Lawrence Page 9

  Lawrence arrived in Safed on the evening of 16 July 1909, exhausted after what he called a ‘terrific climb up from the valley and then over undulating country’.21 He had left Tibnin that morning and halted at noon for a drink at the famous Spring of Kadesh, having in the course of the day marched up and down the height of Mont Blanc: ‘Palestine is all like that,’ he wrote, ‘…the roads go either up or down all the time … and never reach anywhere at all.’22 There was no hotel in Safed then, but he had found accommodation with the family of an English doctor called Anderson who worked for the Jewish Mission Hospital. The doctor was very kind to his young visitor, and took him to see the castle after dark, but the rigours of the journey were already affecting him, and Lawrence came down with the first of several bouts of malaria which were to dog the entire trek.

  He had been walking for just over two weeks, having set out alone from Beirut at the beginning of July. On the first day he had hiked down the coast to Sidon, through mulberry orchards and olive groves. The road had been full of movement: peasants in baggy trousers and fezzes, bristling with rifles, revolvers and cartridge belts, riding horses or driving great trains of camels down to the coastal markets with their harvest. There were camels everywhere, and Lawrence looked at them with interest. He thought their faces ‘horrible’, but loved the rough tones of the camel-bells which faded as the caravans wound placidly into the haze of sunset. Sidon stood on the tip of a headland and it was satisfyingly medieval – a walled town of alleys so narrow that two men could scarcely pass, and which no wheeled vehicle could enter. From there he had climbed the hills towards Nabatiyyeh, tramping up deep gorges and enjoying the refreshing breeze off the Mediterranean. He passed through hamlets of baked mud houses among patchworks of brown fields, and practised his Arabic with the villagers. For the first time he stayed with Arabs in their own houses, and delighted in learning the social rituals involved. On greeting his host with ‘Peace be upon you!’ he would be invited inside, where the womenfolk would drag out a heavy quilt for him to sit on. While his host made coffee and plied him with the customary questions, the children would examine his belongings. After tea or coffee, dinner – generally greasy boiled wheat called burghul, and wafer-thin bread – would be presented. There was no talking during the meal, and afterwards, about nine, he would retire with his quilts, either to the verandah or to the roof. The quilts, he discovered, were far too thick for summer nights, and as they were invariably full of fleas anyway, he usually slept on top. He would be up at sunrise, and would join his host at the hearth, and splash a little water over his face for his morning ablutions. After breakfast of bread and sour milk – or fresh milk if he was lucky – he would be on his way. The simplicity of the peasants’ lifestyle appealed to him, and evoked the landscape of Malory and Morris. He felt comfortable in the simple houses with their spartan furniture – rush mats, tiny stools, and sleeping quilts which doubled as chairs and which could be packed away in a stepped alcove when not in use. He admired the way in which the house doubled as a byre – the lower floor for the cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys and horses, the upper one for humans. He approved of the economy of eating with the hands from a communal dish, or of using pieces of bread as a spoon, and appreciated that the Arab way of washing hands – pouring water over them rather than scrubbing them in a basin – was far cleaner than the English method. He also acknowledged the Arabs’ sense of hospitality: ‘this is a glorious country for wandering in,’ he wrote to his father, ‘for hospitality is something more than a name … there are the common people each one ready to receive one for a night, and allow me to share in their meals: and without thought of payment from a traveller on foot.’23 Though this was not entirely true, for often his hosts would take money, he clearly found their simple dignity attractive. It was an aesthetic appreciation: some of their ways were quaint, they were pleasant and dignified, but ‘very childish and simple of course, and startlingly ignorant’.24 Lawrence also stayed with foreign missionaries, and expressed high praise for their work in ‘civilizing’ and ‘educating’ the natives. In his letters home, he displayed his customary need to bolster self-esteem by revealing his apparent uniqueness: his diet, he said, was that of the natives, and considered ‘lunacy’ by the expatriates, though his habit of drinking fresh milk was viewed as equally crazy by the Arabs. The natives thought him ‘mad’ to walk instead of riding, while the foreigners thought him batty to walk round in the heat of the afternoon. He told his mother that he had become ‘Arab in habit’ yet in the same sentence related proudly how a Frenchman had ‘taken him for a compatriot’, without apparently being aware of the contradiction. On close reading, the character which emerges from Lawrence’s Syrian letters is one who is capable of adapting quickly to a new community, but who essentially belongs to none.

