Hospitals were few, far between, and primitive; diseases such as cholera and malaria were rife; sanitation was lacking outside hotels de grand luxe in the major cities; roads were mostly dirt tracks; and south and east of Damascus the Arabs made a practice of robbing strangers. Except for Constantinople, a big and cosmopolitan city, life in most of the Ottoman Empire was still ruled by family, clan, or tribe; and much of the empire was inhabited by rival or warring nationalities and ethnic groups. The “Young Turks” who had taken power in 1908 were determined to modernize the country, but progress was slow, and deeply resisted. Over the decades, the Ottoman Empire had been driven out of Europe, and subjected to any number of humiliating concessions. Under one such concession, foreigners were tried according to the laws of their own country, rather than those of Turkey; as a result, both the Turks who ruled the empireand the Arabs who resented the presence of all foreigners were deeply hostile to the western powers.

Still, all this must be set against the spontaneous generosity of all the ethnic groups in the empire, especially the Arabs, to whom hospitality to a stranger was (and remains) both a religious obligation and a matter of honor. They managed, however, to combine this with a voracious appetite for theft—so long as you were not a guest under their roof, or in their tent, you were fair game. Thus it was that Lawrence received food and a night’s lodging, however poor his host, but was also shot at, robbed, and badly beaten. Missionaries of numerous denominations and nationalities, including Americans, Scots, and Jews, also offered him hospitality. In all his lengthy letters home Lawrence benefited from the fact that the British and most of the major European powers ran their own post offices and postal services in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish post office being notoriously unreliable. His letters give no hint of homesickness, fear, complaint, or self-doubt. He walked more than 1,000 miles, mostly on rough, rocky paths, for up to thirteen hours a day in temperatures ranging from ninety to 107 degrees, and visited the sites of thirty-six crusader castles—an extraordinary achievement.

He left England on June 18, 1909, on board the P&O liner SS Mongolia. It made only two short stops, at Gibraltar and Marseille, then went on to Port Said, where he was stuck for five nights in one of the most raucous and sordid ports on earth waiting for a berth on a ship to Beirut. He spent most of his time on board studying Arabic, and although he dismissed the voyage as “a monstrous waste of time,” he seems to have enjoyed the variegated company at his table on the Mongolia: “a French girl & a German male, a Swede, two Spaniards, an Indian of some sort, an Italian, an Arab, and a Greek. Swede, & Hindu talk English.” He reached Port Said on June 30, and reported home by letter that he enjoyed good bathing on the beach; had seen the Suez Canal; and was eating melons, peaches, apricots, and grapes—and that nevertheless Port Said was “a horrible place” (few travelers will disagree). He did not arrive in Beirut until July 6—eighteen days for a journey that would now take six hours.

From the beginning, he set himself a demanding pace, averaging about twenty miles on foot a day. Although he is usually portrayed as an instinctive loner, he had actually made plans in Beirut to go with a party of five American tutors at the American College there, but one of them fell ill, so they dropped out and he went on alone. He had no trouble finding places to stay, either in native homes or at missions, though he remarks on the number of flea bites he picked up—inevitably, since most Palestinian houses were built on two levels, the higher end for the family, and the lower one for the animals, both under one roof. He praised the food even in the most modest homes: leben, a kind of thin yogurt, eaten by dipping a piece of rolled-up bread into the bowl; two kinds of bread, one small and dusted with sesame seeds and cumin, which he liked, and the other a very thin, flat, round bread, sometimes three feet in diameter and very dry and brittle, which he didn’t. He always offered to pay; sometimes money was accepted, but mostly it was not. His letters home could serve as models for anybody writing about travel and adventure off the beaten path, and there is in them, though he seldom gets credit for it, a certain sweetness toward people, a desire to believe the best of them until they proved otherwise. He always radiated a powerful, even incandescent enthusiasm and curiosity that seemed to light up everything he saw, however weary, footsore, or sick he was.

And sick he was, quite often—he had already contracted malaria on his bike trip through the south of France, and now he contracted a different and more serious strain; his feet gave him endless trouble; his face and hands were burned and chapped by the heat and the wind; he was covered with insect bites from head to foot; and he clearly didn’t care.

Those who have not read Lawrence’s letters home, to his parents and to his brothers, can have no idea of just how likable he was, and how far removed from the neurotic figure, obsessed by his own illegitimacy, whom some of his biographers and critics have described. What is more, his letters reveal an enviable family picture—there is not a hint of jealousy between the brothers, and his parents are interested in every single thing that Ned does. However fierce the psychological tug-of-war wasbetween Sarah and her second son—a contest that Ned could never win, but that he learned to avoid by putting as much distance as he could between himself and his mother—their concern for each other and his efforts to please her are clear. Simply by being in the Holy Land, of course, he was pleasing her as he could never have done by traveling in France, no matter how many miles he rode a day, or how few shillings a day he spent on himself.

It is, one assumes, largely for her benefit that his letters are not just about local customs and crusaders’ fortresses, but are shot through with biblical references: “From Dan we passed to the site of Abel-Beth-Maachah, where Sheba was finally run to earth by Joab.” Lawrence never neglects to point out each of the biblical sites he visits, though these sites are not his primary interest, of course; and he displays throughout his letters an amazing amount of biblical knowledge—perhaps not so extraordinary for somebody brought up in a family with daily Bible readings. He notes that he has stood on the place where the Arabs believe Jonah was cast ashore, and describes a beautiful spring dedicated by the Greeks to Pan in the village of Banias (on the Golan Heights), which “Mother will remember from Matthew xvi or Mark viii and other places.”

Given Lawrence’s enthusiasm for the Arab cause, it is interesting that he remarks about Palestine: “The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: their colonies are bright spots in a desert.” After describing the primitive farming methods of the Arabs, he notes by contrast that he has just heard the news of Louis Blйriot’s first crossing of the Channel by airplane. Lawrence has great sympathy for the Arabs, but a brisk impatience with the Turks, whom he sees, correctly, as retarding political development and education, and imposing on all subject races of the empire a bureaucracy that is slow moving, corrupt, and punitive. Although he has yet to meet the Bedouin, or even to see the desert—for he is trudging up and down the stony hills of what is now Israel, Syria, and Lebanon, climbing, as he remarks wearily (and with pardonable exaggeration), the height of Mont Blanc every day—he notes with approval the farmers “ploughing intheir fields” with a revolver on their belt or a rifle over their shoulder, and the occasional appearance of a desert Arab in a kufiyya. As if it were a premonition of many a page in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he writes of the heat in northern Palestine: “Inland, up the mountains, it is cooler, though when one gets among the large rocks one is stifled: they seem almost to give off a vapour, or heat-breath, that is horrible; add to that a sirocco, a wind that shrivels every green thing it meets, that blisters one’s face & hands, & makes one feel that one is walking towards some gigantic oven; and you get an idea of the vast possibilities.” Since he adds that the shaded hallway of the hotel in Tiberias, even though cooled by a large block of ice, was over 106 degrees, and that it felt “quite cool” compared with the temperature outside in the sun, gives some idea of what Lawrence had in mind by unbearable heat.