Hero_ The Life And Legend Of Lawrence Of Arabia Part 5

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 gla.s.s, 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 Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te 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.

As the heat increased, Lawrence took to sleeping on the mound, overlooking the Euphrates, and getting up at sunrise to help Sheikh Hamoudi pick the men, and deal with the infinite problems of blood feuds and rivalry between those who shoveled, and thought of themselves as an elite, and those who merely carried baskets of dirt and rocks. Daily, Lawrence was learning not only colloquial Arabic, but the complexities of Arab social relationships, and the dangerous consequences of getting these wrong, or offending Arabs' sensitivity.

On June 24, he wrote home to say that the British Museum, disappointed in the results so far, had ordered work shut down in two weeks, and that he intended to take a walking tour of about a month. He added a warning, "Anxiety is absurd." If anything happened to him, his family would hear about it in time. Dahoum had apparently been promoted from one of the two water boys to "the donkey boy," and Lawrence described him as "an interesting character," who could "read a few words (the only man in the district except the liquorice-king) of Arabic, and altogether has more intelligence than the rank-and-file." Dahoum, he mentions, had hopes of going to school in Aleppo, and Lawrence intended to keep an eye on him. Lawrence deplores the intrusion of foreign influence, particularly French and American, on the Arabs, and adds: "The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn." In a postscript he adds that he has now decided to spend the winter walking through Syria (his new pair of boots has arrived), perhaps settling in one of the villages near Jerablus for a time, possibly in the house of Dahoum's father.

This information may not have alarmed the Lawrence family, but it should have. There was no more talk of working under Petrie in Egypt, let alone any mention of Richards and his printing press. Lawrence and Thompson were to go off and briefly examine another Hitt.i.te mound at Tell Ahmar, at Hogarth's request, and after that Lawrence proposed to go onby himself, walking to those crusader castles he had not already seen. On top of his next letter, written on July 29, from Jerablus, his mother wrote: "This letter was written when he was almost dying from dysentery."

Lawrence's letter home gives no hint of this-on the contrary, he writes, "I am very well, and en route now for Aleppo," and describes his itinerary so far. The letter is unusually short for him, however-surely a bad sign-and in fact, on the day before, he wrote in his diary, "Cannot possibly continue to tramp in this condition," and collapsed in the house of Sheikh Hamoudi. Hamoudi looked after Lawrence as best he could-though not without a note from Lawrence absolving him of responsibility in case his guest died. This was intended to protect Hamoudi from the Turkish authorities, who would certainly have punished him if a foreigner had died in his care.

Lawrence's mother was not wrong-he came very close to dying, and owed his life to the patient and determined care of Sheikh Hamoudi and the donkey boy Dahoum. By the first days of August Lawrence was beginning to recover, though he was still very weak, and sensibly concluded that his walking tour could not be completed, and that he would have to go home. His illness in 1911 set a pattern that would persist for the rest of Lawrence's life-he ignored wounds, boils, abrasions, infections, broken bones, and pain; paid no attention to the precautions about food and drinking water that almost all Europeans living or traveling in the East made sure to take; suffered through repeated bouts of at least two strains of malaria; and kept going as long as he could even when dysentery brought him to the point of fainting. He lived at some point beyond mere stoicism, and behaved as if he were indestructible-one of the essential attributes of a hero.

As Lawrence slowly regained his strength, he used the time to encourage Dahoum's "efforts to educate himself," and wrote to his friend Fareedeh el Akle at the American mission school in Jebail for simple books on Arab history for his pupil-if possible, books untainted by western influence or thinking. In the meantime he practiced his Arabic on Dahoum; and with a curious habit of antic.i.p.ating the future, whichcreeps into his letters and diaries, he wrote to Hogarth that "learning the strongly-dialectical Arabic of the villages would be good as a disguise" while traveling.

