I visited Lawrence’s grave in a corner of Moreton cemetery, marked by a stone bearing the same Latin inscription which decorated the faзade of his school: Dominus Illumunatio Mea – an affirmation of the God in which he had long ago ceased to believe. A more impressive monument, however, lies in St Martin’s Church at Wareham – the medieval hall which Lawrence had always dreamed of acquiring, but in life never did. St Martin’s – one of the oldest Anglo-Saxon churches in Dorset – has precisely the naked simplicity that Lawrence loved. When I visited the church on a warm day at the end of all my travels, sunlight was spilling in a cascade of dapples and brindles through the great window, falling on the crusader’s effigy of Lawrence in Arab dress, carved by his friend Eric Kennington. As I gazed at his serene face, rendered in stone for posterity, I realized that I had in some measure answered the question that I had asked myself on that day at the spring in Wadi Rum. I had discovered that Lawrence, like each one of us, was unique. His unique blend of qualities was exactly that required at a certain moment in history to save the Arab Revolt from oblivion and bring it to success. Lawrence was not a hero of the dragonslayer order – superhumanly strong in body and spirit, unfailingly courageous, immaculately honourable, perfectly truthful – the white knight that Sarah Lawrence tried to create. Such beings, as Lawrence himself knew, exist only in the imagination. On the contrary, he was a man whose physical weakness, bizarre sexuality, unimpressive appearance and abnormal fear of pain led him to develop an extraordinary capacity for determination, courage, compassion and sympathy. He was no authoritarian, but a man whose sensitivity lent him the ability to empathize with men – and women – of all classes, races and creeds; whose inner lack of strong identity allowed him to be anything and anyone he felt others needed him to be. Lawrence was not an imaginary hero, but a real man with a real blend of strengths and weaknesses: a leader, a strategist, a motivator, a thinker, a doer, a romancer, an elaborator, a manipulator of myth. Millions of words have been written in tribute to him, but to me those which serve as his most fitting epitaph are the ones he himself wrote to a friend some years before his death: ‘I am human. There ain’t no such supercreatures as you would fain see. Or if there are I haven’t met one [yet].’³⁵

1. The author and his son at Lawrence’s Spring, Jordan. It was at this spring, known as Shallala to the local Bedu, that Lawrence bathed during his sojourns in the Wadi Rum in 1917. He wrote a moving description of the spring in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

2. Pharaoh’s Island, off Sinai. As a young archaeologist, Lawrence swam out to the island to examine the ruins of the crusader castle (now restored). Known to the crusaders as Ile de Graye, it stands 400 metres off the Egyptian coast, some ten miles south of Aqaba.

3. Ruins of traditional house, Yanbu’, Saudi Arabia. Lawrence occupied a house similar to this one while staying in the port of Yanbu’ during 1916. Though the Turks advanced towards Yanbu’ in December 1916, they turned back in fear of British naval guns, a decision, Lawrence said, which cost them the war.

4. Ruins of mud houses, Hamra village, Saudi Arabia. Often imagined as an encounter in the desert – thanks to David Lean’s film – Lawrence and Sharif Feisal actually met first in Hamra, a large village of mud houses surrounded by palm-groves in the Hejaz’s fertile Wadi Safra.

5. Fallen locomotive, Hediyya station, Saudi Arabia. Several of the original locomotives which operated on the Hejaz railway are still to be found in the deserts of the Hejaz. This one was toppled quite recently by Arabs collecting steel track at Hediyya, a key watering-station which Lawrence had targeted in March 1917 before switching to Aba an-Na’am.

6. Hediyya bridge. Solidly built by German architects and Turkish labour between 1902 and 1908, many of the original bridges on the Hejaz railway have survived till the present day. The line was revived briefly in the 1920s, but much of it has been disused ever since.

7. Guweira plain from the Nagb ash–Shtar pass, Jordan. Lawrence halted to take in this breathtaking sight at dawn on 2 July 1917, just before his patrol engaged a Turkish force at Aba l–Lissan, the major battle in the Aqaba operation. Once Aba l–Lissan was taken, the Arabs were free to descend into the plain and approach Aqaba from the landward.

8. Atwi station, Jordan. Lawrence’s patrol attacked Atwi on 27 June 1917 during a side mission on the Aqaba operation, killing two Turks and capturing a flock of sheep. Such pin-prick attacks were intended to confuse the enemy and distract them from the real target: Aqaba.

9. Tent in the Wadi Rum, Jordan. A unique geological formation, created by the irruption of sandstone strata elsewhere confined under limestone, the Wadi Rum was considered by Lawrence to be the most spectacular sight in the whole of Arabia. Many of Rum’s Howaytat Bedu still live in traditional black tents as they did in Lawrence’s day.

10. Howaytat woman, Wadi Rum. Proudly displaying the facial tattoos she received as a girl on the eve of her wedding, this matriarch of the Howaytat, one of the celebrated bards of her tribe, still chants poems recalling the days of Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayyi.

11. The author with Sabah ibn ‘Iid at Mudowwara well, Jordan. Lawrence’s patrol watered at the pool here on 17 September 1917, on their way to attack Mudowwara station, which lies about three miles away. The Turks had deliberately polluted the water with dead camels, ensuring that Lawrence’s British gunners came down with diarrhoea. Today, due to local irrigation projects, the well is completely dry.

12. Loading a camel at Mudowwara well. A Bedui of the Howaytat loads his camel at the same point from which Lawrence’s patrol moved south to hit the railway near Hallat Ammar. They watered again at Mudowwara well on the exfiltration to Wadi Rum.

13. Wrecked railway wagon, Mudowwara. This wagon of 1914-18 vintage stands near the site where, on 19 September 1917, Lawrence and his patrol successfully mined a train drawn by two locomotives, and killed seventy Turks by machine-gun and mortar fire within ten minutes – one of the most perfectly executed guerrilla operations of the war.

14. A Bedui filling a waterskin. Lawrence wrote that the ways of the Bedu were hard even for those brought up in them, and for a stranger terrible – a death in life. The Bedu saw things differently, however: the desert offered them what to their eyes was a relatively comfortable way of life.