

He was busy with other things—preventing the Germans from taking (despite the kaiser’s promise to Hogarth) valuable Hittite material from the Carchemish mound for building their bridge, instead of the rubble they were supposed to remove; and carving a beautiful and very impressive winged sun disk into the lintel above the front door of the expedition house. The sun disk showed unexpected skill on Lawrence’s part at stone carving—it was almost five feet from wing tip to wing tip—and was also a typical example of tongue-in-cheek humor, since visitors, even learned ones, invariably admired it as a splendid Hittite relic. Lawrence was particularly pleased when German archaeologists were taken in by it.

It is possible to feel in the letters he wrote during the summer of 1912 a strong preference for adventure over scholarship and a growing reluctance to return home to take up a formal academic career. The very idea of England, with its rich green fields and woods, seems increasingly foreign to him, as if the desert had finally claimed him. He wrote to his older brother, Bob, “I feel very little the lack of English scenery: we have too much greenery there, and one never feels the joy of a fertile place, as one does here when one finds a thorn-bush and green thistle…. England is fat—obese.” There are few references to his plan for expanding his BA thesis on medieval castles, and fewer still to the BLitt on medieval pottery that Jesus College supposed him to be working on. He may, in fact, have settled rather deeper into Arab life than he or Hogarth had intended. He wrote to his youngest brother, Arnold (“Worm”), about a battle he had witnessed from the mound, in which two Arabs shoveling sand into boats for the railway were surprised by a long line of Kurds advancing toward them, to take their boats. The Kurds opened fire with their pistols, and the two sand diggers took off, leaving behind two other Arabs, one of whom “swam for it,” while the other was captured and stripped of his pistol and clothes. The Kurds then used the remaining boat to try to cross the river, but the Arabs massed on their bank of the river and opened fire, eventually driving the Kurds off and chasing after them.* Since most of the shooting was done at 400 yards, an impossible range for most pistols, a lot of ammunition was wasted and nobody was hurt. Lawrence remarks, “Wasn’t that a lovely battle?” but there is a certain glee to his account of the incident, which will be echoed from time to time in his early days with Feisal, when battle was still a new experience.

In August his third bout of malaria drove him back to the comparative comfort of Beirut and the mission school in Jebail, where a Miss Holmes was able to look after him. He reports to his family: “I eat a lot, & sleep a lot, and when I am tired of reading I go and bathe in the sea with Dahoum, who sends his salaams.” His reading list, as ever heavy and impressive, includes Spenser, Catullus, Marot, the Koran, Simonides, and Meleager. For lighter reading he had a novel about the Crusade of the Children, and Maurice Hewlett’s Remy (Lawrence is probably referring to The Song of Renny), which, despite Lawrence’s enthusiasm for Richard Yea-or-Nay, prompts him to write, “I think that Hewlett is finished."* Miss Holmes apparently managed to force a midday siesta on a reluctant Lawrence, and he reports home with evident pride that “she has fallen in love with Sigurd,” an acid test to which all of Lawrence’s English-speaking friends appear to have been put at this time.

