In 1910, after Turkey had settled down in the firmer hands of the “Young Turks,” the British ambassador in Constantinople was asked to raise the matter again, and this time, permission was granted. Hogarth’s choice of Lawrence was a natural one. Lawrence had clearly demonstrated a flair for digging up relics of the past, as well as for bargaining for them; he had bought a number of Hittite seals for Hogarth during his walking tour of the Holy Land; he was physically tough and fearless; he had a smattering of Arabic; he was a keen amateur photographer; and he had actually come very close to Carchemish while he was in Syria. Lawrence himself, when he heard about Hogarth’s trip to Constantinople in 1910, had asked his old friend E. T. Leeds, at the Ashmolean, if there was any chance of his being included in the party going to Jerablus with Hogarth.

This raised any number of difficulties, since Lawrence was receiving a scholarship from Jesus College to support his research on medieval pottery for a BLitt degree, which, on the face of things, seemed incompatible with excavating a Hittite site in Syria. But despite Leeds’s doubts, Lawrence demonstrated his lifelong ability to get his own way. Hogarth agreed to take Lawrence, and then, with superb diplomatic skill, managed to secure for his young protйgй a “senior demyship,” a kind of research fellowship, at his own college, Magdalen,* which meant that the British Museum would not have to pay anything but Lawrence’s living expenses at thesite. This was not an inconsiderable feat—Lawrence’s demyship would bring him Ј100 a year for four years (about the equivalent of $12,500 a year today).

With equal skill Jesus College was placated by the suggestion that Lawrence would not only continue his research on medieval pottery but extend his survey of crusader castles in Syria, enabling him to expand his BA thesis into a book; and the British Museum was informed (a little optimistically) that his services were necessary to the expedition because of his command of Arabic, his familiarity with the area, and his knowledge about pottery. All this was the academic equivalent of a carom shot at billiards, and speaks volumes about Hogarth’s talent for manipulation, and Lawrence’s ability to claim convincingly many different skills at the same time. If Lawrence’s parents had any doubts, Hogarth no doubt dealt with those as well—he seems to have gotten along well with both of them—and moved swiftly to send Lawrence to Syria to improve his Arabic, for which so much had been claimed.

Lawrence sailed for Beirut at the beginning of December 1910, hardly more than two months after Hogarth’s return from Constantinople, leaving in his father’s hands the problem of the printing press that Vyvyan Richards and Lawrence were to have founded together. On the way to Beirut, Lawrence managed to visit Athens and Constantinople for the first time. Like many visitors to Greece, he was puzzled by how little the modern Greeks resembled the ancient ones, and compared the former unfavorably with the latter. The voyage, Lawrence complained, was very slow, and the meals were huge and endless (it was a French ship, of the Messageries Maritimes).

By December 10, he was able to write home from Constantinople, where he had an unexpectedly long stay when the engines of his ship broke down, leaving him free to do rather more sightseeing than he had expected. He reported home cheerfully that “the cholera has ceased to all practical purposes,” and he was probably the only tourist in the city’s long history to have found Constantinople “very clean.” He praised the “disorder” of the city, the noisy and colorful variety of its open-airmarkets, and the fact that there were hardly more than “twenty yards of straight street” in all of Stamboul. He attempted to interest three Canadian priests whom he had befriended in the pleasures of sightseeing in Constantinople, but they found everything very dirty, prompting Lawrence to express the broad-minded point of view that would enable him to lead the Bedouin in warfare: “They were always talking of quel salйtй, of the dirt & disorder of things, of the lack of shops and carriages and what they were pleased to call conveniences (which are more trouble than they are worth). They seemed too narrow to get outside their civilization, or state of living…. Is civilization the power of appreciating the character and achievements of peoples in a different stage from ourselves?” This was a question that Lawrence was to answer for himself, over the next few years, with his attempt to live like a Bedouin and even to exceed the capacity of the Bedouin for living on the borderline of human existence.

Lawrence arrived in Beirut shortly before Christmas—it had taken him the best part of a month to travel from Britain to Lebanon—and moved immediately to Jebail, the ancient Greek city of Byblos, where he was to attend the mission school and “perfect” his Arabic.* His teacher, Fareedeh el Akle, who was still alive in 1976, was more realistic about her pupil’s knowledge of the language than Hogarth had been. She praised his exceptional intelligence, and his determination to master the language, but pointed out that “in a short time he could speak and write a little,” which is significantly less than the command of Arabic that Hogarth had attributed to him. It is curious that this supposedly “crash course” consisted of only “one hour [a day] on a red sofa in the large hall,” though Lawrence surely also did a lot of reading and practiced his Arabic on the streets of Jebail. Fareedeh el Akle not only admired her young pupil, but appreciated his keen interest in the Arabian people, and “the spiritualside of his character.” Once, when she was talking to Lawrence about some matter of spiritual significance, he replied, “Help comes from within, not from without,” which might stand as the definition of his peculiar, lonely strength throughout his life. The inner strength of all the Lawrence boys was extraordinary, perhaps the most important quality they inherited from parents who had, by their own action, virtually cut themselves off from the rest of the world without any apparent regret.

Toward the end of her long life, after being questioned by John Mack, a biographer of Lawrence who was also a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Fareedeh wrote to a friend, “Lawrence seems to me like an oyster which has, through pain and suffering, all through life developed into a pearl which the world is trying to evaluate, taking it to pieces layer by layer, without realizing the true value of the whole.” There is some truth to this, even today. Lawrence’s detractors and admirers alike tend to dissect his personality into thin slices, separating the soldier from the scholar, the hero from the teller of tall tales, the victim of neuroses from the man of action, and in the process losing sight of just what an attractive and interesting person he was, even at his most infuriating. Fareedeh clearly recognized this, and understood early on that Lawrence was always more than the sum of his parts. Provocative as Lawrence could be, there was about him a certain sweetness of disposition, a spiritual quality, and above all a sense that he was a special person, destined for greatness, even though it was not yet clear what kind it would be.

Lawrence remained at Jebail studying Arabic until mid-February, keeping up a steady flow of correspondence with his family and friends. The entire Lawrence family seems to have been engaged in writing an endless series of letters and postcards, so that Lawrence seems to have known as much about what was going on at 2 Polstead Road as if he had still been living there, and there was hardly a detail of his own life in Jebail on which he did not report home at length. Apparently his parents were in the habit of showing his letters to Hogarth, since Lawrence asks them to stop doing so, perhaps fearing that Hogarth would be bored by the humdrum details of his life at Jebail, and that his correspondencewith Hogarth ought to be kept on a higher level than worries about Thomas Lawrence’s health, or promises of coins and stamps for Arnie’s collection.