While Lawrence lay ill in Jerablus, Hogarth was busy in London, deftly guiding the British Museum toward supporting a new season of digging at Carchemish, since the Turkish government was unlikely to allow the British to start excavation on another Hitt.i.te site before this one had been fully exploited. Apparently impressed by Hogarth's letters to the Times about Carchemish, Lawrence began what was to become a lifelong habit of writing to the editor of the Times about matters that displeased or concerned him. He broke into public print for the first time with a savagely Swiftian attack on the way the Turkish government was allowing important antiquities and archaeological sites to be torn down by developers. "Sir," he began: "Everyone who has watched the wonderful strides that civilization is making in the hands of the Young Turks will know of their continued efforts to clear from the country all signs of the evil of the past." Remarking on a plan to destroy the great castle of Aleppo for the benefit of "Levantine financiers," and on plans to do the same at Urfa and Biridjik, he went on to attack the Germans who were building the Berlin-Baghdad railway, and predicted that "the [Hitt.i.te] ruins of Carchemish are to provide materials for the approaches to a new iron girder bridge over the Euphrates," signing himself, "Yours, &c., Traveller." The Times, always quick to publish even the tamest of letters-and this one was anything but tame-under a provocative headline, published it on August 9, below the headline "Vandalism in Upper Syria and Mesopotamia," predictably eliciting an infuriated reaction from the German consul in Aleppo. Taunting the Turks and attacking the Germans for their activities in the Ottoman Empire was to become a habit with Lawrence in the years remaining before the outbreak of war.

On August 3 Lawrence began his trip home. He arrived in Beirut on August 8, and to his great delight met the poet James Elroy Flecker and Flecker's Greek wife, h.e.l.le, who were to become his close friends over the next few years. Flecker was the acting British vice-consul in Beirut;he had attended Trinity College, Oxford, where he had been, or felt he was, a misfit, although he had been a contemporary, friend, and rival of the poet Rupert Brooke. John Maynard Keynes, who had met Flecker while visiting friends in Oxford, wrote about him to Lytton Strachey: "I am not enthusiastic about Flecker,-semi-foreign, with a steady languid flow and, I am told, an equally steady production of plays and poems which are just not bad." There may be a trace of what might now be called gay b.i.t.c.hery in this comment, as well as a degree of genteel anti-Semitism-both Keynes and Strachey were members of a rather refined group of extremely bright, ambitious young h.o.m.os.e.xuals. Flecker labored under numerous erotic and familial difficulties, none of which he was able to reconcile or resolve: he had been educated at a school where his father was the headmaster, and as if that were not difficult enough, his father was a ferociously Low Church, evangelical Protestant who was half Jewish. Flecker's swarthy looks made his intense Englishness seem adopted rather than natural, and he rebelled against his parents in every way, running up reckless debts, and indulging himself by writing extravagantly garish poetry and striking exaggerated aesthetic poses that alarmed them. Only by dint of a heroic, last-ditch effort was Flecker able to squeak through the examination into the consular service (a large step down from the more socially and intellectually distinguished diplomatic service). In the process, he did nothing to please either his parents or the Foreign Office by falling in love with a forceful young Greek woman, who braved the issue of his ill health-he was already suffering from tuberculosis-to marry him. More or less exiled to a subordinate post in Beirut, Flecker paid more attention to his career as a poet than to his consular duties.

In Lawrence he found not only a friend but an admirer. Lawrence was deeply impressed by Flecker's poetry,* the best of which was written after Flecker was exposed to the color and drama of eastern life, and felt as much at home in the Fleckers' apartment in Beirut as he would a fewyears later in that of Ronald Storrs, in Cairo. Indeed Lawrence photographed Flecker elaborately dressed in a Bedouin robe and headdress-though despite his dark complexion and an inherent love of dressing up in costume, Flecker does not look nearly as comfortable in Arab clothing as Lawrence. Flecker is also a good example of one of Lawrence's most endearing characteristics: once he became your friend he was your friend for life, and once he admired your work he was a supporter of it forever. the best of which was written after Flecker was exposed to the color and drama of eastern life, and felt as much at home in the Fleckers' apartment in Beirut as he would a fewyears later in that of Ronald Storrs, in Cairo. Indeed Lawrence photographed Flecker elaborately dressed in a Bedouin robe and headdress-though despite his dark complexion and an inherent love of dressing up in costume, Flecker does not look nearly as comfortable in Arab clothing as Lawrence. Flecker is also a good example of one of Lawrence's most endearing characteristics: once he became your friend he was your friend for life, and once he admired your work he was a supporter of it forever.