By the beginning of October, Woolley had returned and digging was resumed—Lawrence’s work gang fired some 300 shots into the air to celebrate the new season and Woolley’s return, alarming the German railway engineers in the nearby camp, who supposed that an insurrection was taking place. The countryside was in an uproar in any case, since the Turks were busy trying to round up recruits for the army as the Balkan wars dragged on, and the Kurds were threatening to rebel, as they always did when there was any hint of weakness in Constantinople. In a letter to Leeds, Lawrence mentions casually that he has suffered two broken ribs in a scuffle with a belligerent Arab—he treats this incident with his usual disdain for injuries of any kind. Hints of various other scrapes with the authorities and the local Arabs are scattered throughout his letters. It seems likely that at some point he was briefly imprisoned by the Turks, and that at another point he and Woolley were involved in a lawsuit from a local landowner, which Woolley solved in his own swashbuckling manner by threatening the judge. (Under the “capitulations,” foreigners in Turkey were more or less immune from Turkish law.) It is certain that Lawrence was involved in an illicit and secret plot (Lawrence describes it as “the iniquity of gun-running”) to smuggle rifles ashore from a British warship into the British consulate in Beirut, so that the staff members could protect themselves in the event of an anticipated Kurdish rising if the Turks could not (or would not) protect them. The plot involved Lawrence, his death in 1923.his friend “Flecker, the admiral at Malta, our Ambassador at Stanbul, two [British naval] captains, and two lieutenants, besides innumerable cavasses [consular guards and porters], in one common law-breaking.” This gleeful flouting of Turkish sovereignty, involving high British naval and diplomatic figures and masterminded by a young Oxford scholar and archaeological assistant, helps to explain the apparently effortless transition of Lawrence from deskbound intelligence officer to guerrilla leader in 1917. Lawrence also reports that he has been firing an expensive Mannlicher-Schцnhauer sporting carbine, possibly presented to him as a reward for his part in the “gun-running” incident, and “put four shots out of five” with it into “a six-gallon petrol tin at 400 yards"; this is very fine shooting by any standard. He also reports having invented a number of special tools of his own design to help move heavy stones, and having taken up the risky use of dynamite to demolish Roman concrete remains and get at the Hittite ruins below them. It is easy to see that many of the elements that made Lawrence an effective military leader were already in place as early as 1912; it is almost as if Lawrence were training himself for what was to come, but of course he was not.

He and Woolley took the precaution of making friends with the local Kurdish leaders; indeed Lawrence hoped to steer the Kurds toward the German railway camp in case of trouble, but the Kurds remained disappointingly quiet. None of this excitement slowed down the steady stream of Lawrence’s letters home. He relied on his older brother, Bob, a pupil of the great physician Sir William Osler at Oxford and now a medical student at Barts, for medical advice that would help him treat the Arabs—it had been Bob who gave Lawrence the instructions for vaccinating the local children against smallpox, and who recommended the use of carbolic acid and ammonia for the workers’ boils and wounds. Even to Bob, though, Lawrence’s tone is faintly paternal, a blend of advice and warnings on every subject under the sun. Indeed, much as Lawrence disliked receiving advice from his mother, he was never hesitant about giving it out. This was to be a lifelong characteristic—though there were exceptions, such as Bernard Shaw, whose advice on grammar and punctuation Lawrence heard patiently, but mostly ignored; and Hogarth, the one person whose opinions Lawrence instinctively trusted. Lawrence was one of those difficult people who nearly always had to find their own way of doing things, and he turned a deaf ear to any differing opinion, however eminent the source. He would always prefer to fail by doing something his own way than to succeed by doing it somebody else’s way: Lawrence never yielded willingly to anybody. Some of the most terrifying episodes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom are those in which Lawrence describes his experiences as a largely self-taught demolitions expert, casually dealing with guncotton and detonators, and using his own rule of thumb to determine how much explosive he needed to use to destroy a train or demolish a bridge. Typically, Lawrence presents these scenes as comedy, and notes that the bigger the bang, the more the Arabs were impressed. This was no doubt true, but he risked death time after time as rails, rocks, and pieces of locomotives rained down around him.

Lawrence’s travels around Syria from 1911 to 1914 and his friendship with some of the Kurdish leaders in 1912 gave him a far better picture of the secret Arab societies and of the unrest boiling under the surface of Turkish rule than he is usually given credit for having. Although skeptics about Lawrence have since questioned his claim that he “dipped deep into” the councils of the Armenian and Kurdish secret societies, there is proof of this: on the way back to England for a brief holiday in December 1912, he stopped to give a detailed report of what he knew to the American vice and deputy consul-general in Beirut, F. Willoughby Smith, who encapsulated it in a long memorandum to the consul. Lawrence brought to Smith’s attention the fact that the Turks had poisoned one of the principal Kurdish leaders, and that he had been shown a secret hoard of “eight to ten thousand” rifles and large stocks of ammunition in a crusader castle. The report is detailed, demonstrates that Lawrence had gained the full confidence of the Kurdish leaders, and goes on to mention that young Kurds who were conscripted to serve in the Turkish army were under orders to desert as soon as they had been issued a rifle—an interestingway of turning the Turks’ conscription to the benefit of their enemies! Smith gives Lawrence and Woolley full credit, which seems to confirm that Lawrence was already dabbling in Middle Eastern politics, not as a British spy (if he had been a spy, he would hardly have passed what he knew on to the American vice-consul), but as an unusually adventurous supporter of the Arab cause. That Lawrence’s judgment about such matters was very sound for an archaeological assistant is borne out, for example, by his frequent mention of the fears of the Armenian community and the Armenians’ attempts to arm themselves. (Those fears were certainly proved well founded when the Turks set out to subject the entire Armenian population to genocide in 1915.)

