When Hogarth and Grigori left on 20 April, Lawrence compounded his oddness by moving out of the house and sleeping on the site – either on the mound or in a trench – a development which must have struck the Arabs as very strange indeed. Lawrence believed it brought him closer to them, though they themselves would not have dreamed of sleeping anywhere but in their own quarters. The excavation was not proceeding well. It was costing Ј40 per week, but as yet they had little to show but the odd lion’s head, basalt relief, and heaps of pottery: no Hittite inscriptions or hieroglyphic texts had been found. When, in May, having found nothing but a Roman coin, the fragment of a lion’s mane and a Byzantine wall foundation for the entire week, they struck solid bedrock, they almost abandoned the diggings then and there. It was under these despairing circumstances that they received a visit from Miss Gertrude Bell, a distinguished Arabist and archaeologist, who had arrived expecting to find Hogarth. Miss Bell belonged to the long British tradition of dominant ladies, who by dint of privileged birth and determination had managed to extrude themselves into a world of men. She was influential, and if she should report back to the British Museum the true state of the excavation, Lawrence feared, it would automatically be closed down. He had already acquired a taste for the lotus-eating life here, and had set his sights on returning for another season. His attitude to Miss Bell was, therefore, understandably defensive. He thought her pleasant enough, but not beautiful ‘except with a veil on, perhaps’,²⁷ and at first he found her too captious by half. When she criticized the way the excavations had been carried out, he and Thompson tried to ‘squash her with a display of erudition’,²⁸ racing volubly over subjects as disparate as Byzantine architecture, Greek folklore, Anatole France, the construct state in Arabic and the price of riding-camels. After ninety minutes of this onslaught, he said, Miss Bell was happy to have tea, and retreat ‘back to her tents’, murmuring defeatedly that they had ‘done wonders’ with the digging.²⁹ This was Lawrence’s account: Miss Bell, seemingly oblivious of any friction, simply added a reginal note to her diary that she had met Thompson and a young man called Lawrence, who, she predicted, was ‘going to make a traveller’: ‘They showed me their diggings and their finds,’ she wrote, ‘and I spent a pleasant day with them.’³⁰

In June, however, Lawrence’s worst fears were realized when Thompson received a telegram from Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, stating that the trustees had been so disappointed with the results of the dig that there would be no second season. There was nothing to be done but to clear up the diggings, glue together those pots which could be glued, and close up the site. In July Thompson and Lawrence moved down the Euphrates to Tel Ahmar to decipher some Hittite cuneiform scripts. From here, Lawrence set off on foot to revisit Urfa and to see Harran, Birejik and Tel Bashar – the region in which he claimed to have been attacked in 1909. Like that excursion, this one also ended in ignominy, when, less than three weeks later, he crept back into Jarablus, spoiling for malaria and dysentery, with festering bites on his hands and his feet in shreds once more. Almost the entire village turned out to greet him, and after an hour’s council, Hammoudi brought him bread, fried eggs and yoghourt and left him, mercifully, to eat alone. That night he slept on the roof with a splitting headache, and woke to see the sunrise over the Mesopotamian plain, with high fever. He staggered doggedly off to Carchemish, intending to measure various trenches, but when Hammoudi tagged along to assist Lawrence fell into a blind rage and bellowed at him, sending him away for no apparent reason. Having reached the mound, he promptly fell flat on his back and lay there motionless for seven and a half hours in a cold sweat, with his head bursting. When he finally summoned the effort to get up, he was astonished to find it was three in the afternoon. He lurched towards the trenches with his tape-measure, but some were deep, and he could not trust himself to take any measurements without falling inside. The trek back to Jarablus village was one of the most fearful marathons he had ever endured: it took him two hours to cover the three-quarters of a mile distance. That evening he scrawled letters with a hand so heavy he could hardly hold the pen, and sent a runner with them to Birejik to summon a carriage and invoke the aid of the Governor and the local doctor. Many Arabs, including Dahoum, came in to wish him well, but he was so sick that he could scarcely see them. All the next day he lay prone in the Hoja’s house, troubled by spurts of diarrhoea to relieve which he had to hurry outside, once fainting and cutting his cheek badly on a sharp stone. In the evening he was comforted once more by a visit from Dahoum. On the third day there was no sign of the carriage from Birejik, and Lawrence began to fear that the messenger had absconded with his money. Though Hammoudi was taking great pains to make him comfortable, he found himself becoming intolerant of the ‘dreadful bore’, and was irritated by the way the Hoja seemed to repeat every sentence five or six times, implying that Lawrence’s Arabic was poor, and emphasizing his foreign-ness. In his weak condition, Lawrence’s Arabic might well have been unintelligible: in fact, he may have owed Hammoudi his life.

While he lay in a half-stupor, the Hoja was fighting a battle with public opinion. His neighbours – almost all of whom had worked on the dig – advised him cold-bloodedly to throw Lawrence out, for if the Englishman were to die, they said, the ex-bandit Hammoudi would certainly be accused of poisoning him for his money, and arrested and imprisoned by the Government. The Hoja dug his heels in, however: to have turned Lawrence out would not only have violated the Muslim code of hospitality, but would also have been a considerable affront to an employer who might possibly offer him a job in the future. Lawrence must have overheard the heated arguments which ensued, for he gave Hammoudi a letter addressed to his father stating that if he should die, the Hoja was not to blame. For three days his life hung by a thread. Dahoum came to visit him each day. Then, on 1 August, there was a slight improvement, and Lawrence managed to drag himself painfully, with long rests, to the river for a much-needed wash. At four o’clock that afternoon the runner arrived back from Birejik without a carriage, saying that the local doctor and the Governor had refused to help. Lawrence was now in dire straits. He was faced with a five-day wait while he sent someone to wire for a carriage from Aleppo, or a ride on horseback to Membij, where there were carriages for hire. He decided to try for Membij, but it was a further two days before he felt strong enough. Just as he was about to set off, Hammoudi turned on him and refused the loan of his horse, without which, he knew, he had no chance of reaching the place. Furious at this sudden and inexplicable reversal in his host’s generosity, Lawrence teetered to another part of Jarablus with Dahoum’s help, and managed to hire a horse to take him to Tel Ahmar, where he might hitch a lift to Membij. One added problem was that he had no cash to pay for the horse, but the owner generously let him take it on trust on being told that he would change money in the bank at Tel Ahmar and send Dahoum back with both horse and cash. They travelled by night, under a fair moon, and reached the Euphrates by Tel Ahmar at dawn, to find their way cut off by the swollen Sajur. Dahoum plunged in, swam across, and brought a boat to ferry both Lawrence and horse to the far shore. There, Lawrence managed to change his money at the Syrian Bank, and sent Dahoum off happy with a metallik (half a crown) and his neighbour’s mount. He lay helpless in a hemp plantation until about mid-morning, when he managed to beg a ride on a wagon bound for Membij. There, after a long agony of bickering with the drivers, he hired a carriage for Aleppo, where he arrived on 5 August, and put himself gratefully to bed in the Baron’s Hotel.