It is a measure of how ill Lawrence had been that he returned to England via Ma.r.s.eille and went on from there by train to Oxford-this route was much quicker (and more expensive) than traveling by sea from Beirut to England. At home, he recuperated under the watchful eye of Sarah, and faced the difficulties so common to talented young men of his age. In his case it was not so much that he couldn't decide what to do with himself as that he had too many choices and self-imposed obligations. Hogarth, he learned, had secured the funds for a second season of excavation at Carchemish; Flinders Petrie had accepted him for a stint of tomb digging in Egypt; Vyvyan Richards was still eager to proceed with the printing press scheme; Jesus College expected to hear more about Lawrence's BLitt thesis on medieval pottery; and Lawrence himself was deeply mired in his plan to bring out his expanded BA thesis on castles and fortifications as a book, a project that was doomed for the moment by the number of his drawings and photographs that he deemed essential to the text.

Lawrence's photograph of James Elroy Flecker.

Although the doctors were strongly against Lawrence's return to the Middle East, that of course did not deter him. Thompson, he learned, had declined to return unless his wife could accompany him, a suggestion that horrified everyone; and Hogarth replaced him with a young archaeologist, Charles Leonard Woolley, an a.s.sistant keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Woolley would go on to a long and distinguished career; he would not only be knighted but serve as the inspiration for Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia. Lawrence and Woolley became and remained friends-Woolley was primarily interested in the discovery of big buildings and monuments, while Lawrence worked with the men, honed his knowledge of Arabic, and took care of the pottery finds and the photography.

Lawrence defied the doctors and set out again for Jerablus at the end of November, to report on the rumor that the Germans planned to build their railway right through the mound at Carchemish. When this proved to be untrue (the railway would pa.s.s uncomfortably near it, but not through it), he journeyed on to Egypt to join Petrie's current dig at Kafr Ammar, on the Nile south of Cairo, but not without enduring a terrifying carriage accident on Christmas Day, when the driver toppled the carriage and the horses off a bridge and into a stream. In a letter home on January 2 he comments darkly (and correctly) about conditions in the Ottoman Empire: "Great rumors of war and annexation:-not to be believed yet, but such a smash is coming out here."

He wrote next from Cairo, giving his family his new address in Kafr Ammar in Arabic script, so they could copy it out and add it to each envelope. The actual digging disgusted him, and prompted one of his darker descriptive pa.s.sages: "It is a strange sight to see the men [dragging] out amummy, not glorious in bright wrappings, but dark brown, fibrous, visibly rotting-and then the thing begins to come to pieces, and the men tear off its head, and bare the skull, and the vertebrae drop out, and the ribs, and legs and perhaps only one poor amulet is the result.... I'm no body s.n.a.t.c.her, and we have a pile of skulls that would do credit to a follower of Genghis Khan." He found the Nile sluggish, and the brown sails of the boats on it depressing to look at.

A week later Flinders Petrie* and his wife arrived, and it is hard not to guess that the uncongenial nature of the work preconditioned Lawrence to dislike her. "I don't like Mrs. Petrie," he wrote home flatly after meeting her for the first time (this was unusual for Lawrence); as for Petrie, who was hugely dignified and full of himself, Lawrence seems to have displayed his dislike of tomb robbing by "taking the mickey" out of Petrie in small ways, perhaps not his most endearing trait. Lawrence turned up for digging in football shorts and a white Magdalen College Boat Club blazer, prompting Petrie to remark that they weren't here to play cricket. As one of Lawrence's biographers pointed out, the joke was on Petrie, who did not realize that cricket isn't played in football shorts (not that Lawrence played either cricket or football). Also, and perhaps more woundingly, flaunting the Magdalen blazer may have been Lawrence's way of reminding Petrie that unlike Lawrence he "was not an Oxonian, but merely Professor of Egyptology in the pet.i.t bourgeois University of London." Petrie, whose long white beard made him rather resemble G.o.d the Father in Michelangelo's ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel, may have been sharp enough to guess the intention of Lawrence's choice of clothing, but the Petries nevertheless showed him a remarkable degree of kindness and courtesy during his time there, and Lawrence thawed toward them. and his wife arrived, and it is hard not to guess that the uncongenial nature of the work preconditioned Lawrence to dislike her. "I don't like Mrs. Petrie," he wrote home flatly after meeting her for the first time (this was unusual for Lawrence); as for Petrie, who was hugely dignified and full of himself, Lawrence seems to have displayed his dislike of tomb robbing by "taking the mickey" out of Petrie in small ways, perhaps not his most endearing trait. Lawrence turned up for digging in football shorts and a white Magdalen College Boat Club blazer, prompting Petrie to remark that they weren't here to play cricket. As one of Lawrence's biographers pointed out, the joke was on Petrie, who did not realize that cricket isn't played in football shorts (not that Lawrence played either cricket or football). Also, and perhaps more woundingly, flaunting the Magdalen blazer may have been Lawrence's way of reminding Petrie that unlike Lawrence he "was not an Oxonian, but merely Professor of Egyptology in the pet.i.t bourgeois University of London." Petrie, whose long white beard made him rather resemble G.o.d the Father in Michelangelo's ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel, may have been sharp enough to guess the intention of Lawrence's choice of clothing, but the Petries nevertheless showed him a remarkable degree of kindness and courtesy during his time there, and Lawrence thawed toward them.