  At Nabatiyyeh he found himself carried along in the swirl of a festival, in narrow streets of chaffering crowds, water-sellers, sherbet-sellers, peasants with fresh produce from their gardens, men rushing along with the fly-blown carcasses of sheep or bags of charcoal on their backs. From here he hired a Christian guide called Barak to take him to the castles of Beaufort and Banias, which he thought might be important for his thesis. Beaufort was memorable for its wonderful view: to the west the scintillating blue of the Mediterranean, and to the east – far across the Jordan valley – Mount Hermon, its gorges sparkling with snow. From the castle window he dropped a pebble into the Litani river, 1,600 feet below. To reach Banias – the biblical Caesarea Philippi – Barak took him through the lush green meadows of the Jordan, which seemed almost tropical after the barrenness of the Lebanon range. The village itself was of little interest, but Lawrence discovered there a spring of deliciously cool water in a hidden cave, above which he was delighted to find an ancient Greek inscription dedicated to Pan. Banias castle – built by the Knights Hospitallers in the twelfth century – stood on a spur of Hermon, and Lawrence climbed all over it with enthusiasm. He even had the gall to set fire to the brushwood in the inner court so that he could see it more clearly: ‘It must have made a jolly bonfire from a distance,’ he wrote.25 It certainly brought the castle’s owner running to see what he was about, though Lawrence reported that he had not objected, since he was now able to enter the courtyard again after twenty years. He set out alone from Hunin, slept at Tibnin and arrived at Safed the following day. Having recovered from his bout of malaria, he made a side-trip to Chastellet on the Jordan, where he had his first taste of the scirocco, the furnace-blast of flint and dust which uncoils off the Arabian desert in summer, giving him a sudden sense of the vast emptiness which lay beyond these homely hills. He descended to the Sea of Galilee, then headed off towards the Mediterranean across the plain of Esdraelon, a vast chequerboard of brown and gold, threaded with red paths like strings, and scattered with nests of black tents, between which great caravans of camels were constantly in motion. Women were winnowing grain on the threshing floors, and now and then he would see clouds of chaff and dust rising above the fields as the peasants reaped or threshed with flails and fans. From the coast at Haifa he passed north into what is today southern Lebanon, trekking through Tyre and Sidon back to Beirut.

  After a week of comfort in Beirut’s Victoria Hotel, he began the second phase of the journey, which he hoped would take him to Latakia, Antioch and Aleppo. In the first week of August he arrived at Jebayyil, north of Beirut, where he called at the American Mission School, run by a Miss Holmes. Miss Fareedah al-Akle, a teacher at the school, remembered him arriving, dusty and exhausted-looking, ‘with a bundle tied to his back’.26 Miss Akle, who was later to become Lawrence’s Arabic instructor, recalled how he had dashed upstairs after the maid without waiting to be asked in, and how, later, he had regaled her with tales of the ‘adventures and hardships’ he had endured on the trip, with ‘many narrow escapes from death’ at the hands of ‘cruel Kurds and Turks’. Lawrence’s avowed preference for ‘hardships’ and sleeping out of doors was an aspect of his reverse exhibitionism – whic
h required public notice – but secretly he much appreciated comfort, and was blissfully happy to spend a few days at the Mission in Jebayyil, eating well, bathing, lounging about under ‘real green trees’ in the garden, and reading in the extensive library. He was received at the American Mission in Tripoli a few days later, presumably with an introduction from Miss Holmes. From there it was a three-day walk to Kala at al-Husn – the famous Crak des Chevaliers, where the Turkish Governor or Qaimiqam, far from being ‘cruel’, proved exceedingly kind and helpful, indeed ‘very comfortable’ as Lawrence himself put it. The Crak was to have a central role in his thesis, and he lingered there for three days, inspecting and photographing it. Like Banias, it was a Knights Hospitallers castle – a vast, double-walled Gormenghast of a fortress standing on a lonely plateau in arid scrubland. Lawrence climbed half-way up its moss-covered inner talus barefoot in the sun, his mind ranging over its advantages and drawbacks. Though he was unable to reach the top, he saw that it would have presented no difficulty to besiegers with scaling-ladders, but its relatively gentle incline meant that they could never ‘get underneath’ the boulders and burning pitch hurled down on them from the defenders above. He also noticed with pleasure that the machicolations – the openings in the masonry through which the defenders threw their projectiles – were of a kind not known anywhere else in Syria, though they were known in Europe – suggesting that the Knights Hospitallers had introduced them as an innovation from the West. Lawrence was altogether impressed with the Crak, and wrote later that it was ‘the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world’.27 The ‘comfortable’ Governor also provided him with an escort to visit the castle of Safita which stood nearby, and which Lawrence admired for its Norman keep with original battlements – the like of which, he said, he had never seen in Europe. Crak, Safita and Sahyun – a castle to the north, whose slender needle of rock supporting the centre of a drawbridge Lawrence thought the most sensational thing he had ever seen in castle building28 – were the highlights of the tour, and having seen them, he wrote to his mother:’… you may be happy now all my rough work is finished successfully: & my Thesis I think assured.’29

