Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia

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On a hot morning in April I climbed a hillside in the Wadi Rum, in Jordan, pausing occasionally to savour the breath of the desert wind which was peeling off the canyons I could see below me, gnarled in ancient orange light. They might have been remnants of some great Martian city warped and buckled by time – indeed, the Bedu of Rum call it the Valley of the Moon and believe that it crashed to earth from the stars. I was looking for a place known as Lawrence’s Spring, where T. E. Lawrence – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – had bathed during his sojourns in the wadi in 1917. In my knapsack I carried nothing but an enamel mug and a battered copy of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom –a book I had read and re-read over many years. Today, though, it felt as heavy as a millstone. I had just left the tent of some Bedu of the Howaytat – descendants of tribesmen who had actually ridden with Lawrence on his raids – and what they had had to say astonished me. ‘Lawrence wasn’t the leader of the Arab Revolt,’ one of them told me. ‘He was just an engineer who knew how to blow up the railway – a dynamite man – that’s all he was!’ T. E. Lawrence had been a childhood hero for me as for thousands of others, and the words of these Arabs struck an almost blasphemous note in my ears.

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