IN SEARCH OF A LOST CIVILIZATION
When we first met in Jerusalem, and later on in the solitude of
the desert, I was unable to draw Lawrence out about his early life.
So, after the termination of the war, on my way back to America,
I visited England in the hope of being able to learn something
concerning his career prior to 1914, which might throw a light on
the formative period when Destiny was preparing him for his
important rôle. The war had so scattered his family and early
associates that I found it difficult to obtain aught but the most
meager information about his boyhood.
County Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, was the original home
of the Lawrences. This may partly account for his unusual powers
of physical endurance, for the inhabitants of Galway are among the
hardiest of a hardy race. But in his veins there also flows Scotch,
Welsh, English, and Spanish blood. Among his celebrated ancestors
was Sir Robert Lawrence, who accompanied Richard the Lion-Hearted
to the Holy Land, seven hundred and thirty years ago, and
distinguished himself at the siege of Acre, just as the youthful
T. E. Lawrence accompanied Allenby to the Holy Land and distinguished
himself in its final deliverance. The brothers, Sir Henry and Sir
John Lawrence of Mutiny fame, pioneers of Britain’s empire in
India, were among his more recent predecessors.
His father, Thomas Lawrence, was at one time the owner of estates
in Ireland and a great sportsman. Losing most of his worldly
possessions during the Gladstone period, when the bottom fell out
of land values in Ireland, he brought his family across the Irish
Sea to Wales, and Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in Carnarvon
County, not far from the early home of Mr. Lloyd George, who is
to-day one of his warmest friends and admirers, and who once told
me that he, too, regards Lawrence as one of the most picturesque
figures of modern times.
Five years of his boyhood were spent on the Channel Isle of Jersey.
When he was ten years of age his family migrated to the north of
Scotland, remaining there for three years. They next moved to
France, where young Lawrence attended a Jesuit College, although
all the members of the family belong to the orthodox Church of
England. From the Continent they went to Oxford; and that center
of English culture, which has been their home ever since, has left
its indelible mark on Lawrence. There Ned, as his boyhood companions
called him, attended Oxford High School and studied under a tutor
preparatory to entering the university. One of his school chums
relates that although not a star athlete he had a daring spirit
and was filled with the love of adventure.
“Underneath Oxford,” this companion tells us, “runs a subterranean
stream bricked over, the Trill Mill Stream. Ned Lawrence and
another boy, carrying lights and often lying flat to scrape through
the narrow culverts, navigated the whole of that underground water
passage.
“Oxford is a great boating center. Every stream that joins the
Thames is explored as far up as any slender craft will float. But
the River Cherwell above Islip is said by the guide-books to be
‘nowhere navigable.’ To say that is to challenge boys like Ned
Lawrence to prove the statement untrue, and that is what he and a
companion did. They trained their canoe to Banbury and came right
down the part of the stream that was ‘nowhere navigable.’”
He was fond of climbing trees and scrambling over the roofs of
buildings where none dared to follow. “It was on such an occasion,”
one of his brothers informed me, “that he fell and broke a leg.”
His relatives attribute his smallness of stature to that accident.
He seems never to have grown since.
All his life he has been as irregular in his ways as the wild
tribesmen of the Arabian Desert. Although he completed the required
four years’ work for his bachelor’s degree in three years, he never
attended a single lecture at Oxford, so far as I have been able to
discover. He occasionally worked with tutors, but he spent most of
his time wandering about England on foot, or reading medieval
literature. In order to be alone he frequently slept by day and
then read all night. He was entirely opposed to any set system of
education. The aged professor who angrily admonished Samuel Johnson
when a student at Oxford, “Young man, ply your book diligently now,
and acquire a stock of knowledge,” would have been equally
displeased with young Lawrence. The idea of obtaining a university
education in order to take up a conventional occupation did not
please him at all. His unconscious credo from earliest youth, like
Robert Louis Stevenson’s, seems to have been that “pleasures are
more beneficial than duties, because, like the quality of mercy,
they are not strained, and they are twice blest.”