Over time, despite his dislike of digging up mummified bodies (and a general distaste for Egypt, both the people and the way they spoke Arabic), Lawrence came rather reluctantly to admire Petrie's abilities. Petrie had discovered the first mention of Israel in Egyptian recorded history by deciphering the Merneptah stele, an accomplishment that won him international acclaim; and by linking the styles of pottery shards, he developed a new and more exact method of chronology for excavation sites, something from which Lawrence would benefit in his task of cla.s.sifying Hitt.i.te pottery at Carchemish.

Petrie emphasized that all archaeological research "lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details," advice from which Lawrence could surely benefit, and with which he agreed. In the end Lawrence not only learned a lot from Petrie, as Hogarth had surely intended, but came to like and respect him, despite their unpropitious first meeting. As for Petrie, he offered Lawrence 700, a not inconsiderable sum, toward the expense of two seasons investigating several sites on the Persian Gulf, which Lawrence was very tempted to accept if the resumption of the Carchemish dig fell through.

However, during Lawrence's one-month stay in Egypt-he may be the only visitor to pa.s.s through Cairo without bothering to see the Pyramids-Hogarth had unexpectedly tapped into a wealthy source for carrying forward the Carchemish digging. By the time Lawrence arrived back there early in February, the matter of financing was settled, and the opportunity to dig for Petrie vanished for the moment. Perhaps this was just as well, for Lawrence's commitment to a career in archaeology was never total. Lawrence was happy at Jerablus-happier than he would ever be in his life again-but he was never tempted by the academic life.

The world of caravans, camels, desert, and Bedouin nomads would hold Lawrence to the Middle East for the next three years, except for brief visits home, and spare him the decision about what career to follow, until at last the outbreak of World War I thrust him into the career for which he had been training himself all his life.

Lawrence arrived at Aleppo to find the Turkish authorities making difficulties about the resumption of work at Carchemish; nor had the moneyarrived with which to begin a new house for the archaeologists, nearer to the site. The years 1911 to 1914 were difficult ones for foreigners in Turkey-the country's political instability combined with a series of humiliating military defeats and territorial losses for the Ottoman Empire in Libya at the hands of Italy, and in the Balkans at the hands of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, intensified the siege mentality of the Turkish government and its hostility to foreigners, and encouraged fear of the Russians and, therefore, a closer relationship with Germany. In the course of the nineteenth century Turkey had seen itself deprived of all its North African possessions, from Egypt to Morocco, and all its Balkan possessions except for a tiny enclave around Constantinople; of course, this made the Turks all the more determined to hold on to their Arabian possessions.

