Feisal, whose understanding of the value of American publicity was a good deal sharper than Lawrence’s, played the good host, taking Thomas and Chase on a long trip out into the desert—providing more good footage for Chase of camels, Bedouin, and tents—and sent them on an excursion to Petra, “the rose-red city, half as old as Time,” where Thomas wondered whether “we had not been transported to a fairy-land on a magically-colored Persian carpet.” Chase’s pictures would later appear in Lowell Thomas’s show about Lawrence, as well as in future travelogues.

Everybody seems to have been aware of just how important it was to present a positive picture of the Arab Revolt to America. Thomas got Clayton and Hogarth to talk to him about Lawrence, despite the fact that as senior intelligence officers they might have kept their mouths shut. Thomas also interviewed people at Aqaba, where everybody may have embellished stories about Lawrence for Thomas’s benefit. Bedouin tribesmen, many of whom believed that the Koran forbade photography, since it involved making a human image, nevertheless meekly allowed Chase to take their pictures, and Feisal provided masses of horsemen and camel riders, banners flowing and swords drawn, for action crowd scenes. Whether Lawrence was conscious of it or not, the few days hespent with Lowell Thomas and Harry Chase in Aqaba would eventually be instrumental in creating the legend of “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Lawrence may not have realized that he had launched himself on a collision course with a new and potent combination of tabloid newspapers, press photography, and the cinema, but what he did in those few days at Aqaba would change his life far more than the mere acceptance of a few decorations and medals could have done. He had the good fortune—or perhaps the bad luck—to put himself in the hands of one of the most gifted and silver-tongued promoters of the twentieth century, a man who would be a star in media not even invented yet, and who would live on to 1981: a long life devoted to making himself and Lawrence household names.

It was at about this time, after Lawrence had left Thomas and Chase to continue their interviews and filming without him, that he rode north to Shobek, about twenty miles from Petra, and learned there of the death of Daud, the friend of Farraj, one of his two high-spirited servant boys. Farraj himself came to Lawrence with the news that Daud had frozen to death at Azrak.* In Lawrence’s account of this, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, there is a clear change of mood, as if some of the exuberance and joy he had felt in his relationships with the Arabs was being squeezed out by the war. Fearless as he may have been for himself, Lawrence was not indifferent to the death of others, particularly those whom he loved, or for whom he felt responsible. He wrote of Farraj and Daud that they “had been friends from childhood, going about hand in hand, for the happiness of feeling one another, and diverting our march by their eternal gaiety.” He reflected on the “openness and honesty in their love, which proved its innocence; for with other couples we had seen how, when passion had thrust in, it had not been friendship any more, but a half-marriage, a shamefaced union of the flesh.” The relationship between Daud and Farraj leads Lawrence on to another of those curious speculations about sexuality, which occasionally puzzle the reader of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and make it clear that Lawrence’s ideas about heterosexuality were a strange mixture of innocence, idealism, his mother’s disapproving eye for the slightest sign of sexual arousal, and the awful example (from Lawrence’s point of view) of Thomas Lawrence’s having given up his fortune and place in society out of lust for his daughters’ governess. “European women,” Lawrence wrote, “were either volunteers or conscientious objectors in this war to govern men’s bodies,” whereas, “in the Mediterranean, women’s influence and supposed purpose were circumscribed and the posture of men before her sexual.”

It is hard to unravel exactly what this means, but it clearly ties in with Lawrence’s assumption that women endured sex unwillingly in the European world, where as in the East “all the things men valued—love, companionship, friendliness—became impossible heterosexually, for where there was no equality there could be no mutual affection.” Of course Lawrence judged eastern domestic life as an outsider, whose relationship with the Arabs was either at work in Carchemish, or at war, when they were far from home. Much as he liked to think he had become part of their lives, he was still excluded from what went on between husband and wife (or wives) and from gauging the degree to which Arabs were invisibly influenced by women or by the demands of domestic life. All that, in the Arab world, took place behind a curtain, but the intrigues of the wives and concubines of the Turkish sultan, and the degree to which a woman of the harem might conspire to put her own son on the throne in place of another, should have cured Lawrence of the notion that women in the East were necessarily without ambition, interest, or influence in public or business affairs, or always submissive to their husband. King Hussein may have been an imposing, if infuriating, figure, but who knows what his four wives had to say to him about the relative positions of their sons when he stepped behind the closed door of his private apartments? The voices of women went largely unheard in the Middle East until very recently in its history, but this does not mean that they did not have ways to make themselves heard in private, or that men did not seek theiradvice, approval, or judgment, as they do elsewhere—or did not have to endure the relentless questioning of a strong-willed mother, as Lawrence himself did. The notion that male Arab society provided a “spiritual union,” which complemented “carnal marriage,” and that “these bonds between man and man [were] at once so intense, so obvious, and so simple,” is a nice tribute to Daud and Farraj, but a very doubtful generalization about marriage in the East, which, while it is certainly different in many ways from marriage in the modern, industrialized West, is perhaps not as different as outsiders may suppose.

Lawrence’s plan for the spring campaign was at once ambitious and simple. He would support Allenby’s raid on Amman with three separate operations: in the center, Jaafar’s regulars, whose numbers were increasing, would seize the railway north of Maan; in the south, Joyce would attack Mudawara with the armored cars, and cut the railway line to Medina once and for all; in the north, Lawrence would join Allenby at Salt, raising the tribes all along the way. Although Lawrence himself still had doubts about whether Jaafar’s men could really take Maan, he finally deferred to the optimism of Feisal and Jaafar, and temporarily returned to his position as “an advisor,” though he “privately … implored Jaafar not to risk too great a disaster.”

Conveying more optimism than he felt, Lawrence rode north with his bodyguard and “an immense caravan of … camels, carrying five thousand rifles, great quantities of ammunition, and food, for the adherents in the north,” only a week after a furious blizzard had covered the ground with snowdrifts. In the last light of day, Lawrence rode alone close to the railway line and surprised a solitary Turkish soldier, who had left his rifle a few yards away while he took a nap. Lawrence had the soldier, “a young man stout, but sulky looking,” covered with his pistol, but after a moment, he merely said, “God is merciful,” and rode off, faintly interested to see whether the Turk would grab the rifle and shoot him. This is Lawrence at his best—not just the moment of mercy toward an enemy, but the moral courage (and perverted curiosity) to test whether the “Turk was1 What the czar actually said, during a conversation reported by the British ambassador in Saint Petersburg in 1853-in the course of which the czar raised the possibility that Russia and Great Britain might split up the Ottoman Empire between them-was: “We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill; it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made. man enough not to shoot me in the back.” Note too Lawrence’s careful distinction—the rightthing for the Turkish soldier to do would of course have been to shoot Lawrence, but the manlything for him to do was to spare Lawrence, as he himself had been spared. How many British officers would have felt that way? How many would have put their lives at risk to see what the outcome would be? It is one of the most interesting and consistent parts of Lawrence’s character that he continually set himself these moral tests, in which he risked everything to see whether he could live up to his own ideals.