As a part of his early reading he made an exhaustive study of
military writers, from the wars of Sennacherib, Thotmes, and
Rameses down to Napoleon, Wellington, Stonewall Jackson, and von
Moltke. But this he did voluntarily and not as a part of any
required work. Among his favorite books was Marshal Foch’s
“Principes de Guerre”; but he remarked to me on one occasion in
Arabia that his study of Cæsar and Xenophon had been of more value
to him in his desert campaign, because in the irregular war which
he conducted against the Turks he found it necessary to adopt
tactics directly opposed to those advocated by the great French
strategist.
As the subject for his Oxford thesis Lawrence chose the military
architecture of the Crusades, and so absorbed did he become in this
work that he urged his parents to allow him to visit the Near East,
so that he might gain first-hand knowledge of the architectural
efforts of the early knights of Christendom. In this he was
encouraged by the distinguished Oxford scholar and authority on
Arabia, Dr. David George Hogarth, curator of the Ashmolean Museum,
a man who has had an important influence over his entire life down
to the present day, and who even came out to Egypt during the war
and acted as his intimate counselor during the Arabian campaign.
Lawrence’s mother was reluctant to have him leave home but, after
many weeks of pleading, gave her consent to his visiting Syria as
a Cook’s tourist and allowed him two hundred pounds for the trip.
His family was certain that he would return home after a few weeks,
satisfied to settle down for the rest of his days and ready to
forget the heat, the smells, and the inconveniences of life in the
Orient. But on reaching the Near East he scorned tourists’ comforts
and the beaten track. He entered Syria at Beyrouth and, shortly
after landing, adopted native costume and set out barefoot for the
interior. Instead of traveling as a tourist, he wandered off alone,
along the fringe of the Great Arabian Desert, and amused himself
studying the manners and customs of the mosaic of peoples who dwell
in the ancient corridor between Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley.
Two years later, when he finally returned to Oxford to hand in his
thesis and receive his degree, he still had one hundred pounds
left!
There were five boys in the Lawrence family, of which Thomas Edward
was the second youngest. The eldest, Major Montague Lawrence, was
a major in the R. A. M. C.; the second, William, a schoolmaster at
Delhi, in India; the third, Frank, who finished Oxford and wandered
off to the Near East with Thomas; and the youngest, Arnold, a star
track athlete at Oxford, who is also interested in archæology, and
for a time took his brother’s place in Mesopotamia. Both William
and Frank gave their lives to their country on the battle-fields
of France.
Since the war Major Montague Lawrence has taken up work as a
medical missionary in China far up on the Tibetan frontier; their
mother has also gone to this remote corner of Central Asia, while
her youngest son is roaming around the museums of the world on a
traveling fellowship from Oxford, studying the sculpture of the
period of the decadence of Grecian art.
Several years before the war an expedition from Oxford, headed by
Lawrence’s friend Hogarth, the great antiquarian and archæologist,
began excavating in the Euphrates Valley, hoping to uncover traces
of that little-known ancient race, the Hittites. Because of his
intimate knowledge of their language and his sympathetic
understanding of their customs, Lawrence was placed in charge of
the digging gangs of unruly Kurds, Turkomans, Armenians, and Arabs.
This expedition eventually succeeded in uncovering Carchemish, the
ancient capital of the Hittite Empire, and there, amid the ruins
of that long-forgotten city, Lawrence amused himself studying
inscriptions on pottery and joining up the various stages of
Hittite civilization. He and his associate, C. Leonard Woolley,
director of the expedition, actually uncovered ruins which proved
to be the missing link between the civilizations of Nineveh and
Babylon and the beginnings of Greek culture in the islands of the
Mediterranean, which extend back for five thousand years. The
Ashmolean Museum at Oxford contains many exhibits “presented by T.