  He left the Governor of the Crak a few days later and set off for the coast, spending the first night sleeping on a threshing-floor with some peasants. The men were threshing their grain, and worked in relays much of the night. When they were all exhausted, they woke Lawrence up and asked him to keep watch with his pistol while they slept, as, they said, there were many thieves about. Lawrence thought it all nonsense, but obliged anyway, only to be told in Tartus the following day that the men had been trying to conceal the extent of their harvest, and that it had not been thieves but landlords they had feared. That there were thieves about, though, came home to him strongly, when, near Masyaf, a lone horseman took a pot-shot at him from 200 yards. According to Miss al-Akle, his assailant was ‘a huge cruel-looking Turk’ whose bullet went wide, whereupon Lawrence had coolly drawn his Mauser pistol and fired a deadly accurate shot which took the skin off the giant’s little finger. Petrified by his opponent’s supernatural accuracy, the Turk had stood frozen to the spot, while Lawrence had approached and bandaged up the finger, patted him on the back, and sent him off home with half his money. ‘It is the story of David and Goliath over again,’ Miss al-Akle wrote, ‘with the difference that David conquered his enemy with the sword while the weapon which won the day for Lawrence was that of friendliness.’30 It is a salutary tale, but how much of it is Miss al-Akle’s imagination and how much Lawrence’s is impossible to say. Lawrence wrote to his mother shortly afterwards that the ‘huge, cruel-looking Turk’ was simply an ‘ass with an old gun’ who had shot at him from horseback. Lawrence had promptly shot back, winging the horse, which had bolted wildly. The bandit had managed to get his mount under control, and wheeled round at about 800 yards for another go. Lawrence had put a second round over his head, at which the man had ‘made off like a steeplechaser’. Once again, it seems likely that neither of these reports was the full truth, for while he referred to the incident as ‘a joke’ there is evidence that in reality he was far less sanguine. He had never been shot at before, and with his abnormal fear of pain, the thought of the bullet – no matter how ‘old’ – slapping into his flesh cannot have been a pleasant one. In fact, he was shaken enough to report the incident to the local Turkish Governor and sufficiently concerned about a repetition to accept an escort of Turkish troopers, despite knowing that they must hamper his freedom of movement. From this point onwards, Lawrence’s confidence took a downward spiral. The fear, the fever, the heat, the hardship – the utter pain of the trek – began to tell on him. His interest in castles waned, as exhaustion, sore feet and malaria took over. He had planned to make a detour to Antioch and remain there several days, but for the first time he dropped one of his major objectives. Though he later claimed to have seen Antioch’s town walls from afar, it seems unlikely that he went anywhere near them. His mounted escort only added to the hardship, simply because he refused to ride. Though Lawrence later told Edward Leeds with customary bravado that on the first day he had ‘walked them to a standstill’, obliging them to return to the starting point to pick up horses, the fact is that once they were mounted, he had to struggle to keep up. The sight of a young Englishman stumping, half-lame, across those hills in the wake of a squadron of horsemen who were supposed to be his escort must indeed have been a bizarre one. No one would have blamed him for riding, but his unrelenting will made it impossible for him to give in. He stalked on on blistered and bruised feet, perhaps cursing the fear which had caused him to report the ‘trifling’ incident to the Governor in the first place. That last burst of 120 miles in five days almost finished him. When he limped into Aleppo on 6 September, two months after leaving Beirut for the first time, his flesh was pared to the bone, his boots were in tatters and his feet a mass of sores that not even his Nietzschian will could mend. He had sworn that he would walk while others rode, but now he was finished as far as walking went. He had believed that there was no limit to the suffering he could force his body through, but now he had found it. That he had already made a remarkable journey of over 1,000 miles mattered not a jot. It was not good enough. He had failed. He had failed to reach Antioch. He had failed to reach Urfa, and Shobek and Kerak in the Belqa hills. He had failed to obtain Hogarth’s Hittite seals. Now, exhausted by overstrain and malaria, he felt that he could not go on.