Lawrence kicked his heels in Aleppo for nearly two weeks, happy to be out of Egypt, buying small antiquities for Hogarth and the Ashmolean Museum, bargaining for a long camel-hair cloak for himself ("such as Bedouin sheiks wear: Baghdad made: very warm and beautiful"), and keeping himself going by borrowing from the British consul until money arrived from the British Museum. He spent much time searching for an armorer who still made chain mail as it had been made at the time of the Crusades, for the benefit of a friend in Oxford who shared his interest in armor. He wrote home often-in one letter, he expresses satisfaction that his brother Frank is keeping up with his shooting, and urges Frank "to do a little revolver work: it is harder than a rifle to learn, and more often necessary," a typically offhand remark that separates Lawrence from other archaeological a.s.sistants, few of whom would have felt that revolver marksmanship was a necessity. He seems to have been reading a lot-Maurice Hewlett's Richard Yea-and-Nay, a historical novel about Richard I, for the ninth time, Lawrence claimed; and William Morris's "Victorian-Icelandic-Anglo-Saxon-German epic poem" Sigurd the Volsung. This is a revealing choice of books. Hewlett was a prolific English writer of romantic historical fiction; he was a friend of Ezra Pound and of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, and was famous and successful in his time,though he is largely forgotten now. His novel about Richard Coeur de Lion is a frankly hero-worshipping and meticulously detailed portrait of one of Lawrence's favorite medieval kings. Morris's hero, Sigurd, is the central figure of Norse myth and legend, the dragon slayer and hero of the Volsunga Saga, and Wagner's inspiration for the Ring cycle. Morris transformed Sigurd into a n.o.ble Victorian hero, a kind of fantasy preux chevalier, in what one biographer of Lawrence calls "a transparently Oedipal tale."* Both books are about the trials and tribulations of a hero as he pa.s.ses from one dangerous adventure to another toward his fate: betrayal by a woman. It is hard to imagine anyone reading Hewlett's novel nine times, unless he identified in some way with Richard I. As for Sigurd's doom-laden (and pagan) story, it seems unlikely that Thomas and Sarah Lawrence would have shared their son's enthusiasm. As is so often the case with Lawrence, his interests and enthusiasms seemed to be drawing him toward a life in the heroic mold, for the moment still in the form of literary fantasy, even while on the practical, day-to-day level he pursued archaeology. Both books are about the trials and tribulations of a hero as he pa.s.ses from one dangerous adventure to another toward his fate: betrayal by a woman. It is hard to imagine anyone reading Hewlett's novel nine times, unless he identified in some way with Richard I. As for Sigurd's doom-laden (and pagan) story, it seems unlikely that Thomas and Sarah Lawrence would have shared their son's enthusiasm. As is so often the case with Lawrence, his interests and enthusiasms seemed to be drawing him toward a life in the heroic mold, for the moment still in the form of literary fantasy, even while on the practical, day-to-day level he pursued archaeology.

Once he arrived in Jerablus, after a three-day walk over rough country, followed by a recalcitrant mule train carrying the expedition's supplies, Lawrence was like a man back in his element. Physical discomfort, danger, and exhaustion acted on him like a tonic. He gathered a workforce; had the foundations for the expedition house dug; and argued over the ownership of the mound with a greedy local landowner who claimed it, and with a Turkish police lieutenant who ordered him to stop the digging. By the first week in March he was back in Aleppo, to pick up Woolley-there was a certain amount of excitement in the foreign community, since all Italians were being expelled from Turkey because of the war in Libya, and it was therefore possible to buy their collections of antiquities atbargain-bas.e.m.e.nt prices. Then, a week later, Woolley and Lawrence went to Biridjik together, to confront the kaimakam over the order to stop the digging and the interference from the local landowner.

Lawrence might easily have resented Woolley's presence, since Woolley was senior to him, and a more experienced archaeologist, but fortunately Woolley behaved exactly the right way for an Englishman confronting an Asian official, and told the kaimakam that he would shoot on the spot anyone who "interrupted the digs." He apparently spoke with enough high-handed vigor and righteous British indignation to cow the kaimakam, who had, of course, arranged the various attempts to stop the digging in the hope of extracting a bribe for himself. Woolley thereby won Lawrence's instant and lasting respect and friendship. Those who thought Lawrence was mild saw only his short stature, his slight figure, and the boyish shock of unruly fair hair, and failed to notice the icy blue eyes and the large, firm jaw: he was quite capable of acting just like one of Kipling's pukka sahibs when aroused, and he thoroughly approved of Woolley's boldly threatening the Turkish police chief in the chief's own office, as well as Woolley's parting shot: that he was declaring war not against the Turkish government, but only against the kaimakam.