E. Lawrence” before he was twenty years of age.
An American traveler and director of missions in the Near East
happened to visit the camp of these lonely excavators. He gives us
a vivid picture of his visit and an indication of how Lawrence
received the training which enabled him to gain such an amazing
hold over the desert tribes when the Great War overtook him.
“It was in 1913,” says Mr. Luther R. Fowle. “Easter vacation at
the American College in Aintab had given us the opportunity to make
the three days’ trip by wagon to Curfa, the ancient Edessa. After
Curfa, we had visited Haraun, a few miles to the south, whither
Abraham migrated from Ur of the Chaldees.
“Our return trip to Aintab was by the road farther to the south,
which brought us to the Euphrates River at Jerablus, over which
the Germans were building their great railway bridge, an essential
link in the Berlin-to-Bagdad dream. On the western bank, a few
hundred yards from the bridge, was the site of Carchemish, and
there we found the quiet British scholar, who, under the stress of
the war, was soon to turn from his digging among the ancient ruins
beside the Euphrates to become a shereef of Mecca and leader of a
vast Bedouin host in a successful war to throw off the Ottoman
yoke.
“Mr. Woolley, the archæologist in charge of the work of excavation
of Carchemish, had just come from the diggings, clad in his business
dress of gray flannel shirt and golf-trousers. Lawrence, his
youthful associate, also fresh from the works, was stepping lightly
across the mounds of earth clad in what we Americans would call a
running-suit and wearing at his belt the ornate Arab girdle with
its bunch of tassels at the front, the mark of an unmarried man.
But he was out of sight in a moment; and when we gathered for
supper the freshly tubbed young man in his Oxford tennis-suit of
white flannel bordered with red ribbon, but still wearing his Arab
girdle, launched into the fascinating story of the excavations; of
relations with the Kurds and Arabs about them; of his trips alone
among their villages in search of rare rugs and antiquities, that
gave opportunity for cultivating that close touch and sympathy with
them that subsequently was the basis of his great service in the
time of his country’s need. The meal was delicious and was served
by a powerful, swarthy Arab in elegant native dress, with enough
daggers and revolvers in his girdle to supply a museum. Soon he
entered with the coffee, delicious as only Turkish coffee rightly
made can be. And our British friends, who were hardly able to find
interest in the Roman nut-dishes merely a couple of thousand years
old and part of the rubbish to be cleared away before reaching the
Hittite ruins, pointed out with pride that our little brown
earthenware coffee-cups were unquestionably Hittite and probably
not far from four thousand years old.
“I should not say ‘buildings,’ or even ‘building,’ but rather
‘room’; for we learned that the British Government, because of an
understanding with the Turkish authorities, had given permission
to build only one room. Accordingly Woolley and Lawrence had built
a room of two parallel walls about ten feet apart, extending fifty
feet south, then thirty-five feet westward, and again fifty feet
north. Closed at both ends, this giant letter U was indeed a room;
and, although somewhat astonished, the Turkish Government had to
concede the fact. Of course, the honorable inspector could not
object if little partitions were run across to separate the sleeping
portions from the dining-room and office, and in due time
convenience demanded that doors be opened from various parts of
the structure into the court. Thus it was that, when we first saw
it, on the right was a series of rooms for the storage of
antiquities and for photographic work; on the left were the
sleeping-rooms of the excavators and their guests; and in the
center was the delightful living-room with open fireplaces, built-in
bookcases filled with well-worn leather-bound volumes of the
classics with which a British scholar would naturally surround
himself, and a long table covered with the current British papers
as well as the archæological journals of all the world.
“Around the fireplace we learned much of the good faith and
friendship that existed between these two lone Englishmen and the
native people around them. They insisted that they were safer on
the banks of the Euphrates than if they had been in Piccadilly.