Lawrence had a way of getting involved in matters far beyond the ordinary demands of field archaeology, like smuggling rifles into the British consulate. Echoes of Lawrence’s adventures are strewn throughout his letters—it is possible, for example, that he and Dahoum were thrown into a Turkish prison as deserters from the Turkish army (Lawrence must have been in Arab clothes at the time), and were badly beaten there. Lawrence’s contacts with the Kurdish revolutionaries (and to a lesser extent, the Armenians) seem to have been more in the nature of a high-spirited adventure than of serious intelligence work, but had the full approval of Woolley, who realized that in the event of an uprising in the area around Carchemish the two Englishmen would be at the mercy of the Kurds. Good relations with the Kurdish leaders were therefore a necessary precaution; Woolley even went so far as to arrange for the settlement of a three-generation blood feud between two of the most important Kurdish sheikhs—"Buswari and his great enemy Shalim Bey"—in the expedition house, with himself as the impartial referee, passing out chocolates to the party of “9 great Kurds.”

Visitors to the excavation site were startled to see that the watchman was a villainous-looking, heavily armed Kurdish brigand, whom Lawrence had chosen because his reputation alone would keep away other marauding Kurds in the event of an uprising. Any doubts about what such an uprising might entail had been erased when Lawrence visited thenearby towns of Nizib and Biridjik, in Arab clothing. He found the body of an Armenian Christian doctor still lying in the street in Nizib, two days after the doctor had been shot by Kurdish militants; and he described the Kurdish hill villagers as “running around with guns and looking for another Christian to kill.” Clearly, Lawrence’s habit of wearing an Arab robe and a headdress was already more than a casual affectation; in certain circumstances it was a means of survival, long before Feisal asked him to put such clothing on in 1916.

Lawrence’s short return home took place in part because there was a gentlemanly dispute simmering between Hogarth at the Ashmolean in Oxford and Kenyon of the British Museum in London over which institution should get first choice of the antiquities Lawrence was buying or (more rarely) unearthing in Carchemish; in part because funding for further digging was again in doubt; and in part because Lawrence’s speculations regarding a Kurdish uprising had the no doubt unintended effect of raising, in the minds of Hogarth and Kenyon, questions about his and Woolley’s safety. Certainly the ottoman Empire seemed to be falling to pieces as the Balkan wars exposed all its weaknesses. Before his departure for home, Lawrence commented on the total unreliability of the postal system, the wolves attacking herds by night in close proximity to the dig, the erratic and brutal attempts to enforce military conscription, and the fact that steamships were no longer reliably entering Turkish ports. Lawrence had hoped to bring Dahoum, Sheikh Hamoudi, and perhaps Fareedeh el Akle (his Arab teacher at Jebail) home with him, but the uncertainty about whether to continue the dig had left him short of funds.

As usual, Hogarth performed the required miracle, smoothed over the difficulties with the British Museum, and found funding to resume the dig at Carchemish. Lawrence returned in the third week of January—after a pause of a few days in Egypt, where he made an amicable visit to Petrie’s new site (and “was lucky enough not to find Mrs. Petrie there,” as he ungraciously remarked). In Cairo he visited the famous museum and found a Hittite cup mislabeled as Persian. He made a huge fuss, demanding that a correction be made, and when the keys to the case could notbe found, insisted on having it opened by the museum carpenter with a “hammer & screwdriver,” showing once again how quickly he could take on the identity (and attitude) of a pukka sahib toward the “natives” when it suited him to. To be sure, he did not like Egyptians, but still, there is a certain mismatch between Lawrence in this mood and Lawrence as the champion of Arab freedom. His increasing admiration for the Arabs did not, for instance, make him more tolerant of Negroes, Indians, or Levantine Jews.