Woolley acquired further merit in Lawrence's eyes by admiring Lawrence's pottery finds (and agreeing with most of Lawrence's theories about them) and showing a preference for Syrian over Egyptian cooking. Since Woolley could not speak or understand the local dialect, he needed Lawrence to translate for him, as well as deal with the workforce-not always an easy task, since almost every adult male was armed, and every find was proclaimed with a fusillade of shots. Even the cook, "the staid Haj Wahid," worked with a Mauser pistol stuffed into his sash and a Martini-Henry rifle by his bedroll, and at one point fired ten shots through the goat-hair roof of the tent in celebration; the holes then had to be darned.

By the beginning of April-despite the fact that no building permit had as yet arrived from Constantinople-the stone expedition house was almost completed. Consisting of eleven rooms, "two of them very large," the Carchemish house was to occupy a good deal of Lawrence's time andattention over the next two years. It had an impressive courtyard with a graceful stone entrance, and although the house was built of rough-dressed stone rather than adobe, in photographs it very much resembles a largish and rather fashionable home in Santa Fe. This is particularly true of the interior, with its hanging wall rugs; white plaster walls with deep, graceful niches for books and antiquities; carved wooden doors; and beamed ceilings, which look just like the rough-hewn vigas used in New Mexico.

By mid-April Lawrence and Woolley had settled into the new house and were waiting for the arrival (and the approval) of Hogarth. Despite a formal visit from the kaimakam, who had been ordered to apologize to them, Lawrence continued his campaign of hara.s.sing the Turkish authorities, picking the lock of the storeroom in which the "poor little [Turkish] Commissaire" kept the antiquities that had been excavated, and in general doing what he could to stoke the discontent in the local workforce against the nearby German railway builders. For the moment, all this was still on the level of undergraduate pranks, but the Middle East being what it was (and is), there would soon be an escalation to violence and the use of firearms. Even Woolley, who came to admire and love Lawrence, was aware of his "essential immaturity" about matters like this. That impression was no doubt accentuated by the fact that Lawrence looked, as Winifred Fontana, the wife of the British consul in Aleppo, remarked, "about eighteen." Another person who met Lawrence in Aleppo at that time described him as a "frail, pallid, silent youth," though that remark contrasts with Mrs. Fontana's description of him as "a young man of rare power and considerable physical beauty." Much as Lawrence spurned physical relationships with any women (or men), a number of women were strongly attracted to him over the years.

In a long letter home at about this time, Lawrence brings up the possibility, no doubt alarming to his family, that he may go off into the desert to seek out the primitive and nomadic Soleyb, survivors of the pagan predecessors of the Arabs; spend "a spring & summer with them"; then write a book, along the lines of Doughty's Arabia Deserta, devoted to this mysterious people. Lawrence expresses his belief that his book (or books)"would be better, if I had been for a time in open country," a very different and more demanding ambition than turning his BA thesis into an ill.u.s.trated book. Lawrence may have lost interest in the elusive Soleyb on learning that they lived on raw antelope meat, though this is not the kind of consideration which would necessarily have held him back-more likely, his growing interest in archaeology and his responsibilities at Carchemish pushed this scheme into the background.

Lawrence's letters to his friend Leeds, back at the Ashmolean, are often rather franker than his letters home. Admittedly, in writing to Leeds Lawrence attempts to turn every event, however trying and difficult, into a funny story-one learns, for instance, that he and Woolley had prudently taken spare clothes and tinned food with them when they went to confront the kaimakam, since there was a good chance they might have been thrown into prison, and that Woolley had to brandish his pistol again, "when the police tried to hold up his donkeys." Lawrence was running footraces with the younger and nimbler workers, and painstakingly removing a splendid Roman mosaic floor from a plowed field near the excavation site and reconstructing it as the floor of one room in the expedition house. Since this consisted of 144,000 tesserae (small vitreous tiles) "weighing over a ton," it was no simple or easy task. In May the eagerly awaited visit of David Hogarth took place: "A breathless hush of expectation.... We're all dressed in our best, sitting in our empty, swept, and garnished rooms, awaiting the coming of the C H I E F."

Hogarth's nine-day visit to the site proved satisfactory-it is typical of Hogarth's amazing ability to be in the right place at the right time and, more important, to know the right people, that on his way out to visit Carchemish he met in Berlin with the kaiser and obtained from his imperial majesty "his explicit promise to make all right for us with the Bagh-dadbahn people, if there is any trouble," in Lawrence's words. Thus the German railway engineers were persuaded to carry away much of the spoil and rubble from the excavation site to use in building the bridge over the Euphrates and in bedding the tracks, thereby saving the British Museum a good deal of money, and speeding up the dig for Woolley and Lawrence.

