Hogarth was not much interested in Lawrence’s crusader castles. His attitude to any aspect of archaeology unconnected with classical antiquity and the ancient Near East was dismissive. What moved Hogarth was the Hittites, a mysterious biblical people about whom, before 1870, hardly anything had been known. The story of the Hittites was a curious one. In 1812, the Swiss explorer Johan Lutwig Burckhardt had discovered a stone set in the wall of the bazaar of Hama – a large town in Syria – which appeared to be incised with hieroglyphs. He was unable to examine it in detail because of local hostility, but on first glance he felt that the hieroglyphs were quite unlike ancient Egyptian ones. It was not until 1872 that the Hama stone was inspected closely, and then its hieroglyphs were compared with those discovered on a similar stone in Aleppo, and various other inscriptions found scattered over Asia Minor. By 1876, it was concluded that the script of the lost Hittite civilization had been found. Hogarth had already made several major journeys in search of that civilization, and had returned to Oxford with a collection of Hittite cylinder-seals which was unique of its kind in the world. These seals offered tantalizing insights into the lost culture. Of similar shape to the joint of a finger, and rarely much longer, they were incised with intricately made, sometimes surreal images – bloated plants, spiky animals, insect-like humans. Although referred to as ‘seals’, they had originally been printing devices which, when dipped in coloured pigments, could be rolled out to produce designs on human skin or clothing for decoration, or on property to signify ownership. Hittite cylinder-seals had no place in Lawrence’s medieval fantasy, but he flattered Hogarth by showing an interest in them, and by asking where traces of Hittite civilization were likely to be found. He explained that he was planning a trip around crusader castles in Syria the following summer, but could certainly spare a few days hunting for Hittites. Hogarth, unmoved, tried to dissuade him from the journey. It would be far too hot in summer, he said, for tramping about Syria. When Lawrence persisted, Hogarth advised him to contact Doughty, the expert on Arabian travel. Lawrence wrote, but Doughty’s attitude was little more encouraging than Hogarth’s had been. He explained, first of all, that he had been no farther north than Damascus, but added, ‘In July and August the heat is very severe day and night … it is a land of squalor where a European can find evil refreshment. Long daily marches on foot a prudent man who knows the country would I think consider out of the question …’¹⁶ If Lawrence really intended visit the East, Doughty commented, he would be well advised to learn Arabic.

Doughty’s forebodings filled Lawrence with fear, but the more his betters insisted on the foolishness of the undertaking, the more tightly the screw of his determination was turned. His ride through France in 1908 had been the preparation: the East would provide the backdrop for the knight-errant adventures he craved. He began taking Arabic lessons from a Syrian Protestant clergyman, the Revd Nasar Odeh, and from him acquired a sound framework of grammar and a vocabulary of about 100 words which, he thought, would suffice for road directions, food, accommodation, and money transactions. His parents provided Ј40 to buy a camera and tripod, and to supplement his photographs he took drawing lessons from E. H. New, an architectural illustrator who, to Lawrence’s delight, had recently illustrated a biography of William Morris. Before leaving, he saw Hogarth again, and this time the Master set him a task. Since he would be visiting the region of southern Turkey in which Hogarth had found many of his Hittite cylinder-seals, would Lawrence bring back more seals for the Ash-molean collection? The seals were small and easily transportable. Lawrence now had his quest. To prepare himself practically for local conditions, he memorized long passages from Arabia Deserta and read Practical Hints for Travellers in the Near East by E. A. Reynolds-Ball. He took Ball’s advice and bought a Mauser automatic pistol for protection against footpads. He had a lightweight suit made with many pockets to carry his things, and through Hogarth met Harry Pirie-Gordon, who had travelled in Syria the previous season, and from whom he managed to borrow an annotated map. Meanwhile, his official iradeh – a letter of safe-conduct from the Ottoman Government – had been applied for by Sir John Rhys, Principal of Jesus College, through Lord Curzon, Chancellor of Oxford University. On 18 June 1909, with Pirie-Gordon’s map stuffed into one pocket and his Baedeker stuffed into another, he stepped aboard SS Mongolia, bound for Port Said and, ultimately, Beirut.

Beirut was then one of the most vibrant cities in the Middle East: Lawrence himself characterized it as ‘the door to Syria, a chromatic Levantine screen through which … foreign influences entered …’¹⁷ When I arrived there in his footsteps, ninety years on, however, it was a shell of a place, its famous ‘Downtown’ quarter reduced to rubble – a maze of shell-shocked buildings without interiors or roofs. Though the war between Muslims and Christians had long since ceased and Israeli troops had pulled out of the city, they were still fighting the Palestinians in southern Lebanon, which made it impossible for me to follow that part of Lawrence’s 1909 route. Instead I had to approach it indirectly, taking a bus from Cairo to Jerusalem and up the Jordan valley to Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, where I found a room in the Church of Scotland Hostel. The verandah of my cell-like room looked into a private beach-garden full of spruce and cypress and old eucalypts. There were glowering clouds over the lake, a ponderously spinning carousel casting beams of light on the embroiled waters. Gulls and shearwaters rose and fell on the waves like paper boats. Lawrence had found the lake ‘very blue and always moving: never quite calm’, but ‘pretty’ rather than ‘grand’.¹⁸ He described Tiberias itself as a ‘hot and dirty’ town, but found it not altogether unpicturesque: he loved its tiny port and fishing-boats, and thought its ruined walls ‘interesting’. The walls were still there, but their effect was spoiled by the dozen great ziggurats of modern hotels which towered over them.

The following day I hired a mountain bike to ride up to Safed, the highest town in Galilee, where Lawrence had spent a few days. It had rained in the night. The road along the lakeside through Magdala was wet and the wheels sprayed a rash of mud over my oilskin jacket. I climbed painfully above Capernaum, around an endless series of hairpins, through green meadows full of grey boulders, fat, grazing cows and elegant white egrets. At Rosh Pinna, the air was thick with mist and the road darkened by avenues of stone-pines. I halted to drink coffee at a papershop-cum-cafй, where a very fat man – the proprietor of the place – was sitting at a table reading the sports page of a Hebrew newspaper. He seemed interested in my search for Lawrence. ‘Lawrence was a friend of the Jews,’ he told me. ‘He believed in Israel as a National Homeland for us. We will never forget him for that!’ This was essentially true, I thought. Like many Britons of his day, Lawrence had been excited by the idea of restoring the Jews to their ancestral homeland after 2,000 years: the British had seen themselves as secret guardians of time, capable of using their vast wealth and power to replay history. On his first journey through Galilee in 1909, indeed, Lawrence had been disappointed to find the country derelict by comparison with the image he had formed of it through his biblical study. Instead of the ‘polished streets, pillared houses and rococo baths’ he had imagined, he found a place of ‘dilapidated Bedu tents, with the people calling to [one] to come in and talk, while miserable curs came snapping at [one’s] heels’.¹⁹ There is little trace here of the later Arabophile. He believed that Palestine had been a ‘decent’ country in Roman times and could be made so again: ‘The sooner the Jews farm it all the better,’ he wrote. ‘Their colonies are bright spots in the desert.’²⁰