He wrote home in February from Aleppo, where the Armenians, in no doubt about what was coming, were “arming frantically” and where there were “snow-drifts, & ice & hail & sleet & rain.” He managed to reach Beirut, but the railway north was blocked by snow in the mountains, and Lawrence was unable to get on a steamer from Beirut to Alexandretta in time to ensure the shipment of the many cases of antiquities piled up there for the Ashmolean and the British Museum. He drew on his friendship with the British consul, who arranged with the Royal Navy to have Lawrence, accompanied by Dahoum, taken to Alexandretta by a British cruiser, HMS Duke of Edinburgh—this kind of amazing good fortune seemed to happen only to Lawrence. On board the cruiser Dahoum was popular with the officers—he seems to have had considerable personal charm. In Alexandretta, another British cruiser took on board all the packing cases—the number of British warships and naval personnel with time on their hands off the Turkish coast is explained by the prevailing fear that the Turkish government might at any moment permit or encourage a massacre of foreign residents (including British subjects), to draw attention away from its defeats in the Balkans. In this matter, as in the buying of antiquities, Lawrence seems to have acted with a certain swagger.

While he was in England, he had ordered a canoe (from Salter Brothers, the famous boatbuilders in Oxford) and had it sent out to Beirut. In it, he hoped to explore the farther reaches of the Euphrates River during the spring—this is another example of Lawrence’s lordly way when it came to those things that really interested him, and also of his determination to make his time at Carchemish, which would now stretch out for at leastanother year, as pleasant as possible. Carchemish, despite the occasional brawls and confrontations with the authorities, was “a place where one eats lotos* nearly every day.” There, Lawrence, in the company of his friend Dahoum, could arrange his life as he pleased, without any interference, provided that he carried out the basic duties of his profession to the satisfaction of Hogarth, whose approval was unfailing.

By the middle of March, despite cold weather and storms, Lawrence already had his canoe in the river, was teaching Dahoum to paddle it, and was luxuriating in the number of objects he and Woolley were at last beginning to produce in quantity. The list is endless: Hittite bronze work and carved slabs of basalt, Phoenician glazed pottery, Roman glass. In addition, the excavation was at last beginning to uncover greater portions of the Hittite city itself. Lawrence and Woolley worked without friction, and to any reader of Lawrence’s letters, it seems at least possible that Lawrence might easily have settled down into the role of an archaeologist and adventurer in the Middle East, if it had not been for World War I. On the other hand, it is hardly possible not to read into his letters a foreboding that some kind of breakup or collapse was impending—that he was enjoying his “lotos-eating” days in the knowledge they would soon be ended. Perhaps for that reason, his interest in crusader castles and in writing a great book about the major cities of the Middle East had apparently gone the way of the thesis on medieval pottery. One senses that he already knew none of these things was going to happen. Certainly the Ottoman Empire in 1913 was, of all the uneasy places in the world, the one in which fearsome threats, anger, and hatred between the subject races of the empire and their masters, and a terrifying mixture of cynicism, corruption, and brutality at the top, seemed most likely to produce a conflagration. Turkey was balanced at the edge of an abyss, having lost all its possessions in North Africa and Europe; itsrulers were determined to hold out for the highest price in the event of war between the great powers rather than risk neutrality and being left out of the spoils of victory, and they were always acutely aware that the majority of Turkey’s population consisted of subject races—Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Jews, Christians—who had in common nothing except a desire to get rid of the Turks as overlords and masters. Lawrence, who understood the situation better than most, can hardly be blamed for enjoying himself in his own way for as long as possible.

As the fame of Carchemish increased, so did the number of visitors, some of them American, whom Lawrence much preferred to Germans. At the end of April, having been told by the local boatmen that with the Euphrates in full flood he “couldn’t shoot the railway bridge” in his canoe “without upsetting,” he naturally took “a Miss Campbell, staying with us,” down the racing river, and back up again, drawing a rare note of concern from his father, the expert yachtsman. Lawrence had apparently fitted “a square-rigged sail” to the canoe, and he pointed out in his own defense that even if it did upset, all he had to do was swim back to shore towing it—though he did not say whether Miss Campbell, in the long skirt of the day, would have enjoyed the experience.