LAWRENCE

The Uncrowned King of Arabia

Michael Asher

With colour photographs by Mariantonietta Peru

‘The story I have to tell is one of the most splendid ever given to a man for telling.’

T. E. Lawrence to Vyvyan Richards

‘Il faut souffrir pour кtre content.’

T. E. Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw

LAWRENCE

‘Asher probably gets nearer to the truth about him than any of his previous biographers… By the end of this conscientiously researched book, the more impressive for Asher’s knowledge of the Bedu tribes, one is left wondering whether he regrets the journey he has made to prove his childhood hero to be somewhat flawed’ Simon Courtauld, Spectator

‘This excellent biography is in part a pilgrimage, performed by an admirer with a felicitous blend of reverence and wry scepticism and a marvellous ability to convey a sense of place’ Lawrence James, Literary Review

‘Asher has written a book about his childhood hero that is thoughtful and balanced… Moreover he reaches a conclusion about Lawrence that encompasses all other biographies, one that takes the ground out from under the never-ending controversy about probably the best-known Englishman, after Winston Churchill, this century’ Phillip Knightley, Mail on Sunday

‘This may well emerge as the best biography currently available’ Contemporary Review

‘He writes well and has new things to say – not an easy thing in this desperately overcrowded field. His life of “the Uncrowned King of Arabia” has the balance that Aldington’s polemic so lamentably failed to provide’ Robert Irwin, London Review of Books

‘Asher himself, a former SAS man, is one of the greatest living desert explorers. Unlike other biographers, he gains his insights not only through the dust of libraries, but through the dazzling light of the dunes… what follows is… a careful exploration, stripping away myth (while avoiding crass revisionism), gazing into the complexity beneath a legend’ Catherine Lockerbie, Scotsman

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Asher has served in the Parachute Regiment and the SAS, and studied English at the University of Leeds. He has made expeditions in many countries, always preferring to travel on foot or with animal transport. He lived for three years with a Bedu tribe totally unaffected by the outside world and, with his wife, Arabist and photographer Mariantonietta Peru, made the first west-east crossing of the Sahara on foot with camels – a distance of 4,500 miles – without technology or back-up of any kind. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has won both the Ness Award of the Royal Geographical Society and the Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for Exploration. In 1997 he and Mariantonietta Peru presented the documentary In Search of Lawrence for Channel 4, which was watched by 2.4 million people. Michael Asher has travelled a total of 16,000 miles by camel and is the author of eight books. Of these, Penguin also publish Shoot to Kill: A Soldier’s Journey through Violence, Thesiger: A Biography and The Last of the Bedu: In Search of the Myth.

Introduction:

The Valley of the Moon

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.

It took me only twenty minutes to find what I was looking for: the spring lay in a V-shaped cleft where water plunged down from the head of Rum mountain, thousands of feet above, gurgling into a rock cistern from which ribbles of silver liquid streamed out through shallow pools and luxuriant growths of mint and wild thyme. I filled the mug with water from the cistern and tasted it – it was sweet and deliciously cool. Then I sat down in the shade of the rock wall, opened Seven Pillars at the pre-marked page, and began to read: ‘… a rushing noise came from my left,’ Lawrence had written, ‘by a jutting bastion of a cliff over whose crimson face trailed long, falling runners of green leaves… on the rock bulge above were clean-cut Nabataean inscriptions and a sunk panel … and Arab scratchings, some of which were witnesses of forgotten migrations, but my attention was only for the splashing of water in an opening under the shadow of an overlying rock.’¹ I glanced up to find the Nabataean inscriptions and Arab tribal marks, exactly where Lawrence had seen them almost eighty years before. I took in the rushing of the water, the green, fragrant streamers of the wild herbs, and was momentarily stunned by the immediacy of the description. It was as if Lawrence of Arabia, who died eighteen years before I was born, was actually there beside me: I could almost sense his presence, as if he were peering over my shoulder. Glancing back at the page, I had the irrational but powerful feeling that he was speaking directly to me – that he had somehow known that I would follow in his footsteps, and had written this especially for me to read at this very moment, on this very day.

I have often experienced such transcendent visions while travelling in the desert. The vastness, the silence, the emptiness, induces a timeless feeling that is almost palpable: I have picked up prehistoric hand-axes lying on the surface, knowing that my hand was the first to touch them since they were discarded by their makers 100,000 years ago. Somehow, in the desert, the human spirit can leap over even such a gap as this. I was certain that Lawrence felt it too, for Seven Pillars is permeated by a sense of spiritual awe which is, for me, the essence of human experience in the desert. T. E. Lawrence has affected my life with particular power. Without Lawrence I would probably not have become an Arabic speaker and a camel-rider, would not have covered 16,000 miles by camel, nor made the first ever west-east crossing of the Sahara – a distance of 4,500 miles – nor lived with a traditional Bedu tribe for three years. Without Lawrence I would probably not have served in the Special Air Service Regiment, simply because without Lawrence there would probably never have been an S A S. The words of my Howaytat hosts still burned in my head, and as I sat there I wondered, as so many others had wondered before me, who Lawrence had really been. To his adulators, everything he said or wrote is held up as true, while his critics have gone to extraordinary lengths to prove the reverse. Surely, I thought, eighty years on, it must be possible to attain a more reasonable, more honest, and more balanced view.