Among the many things Lawrence learned from Hogarth, perhaps the most important was to go to the top unhesitatingly in any matter that interested or concerned him. Despite a reputation for shyness and a desire to remain in the background, as a young civilian in Cairo in 1914 Lawrence was apparently able to reach the formidable Field Marshal Kitchener to urge on him the importance of taking Alexandretta; he successfully bypa.s.sed many layers of military command to deal directly with General Allenby in 19171918; although only an acting lieutenant-colonel, he made his arguments about the Middle East directly to Lloyd George, Wilson, and Clemenceau at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919; and he made his case for reforms in the RAF directly to Air Chief Marshal Trenchard in the 1920s. It must be said that Lawrence seldom used either his fame or his remarkable ability to reach some of the busiest and most powerful people in the world to his own advantage; he used both only in pursuit of causes he deemed worthwhile, or to deflect policies that he thought were ill-advised.

Hogarth was sufficiently impressed with what had been done at Carchemish so far-and by the numerous signs that the remains of a great Hitt.i.te city would eventually be uncovered-that he recommended to the British Museum that Woolley's pay be increased, and that Lawrence be given a salary of fifteen shillings a day for the next season's digging. In the meantime, Lawrence was using Dahoum to help him rea.s.semble and cla.s.sify the growing collection of pottery fragments, and teaching Dahoum to act as his a.s.sistant in the darkroom. In June, Woolley stopped the dig and went home to England, leaving Lawrence on his own, to spend the summer months traveling through Syria with Dahoum as his companion.

Lawrence's friendship with Dahoum has been the subject of a good deal of speculation over the years, but it seems very unlikely that there was anything improper or scandalous about it-Vyvyan Richards's comment that Lawrence was totally without s.e.xual feelings or temptation probably holds as true for his relationship with Dahoum as it held for Richards. Whether Lawrence was totally without such feelings or savagely repressedthem for most of his life is a different question. Given his belief that his parents should never have had children, and his melancholy feeling that his father had given up great estates, a position in society, and a t.i.tle for a transitory and guilty pleasure, Lawrence may well have begun early on in childhood to suppress in himself even the faintest hint of s.e.xuality-a feat to which his unusual degree of willpower and determination would have lent themselves. The stormy relationship between Lawrence and his mother, and his refusal to be dominated by her formidable will, may have contained a complex, self-destructive reversal of the Oedipus complex: Lawrence not only refused to give in to his oedipal fantasies but suppressed all his s.e.xual instincts completely to do so. This would be a psychological a.n.a.logue of a "scorched earth" strategy, in which he constantly refused to surrender to s.e.xual urges of any kind until his refusal became a fixed part of his personality, and the source of much of his strength.

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, cla.s.s, and age (Lawrence was seven or eight years older than Dahoum), not s.e.xual. Whether Lawrence had s.e.xual 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 n.o.body else in his life was he ever so close, and with n.o.body 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 n.o.bility 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 protege. 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 Hitt.i.te 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 pa.s.sing 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 Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te 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 ma.s.sed 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 n.o.body 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. Since most of the shooting was done at 400 yards, an impossible range for most pistols, a lot of ammunition was wasted and n.o.body 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. 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 sc.r.a.pes 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 ash.o.r.e from a British warship into the British consulate in Beirut, so that the staff members could protect themselves in the event of an antic.i.p.ated 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 Amba.s.sador at Stanbul, two [British naval] captains, and two lieutenants, besides innumerable cava.s.ses [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 a.s.sistant, 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-Schonhauer 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 Hitt.i.te 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 princ.i.p.al Kurdish leaders, and that he had been shown a secret h.o.a.rd 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sistant 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, pa.s.sing 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 circ.u.mstances 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 inst.i.tution 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 Hitt.i.te 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 ident.i.ty (and att.i.tude) 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 ma.s.sacre 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. 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 quant.i.ty. The list is endless: Hitt.i.te bronze work and carved slabs of basalt, Phoenician glazed pottery, Roman gla.s.s. In addition, the excavation was at last beginning to uncover greater portions of the Hitt.i.te 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 "loto