The leaders of the two most feared bands of brigands in the region,
Kurdish and Arab, were faithful employees of the excavators, one
as night-watchman, the other in a similar position of trust. Of
course there was no stealing and no danger. Had not these men eaten
of the Englishman’s salt? Moreover, the even-handed justice of the
two Englishmen was so well known and respected that they had come
to be the judges of various issues of all sorts between rival
villages, or in personal disagreement. Never abusing their
prerogatives, their decisions were never questioned. Lawrence had
recently been out to a village to settle the difficulties arising
out of the kidnapping of a young woman by the man who wished to
marry her and who had been unable to overcome her father’s
objections. Could any training have been better for the part he
was to play in the great Arab awakening than these experiences
among the native people?
“In the living-room was an ancient wooden chest which may once have
held the dowry of a desert bride, but which now served as money-box
and safety-deposit vault. Larger than a wardrobe-trunk, there it
stood, unlocked and unguarded. It was full of the silver money with
which to pay the two hundred men working on the excavations. But
such was the unwritten law of the community, such the love of the
workers for their leaders, and so sure and summary the punishment
which they themselves would mete out to any of their number taking
advantage of this trust, that the cash could not have been safer
in the vaults of the Bank of England itself.
“All this contrasted sharply with the methods and experiences of
the German engineers half a mile away, building the Bagdad
railway-bridge across the Euphrates. They and their workers seemed
fated to mutual distrust and hatred. The Teuton could not see why
the Arab should not and would not accept his régime of discipline
and punishment. The Germans were always needing more laborers,
while the Englishmen, a few hundred yards away, were overwhelmed
with them. Once when the latter were forced to cut down their staff
they tried in vain to dismiss fifty men. The Arabs and Kurds just
smiled and went on with their work. They were told they would get
no pay, but they smiled and worked on. If not for pay, they would
work for the love of it and of their masters. And so they did. Nor
was the excavation without interest to those simple men. They had
caught the enthusiasms of their leaders, who had taught them to
share in the joy of the work; their digging was not meaningless
toil for foreign money, but was rather a sharing of the joy of
archæology.
“We retired for the night, our minds filled with the stories of
the East, in which Christian and pagan, Hittite, Greek, and Roman,
the great past and the sordid present of these regions were mingled
with the background of energetic German effort and the calm
achievement by two modest and capable representatives of the
British breed of men. We slept long and well on the familiar
folding cots in our clean, mud-walled room; nor were our slumbers
troubled by our bed-covers, Damascus _yorgans_ of cloth of gold,
upon which a rare arabesque on its background of dull red invited
the eye to journeys without end. These ancient covers were some of
Lawrence’s treasures, brought back from his frequent trips to the
Arab villages, when for weeks his whereabouts were unknown. It was
during these journeys that he in native garb joined in the
conversation of the village elders on the shady side of a tent, or
came to understand and admire the Arab in quiet intercourse before
an open fire, where, sitting cross-legged on the floor, when the
coffee had been made and silently drunk, one and another spoke.
While forty German engineers were building their bridge, which was
to enable them to coerce these people in case they would not obey,
one broad-minded kindly Englishman was unconsciously preparing to
become the man who in the great crisis was to lead this people,
not only to destroy the Teuton dream of conquest, but to break the
centuries-old political servitude of the Turk.
“After breakfast we were examining the mosaic floor of the
dining-room, a Roman fragment that these men had taken out whole
rather than destroy it in their search for the Hittite antiquities
hidden below. But just then word came of excitement at the ‘works.’
We hurried over to find the Arabs and Kurds closely packed around
a large excavation. The Greek foreman was removing the age-old
earth about a dark stone several feet square; and by the time Mr.