  As he lay in his bath in the Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, he cannot have avoided the conclusion that his own fear had defeated him. Urfa lay 100 miles away across the Euphrates – 200 miles there and back. That would have meant, at best, an eight- or ten-day trek. Frankly, he was not up to it. Very reluctantly, he decided that he would have to play the privileged tourist after all, and hire a carriage with two coachmen at the exorbitant cost to his pocket of £7. He wrote to his mother the next day informing her of his decision, but saying nothing of his exhaustion: for Sarah, he must be the indomitable white knight. He implied only that he was short of time: ‘I must make haste,’ he wrote. That letter was written on 7 September. What happened to Lawrence between that date and 19 September, when he wrote again from Aleppo, is a mystery.

  When Lawrence turned up in Oxford in the middle of October, one week late for term, ‘thinned to the bone with privation’ – according to Ernest Barker – the camera which had been procured for him at great cost was missing. Though he still had Pirie-Gordon’s precious map, it was covered with bloodstains – and thereby hung a tale. Lawrence enthralled his less adventurous but more masculine and sporty colleagues with stories of how, while seeking Hittite seals, he had been attacked by a band of bloodthirsty Kurds who, disappointed that he was not carrying ‘treasure’ as they supposed, robbed him of all his possessions and beat him to within an inch of death. He had managed to crawl to safety, but having been left penniless, had been obliged to work his passage back to Marseilles on a tramp steamer, earning just enough to pay his fare back to O
xford. His friends were impressed, but, more important, his potential sponsor and mentor, Hogarth, was impressed. The young man had performed his sacred task: he had brought back his thirty Hittite seals for the unique collection at the Ashmolean. Lawrence probably did not tell Hogarth directly that he had risked his life to obtain them, but let the information permeate to its target by circuitous routes. He was already becoming expert at ‘massaging the truth’ to achieve his goals, and in this case his goal was to attract the attention of Hogarth, who, high on his lofty pedestal, had taken little notice of him until now. No one knows what was said during their first meeting after his return, only that Hogarth told Leeds afterwards: ‘That is a rather remarkable young man – he has been in places rarely visited by foreigners.’31

  Just where had Lawrence been during the second and third weeks of September 1909? We last have him writing to his mother that he intended to visit Urfa on 7 September, and that he must ‘make haste’. According to his expense-account, though, he had lingered in Aleppo for a week on that occasion – which puts his date of departure as the 13th, at the earliest. We know he was back in Aleppo by the 19th, because he wrote to Edward Leeds on that date from the Hotel du Pare. The trip to Urfa by carriage generally took three to four days by the most direct route, which ran through the Circassian village of Membij, crossed the Euphrates at Tel Ahmar and passed through Suruj before reaching Urfa, where there existed an important crusader castle. If Lawrence did leave on the 13th, he would have had just enough time to reach Urfa and back by the 19th, assuming he spent one or two days looking at the castle. On 22 September he wrote to his mother, this time from the Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, telling her that his trip to Urfa had been ‘delightful’ but marred by the fact that his camera had been stolen at Suruj on the way back, when the coachman he had left on watch was asleep. The only other incident he related was that the carriage had been upset by a runaway horse, though he had not been badly hurt. In this letter he seemed keen to return home: he was almost out of money, he was very tired, exhausted by a fourth attack of malaria, and discouraged by the early onset of the rains which had started a few days earlier and which would render further walking impossible. He also mentioned that a report had appeared in the Aleppo newspaper that a ‘Mr Edvard Lovanee’ had been murdered near Ayntab. He noted with amusement that the hotel staff had greeted him like a ghost, and called the report ‘an absurd canard’, assuring his mother that he had been nowhere near Ayntab, a Turkish town lying sixty miles due north of Aleppo and some eighty miles west of Urfa.