Lawrence

by Michael Asher

  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.’7 In Aleppo he had many friends – not only Arabs but also Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Circassians. His sense of noblesse oblige was 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.’8 He 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 were disputes 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 élite, 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 Isis magazine, 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.’9 The 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.’10 Dahoum 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.’11 Lawrence’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’.12 Very 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’.1 Newcombe 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 inadverte
ntly 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.’2 It 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’. ‘Ein meant 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.

  Forbidden map-work, Lawrence spent his time scouring the ruins of the ancient citadel of Ayla, where he picked up some sherds of pottery. He tried to hire a boat to take him to Pharaoh’s Island – the Crusaders’ Île de Graye – about ten miles south of Aqaba, where there was a medieval castle. Unfortunately, the boatman he had engaged was immediately arrested by the police, and when Lawrence and Dahoum tried to take the boat out themselves, the police prevented them. Undaunted, Lawrence borrowed three ten-gallon water-drums from Newcombe, and hiked with his camels around the coast to Taba, from where the island lay only 400 yards offshore. He blew air into the tanks, and paddled across using a wooden plank as an oar, towing Dahoum behind him on one tank and his camera on another. Unfortunately, the ruins were not worth the effort, and on his return he was obliged to leave the district under military escort.

  Lawrence decided to march north up the Wadi ‘Araba to Petra, the ancient Nabataean city carved in solid rock, which he had wanted to reach since his first expedition in Syria in 1909. Photography was forbidden, but despite his escort he managed to get half a dozen photographs by pretending to be suffering from diarrhoea and taking frequent leave. He sent his twelve camels and five camel-men on to Wadi Musa, at the entrance to Petra, and he and Dahoum stalked off fast, managing to lose their military guards in the maze of valleys around Mount Hor. While alone, they discovered a route through the hills which Bedu raiding-parties used when heading for Sinai. Lawrence found Petra itself a feast. Though he had read a great deal about it previously, he was unprepared for the overwhelming effect of the place. It was not the rock-cut tombs and temples which awed him, but the natural beauty of the site, with its marbled colours of red, black and grey, its great cliffs and pinnacles, and its gorge, or Siq, like an undersea cavern, abrim with oleanders, ivy and ferns. For once he felt his powers of description inadequate: ‘Be assured,’ he wrote Edward Leeds, ‘that till you have seen it you have not the glimmering of an idea how beautiful a place can be.’3 Although the rock city was mercifully unmarred by the thousands of visitors who flock through it today, there already existed a tourist camp run by Thomas Cook, and there was a slow trickle of privileged sightseers. From one of them, a Lady Evelyn Cobbold, Lawrence managed to beg the train fare from Ma’an to Damascus, while making a slightly snobbish mental note to have his mother look her up in Who’s Who to find out ‘what’ she was.

  Ma’an lay only a short distance away across the Belqa hills, and Lawrence sent his baggage caravan on ahead as usual. He was annoyed to find on his arrival that the ca
mels had been impounded by the police for grazing on public pasture, and would not be released until he paid a fine. Lawrence had learned the correct response to such problems at the hands of the firebrand Woolley, and he suddenly snatched a couple of the rifles which the policemen had piled before them and, with the weapons tucked under his arm, marched briskly towards the local Governor’s office. The policemen, too cowed to snatch them back, trotted close behind. He confronted the Governor, and demanded that the fine be waived in exchange for the rifles. The Governor was furious, but reluctantly agreed, instructing his men to free the camels, upon which Lawrence cocked a deliciously arrogant verbal snook, saying, ‘Please don’t trouble yourself. They left the town an hour and a half ago!’4 He waited at Ma an two days for a train, grumbling about the inefficiency of the Turkish railway engineers, and finally managed to travel to Damascus third class. He was not to see Ma an again for three years, and then it would be a distant vision from the desert, as he rode towards Aqaba at the head of a Hashemite force.

  Lawrence was glad to be back at Carchemish, and took with him no yearning for the desert. He looked forward instead to the routine of the dig, wanting it to go on and on for years. At last the young man who had wished to spend his life as an artistic dilettante saw himself turning into a ‘professional’: in his letter to Vyvyan Richards at the end of the previous season he had confessed that ever since he had got to know the East, the idea of settling down at home had faded: ‘… gradually I slipped down,’ he wrote, ‘until a few months ago when I found myself an ordinary archaeologist. I fought very hard at Oxford… to avoid being labelled: but the insurance people have nailed me down now.’5 However, work could not begin until the end of March since Kenyon had neglected to renew the digging permit, and on the day Lawrence and Woolley arrived back from Aleppo with the permit, there was fighting in the railway camp.