Woolley had reached his side, he had determined which was the real
face of the block. With practised hand, Mr. Woolley began to remove
the last crust of soil which covered the treasure underneath. There
was no one to command those peasants to go back to their work, for
the spiritual fruits of discovery belong to all, to the Englishman
no more than to the water-boy who left his donkey to find the
Euphrates alone, while he joined the breathless group whose eyes
were glued on Woolley’s jack-knife deftly doing its work. A burst
of applause greeted the first appearance of something in relief on
the hard rock. It was a hand! no—a corner of a building!—a lion!—a
camel! Guess and conjecture flew about, to be greeted by approval
or derision, always followed by quick, tense silence, while the
jack-knife did its work. Soon Woolley’s trained eye revealed to
him that it was a large animal standing in a perfect state of
preservation and that he was uncovering its head. His feint to
begin at the other end of the figure was greeted by a babble of
protest from his workmen, not yet sure what the figure was.
Woolley’s quick smile acknowledged the reception of his little
joke, and back he went to the spot already uncovered. Soon head,
chest, legs, body, came to light, and exponents of various
theories—cow, horse, sheep—were still backing their claims in
musical gutturals when Woolley’s hand returned to the head of the
animal and with a few quick motions lifted off the earth which
covered the perfect tracery of a magnificent pair of antlers; alive
with the undying art of forty centuries, there stood revealed
before us a superb stag. Such a discovery was worth a celebration,
and unwritten law had ordained the nature of it. For the excavator
nodded in response to the Greek’s whispered query; and, as he gave
the awaited signal, two hundred boys from fifteen to sixty-five
emptied all the chambers of their revolvers in the air. I wonder
what the Germans thought as they heard the volley from their
bridge; for, as I found out a few weeks later when I had galloped
over for another visit with the Englishman, shots at the German
place meant something far different. To-day, perspiring as much
because of their intense excitement over the discovery of the
Hittite stag as from their labors, the Arabs laughingly sat down
to smoke the cigarettes which ended these celebrations, while the
water-boy started wildly in search of his donkey, followed by the
vigorous epithets of his thirsty friends, who knew that the full
flavor of a cigarette comes only with a drink of cold water.
“Noon came all too soon; and it was Thursday, the pay-day. Friday
was the Moslem Sabbath, and these Englishmen were too Christian in
their relations with their Moslem workers to make them labor on
their chosen day. Our drive to Aintab was short, and so we delayed
to see the men paid off, on Lawrence’s assurance that it would be
interesting.
“A table was set in the open court of the ‘room,’ and Woolley
handed out the piasters to the line of workers. That was simple,
but the men had learned to bring their discoveries in on pay-days,
and they received cash rewards for everything turned in. Of course,
the result was exceeding care on their part to lose or break no
fragment in their work; and in fact rare discoveries were sent in
from all the country-side on these pay-days. The excavators would
glance at the article offered. One man would receive a ten-piaster
bonus for what he brought in, perhaps more to encourage him than
because it had any real worth; another would have a fragment of
pottery smilingly returned to him by the judge, while his companions
laughed at him for trying to pass off on the alert Woolley part of
a modern water-jar. Never did the Englishman say, ‘I can pay you
nothing for this, but I will keep it just the same!’ It was either
paid for or returned to the owner. Occasionally a gold coin, bright
as the Arab’s eyes, would reward some happy man; but whether he
got the gold or a laugh, never was the decision of his master and
friend questioned.
“As we tinkled across the plain to the rhythm of the bells on the
horses’ necks, we had food for thought in what we had seen. If
Britain governs much of the world, we wondered if it did not
because of the merit, capacity, and good sense of her sons in all
lands. Impressions of this chance visit to Carchemish were deepened
by residence in Constantinople throughout the World War, where we
watched the German play for the big stake, of which the Euphrates
Bridge was but an incident. And the German lost because of the way
he went after it.
“Thomas Lawrence worked another way. His extraordinary achievement
was wonderful beyond measure. But it was not a miracle. It was but
the outworking of intelligence, imagination, sympathy, character.”
Robert Louis Stevenson in “An Apology for Idlers” deplores that
“many who have ‘plied their book diligently’ and know all about
some branch or other of accepted lore, come out of the study with
an ancient and owl-like demeanor, and prove dry, stockish and
dyspeptic in the better and brighter parts of life.” But in Lawrence
Stevenson would have found a kindred spirit. Though scholar and
scientist, he is neither bookish nor owlish. During the early days
of the Arabian Revolution, a Captain Lloyd, now Sir George Lloyd,
recent governor of Bombay, was in the desert with him for a short
while. He once said to me: “It is difficult to describe the delight
of intimate association with such a man. I found him both poet and
philosopher, but possessor of an unfailing sense of humor.”
Mr. Luther Fowle’s description of that “U-shaped room” at Carchemish
is an illustration of this same sense of humor which makes Lawrence
so thoroughly human, and which saved his life on more than one
occasion. Major Young, of the Near Eastern Secret Corps, who in
pre-war days had known Lawrence in Mesopotamia, relates another
incident. Representatives of England, Germany, France, Russia, and
Turkey met in 1912 and agreed to an arrangement which gave the
Germans control of the important strategic harbor of Alexandretta,
and also permission to continue the railway which they long had
wanted to extend through from Berlin to Bagdad in order to open up
a direct route to the treasure-vaults of Hindustan and Far Cathay.
Lawrence, with his intimate knowledge of history, saw in this a
bold Prussian threat against British power in Asia. Upon learning
of the agreement he immediately hurried down to Cairo, demanded an
audience with Lord Kitchener, and asked K. of K. why Germany had
been permitted to get control of Alexandretta, the vital port to
which Disraeli referred when he said that the peace of the world
would one day depend on the control of that point on the coast of
Asia Minor toward which the finger of Cyprus pointed. Kitchener
replied:
“I have warned London repeatedly, but the Foreign Office pays no
attention. Within two years there will be a World War. Unfortunately,
young man, you and I can’t stop it, so run along and sell your
papers.”
Although deeply chagrined because Britain, wrapped in slumber, had
allowed Germany to extend her sphere of influence all the way from
the Baltic to the Persian Gulf, Lawrence decided to amuse himself
by “pulling the leg” of the German engineers who were working with
feverish haste on the Berlin-to-Bagdad Railway. Loading sections
of drainage-pipe on the backs of mules, he transported them from
Carchemish to the hills which looked down on the new railroad right
of way. There he carefully mounted them on piles of sand. The
German engineers observed them through their field-glasses, and,
as Lawrence had hoped, they mistook these harmless and innocent
pipes for British cannons. Frantically they wired to both
Constantinople and Berlin declaring that the British were fortifying
all the commanding positions. Meanwhile, Lawrence and Woolley were
laughing up their sleeves.
At Jerablus, northeast of Aleppo, the Germans were at work on a
great bridge over the Euphrates. In their typically German way they
painted numbers on the coats of their native workmen as a means of
identifying them. They never even attempted to learn their names.
They even committed the folly of allowing blood-enemies to dig
together. Of course, instead of digging holes for bridge-piles,
they dug holes in each other. This went on for a time, and then
the seven hundred Kurd workmen turned on their German masters and
attacked them. Three hundred of the digging gang at Carchemish
joined their relatives and started a simultaneous attack from the
rear. Fortunately for the kaiser’s myrmidons, Lawrence and Woolley
arrived on the scene in time to prevent a massacre. As a result of
their heroism both archæologists were awarded the Turkish order of
the Medjidieh by the sultan. That was early in 1914, before the
Great War found Lawrence.
One of his first expeditions in the Near East was for the Palestine
Exploration Fund. Lawrence and Woolley attempted to follow the
footsteps of the Israelites through the Wilderness. Along with
other discoveries they found what is believed to be the Kadesh
Barnea of the Bible, the historic spot where Moses brought water
gushing from the rock. First they located a place in the Sinai
Peninsula which the Bedouin called Ain Kadis, where there was one
insignificant well; and perhaps it was there that the Israelites
began complaining to Moses regarding the shortage of water.
“If that really was the place,” remarked Lawrence, “one could
hardly blame the Israelites for grousing.”
Some five miles distant the two archæologists came upon a number
of fine springs in a little valley called Gudurat, and they are of
the opinion that this was where Moses succeeded in regaining the
confidence of the children of Israel, by quenching their thirst
with the sparkling waters of these springs. Later on Woolley and
Lawrence wrote a small book concerning this expedition entitled,
“The Wilderness of Sin.” In it they tell of finding traces of a
civilization dating back to 2500 b. c., the oldest traces
of human habitation ever discovered on the Sinai Peninsula.
Woolley has written a delightful book published by the Oxford
University Press entitled, “Dead Towns and Living Men,” in which
he describes the archæological experiences of Lawrence and himself
before the World War. One story throws considerable light on the
differences between the methods of these two men in dealing with
the natives and the tactics of the Germans at work on the
Berlin-Bagdad line:
Our house-boy, Ahmed, was coming back one day from
shopping in the village, and passed a gang of natives working
on the railway whose foreman owed him money. Ahmed
demanded payment of the debt, the foreman refused, and a
wordy wrangle followed. A German engineer on his rounds
saw that work was being hindered by an outsider, but instead
of just ordering him off, he called up the two soldiers
of his bodyguard, seized the unfortunate Ahmed, and without
any inquiry as to the origin of rights of the dispute, had
him soundly flogged. Ahmed returned to the house full of
woe, and as I was away Lawrence went up to the German
camp to seek redress.
He found Contzen and told him that one of his engineers
had assaulted our house-servant and must accordingly
apologize. Contzen pooh-poohed the whole affair. When
Lawrence showed him that he was in earnest, however, he
consented to make inquiries and sent for the engineer in
question. After talking to him he turned angrily on Lawrence:
“I told you the whole thing was a lie,” he said;
“Herr X—— never assaulted the man at all; he merely had
him flogged!”
“Well, don’t you call that an assault?” asked Lawrence.
“Certainly not,” replied the German. “You can’t use
these natives without flogging them. We have men thrashed
every day; it’s the only method.”
“We’ve been here longer than you have,” Lawrence retorted,
“and have never beaten one of our men yet, and we
don’t intend to let _you_ start on them. That engineer of
yours must come down with me to the village and apologize
to Ahmed in public.”
Contzen laughed. “Nonsense!” he said, and then, turning
his back; “the incident is closed.”
“On the contrary,” replied Lawrence, “if you don’t do as
I ask I shall take the matter into my own hands.”
Contzen turned round again. “Which means—” he
asked.
“That I shall take your engineer down to the village and
there _flog him!_”
“You couldn’t and you daren’t do such a thing!” cried
the scandalized German; but Lawrence pointed out that
there was good reason for assuming that he both dared and
could; and in the end the engineer had to make his apology
_coram publico_, to the vast amusement of the villagers.
For seven years Lawrence wandered up and down the desert, often
accompanied by Woolley but more frequently alone in native garb.
At one time the British Museum sent him on a short expedition to
the interior of the island of Sumatra, where he had escapes from
head-hunters almost as thrilling as his adventures in Arabia. But
of these we could never persuade him to speak. Some day, perhaps,
he may tell us of them in his memoirs.
I had often wondered why he had chosen Arabia as the field for his
archæological work, instead of Egypt, which is the Mecca and Medina
for most men who love to dig among the ruins of antiquity. His
reply was typical of him. He said:
“Egypt has never appealed to me. Most of the important work there
has been done; and most Egyptologists to-day spend too much of
their time trying to discover just when the third whisker was
painted on the scarab!”
Photograph: DATE-PALMS ALONG THE CORAL SHORE OF ARABY
Photograph: LAWRENCE AT HEADQUARTERS IN CAIRO
Photograph: THE ARCHÆOLOGIST AND POET WHO TURNED SOLDIER