A long letter from Vyvyan Richards reminds Lawrence uncomfortably of the promise to go into business with him. Richards, who seems to have been unable to take a hint, was in the process of planning to build “the hut” where they would live together, and Lawrence asks his father to send Richards some money on his behalf, but in rather lukewarm terms, surely aware that his father will be reluctant to do any such thing.

On January 24 he responds to his mother’s copy of a long letter from Richards—Lawrence describes it as “huge"—attempting to deal with the practical problems Richards is raising about the project. Lawrence asks his father to bear in mind that printing, as he and Richards envision it, is “not a business but a craft,” which pretty well sums up Thomas Lawrence’s objection to the scheme, and argues that he and Richards cannot be expected to “sit down to it for so many hours a day, any more than one could paint a picture on that scheme,” although in fact that is exactly what printers and painters do.

By February 18 he was back in Beirut again, to meet Hogarth. Those who think of the Middle East as uninterruptedly hot should bear in mind that Lawrence reported the railway line between Beirut and Aleppo was blocked by “snow 30 feet deep for 7 kilometers,” a factor which would play a part in the later stages of his campaign against the Turks in 1917–918. Hogarth, who had been delayed by bad weather in Constantinople, arrived accompanied by his assistant R. Campbell Thompson, a “cunei-formist” and specialist in Semitic languages, whose presence Lawrence managed mostly to ignore in his letters home; Hogarth’s “archeological overseer” Gregorios Antoniou, a Greek Cypriot who had supervised the excavating on Hogarth’s previous expeditions, joined the party in Beirut. They were stuck there for some days, since snow continued to fall in the mountains while a ferocious storm prevented them from sailing, but they finally managed to get on a vessel bound for Haifa and from there went on by train to Damascus, on one of the railway lines that Lawrencewould later spend much time and effort blowing up. They passed on their way Nazareth, which, Lawrence wrote for his mother’s benefit, was “no uglier than Basingstoke,” and journeyed on to Deraa, the vital railway junction where Lawrence would be taken prisoner, beaten, and suffer his worst and most painful humiliation. They lunched at the station buffet, which “was flagrantly and evidently an exotic” and served French food in an eastern decor. Hogarth dazzled Lawrence by speaking, with equal fluency, “Turkish & Greek, & French, & German, & Italian & English,” and even Lawrence remarked on how weird it was “to be so far out of Europe.” This was no longer the rocky, hilly landscape of the Holy Land, which had once been fertile under Roman rule, and over much of which he had walked on foot. Alongside the railway line lay “the Lejah, the lava no-man’s-land, and the refuge of all the outlaws of the Ottoman Empire … almost impassible, except to a native who knows the ways.” One senses Lawrence’s fascination with that vast, empty space—he had glimpsed from the train the fabled “great Hajj road,” the pilgrim way over which Doughty had approached on camel to the very outskirts of Mecca. That evening they reached Damascus, and from there, via Homs, went to Aleppo.

Lawrence wrote home from Aleppo that he found Thompson “pleasant,” by which he seems to mean that Thompson was no competition for Hogarth’s attention, and drops the news that he may not get back to England “this year,” that is to say for at least another nine months. Hogarth’s preparations for the excavation included, Lawrence notes with approval, nine kinds of jam and three kinds of tea; between the three men they carried the complete works of Shakespeare (Thompson), Dante (Hogarth), and Spenser (Lawrence), as well as large quantities of pistachio nuts and “Turkish delight.” Lawrence was in a part of the world where his taste for sweet things and his dislike of alcohol were shared by most of the local population. Aleppo he found muddy and filthy, though he seems to have enjoyed the souk, since he was always on the hunt for local pottery and brassware that might please his mother. His brother Frank was apparently practicing pistol shooting, and Lawrence advises him to shoot withouttaking aim: “The only practical way is almost to throw your bullet like a stone, at the object.” This is excellent advice for somebody with good eyes and a steady hand, and from one who knows what he is talking about—those who saw Lawrence in action during the war marveled at his marksmanship, including the Bedouin, who set great store by it.

The winter weather was so bad that they did not arrive in Jerablus until March 10, having made the journey from Aleppo by camel and horse (eleven baggage horses, ten camels), except for Lawrence, who walked. The only local industry was the raising of Glycyrizza glabra, a desert plant resembling fennel, from the roots of which licorice is extracted; and the headman of the nearest village was also the agent for the licorice company, who had put the company’s house at the disposal of the British archaeologists. The village consisted of about forty fairly new houses—it was clearly something along the lines of what we would call a “company town"—with a good water supply, about half a mile west of a bend in the great Euphrates River, and about three-quarters of a mile south of the great mound of Carchemish, which loomed over the countryside. To the northwest the snow-covered summits of the Taurus Mountains were clearly visible, and the wind from them reduced the daytime temperature to the low forties. Provision for sleeping in the open on the roof of the one-story house, however, suggested that conditions in the summer might be radically different. (Lawrence included in his letter a helpful sketch plan of the house.)

To say that Lawrence found himself in his element would be putting it mildly. He was far from home, and fully occupied day and night. Indeed, he did not write home for another ten days, being busy with establishing their living quarters. For the moment, Lawrence seems to have been in charge of the food supply (with two servants to prepare it), and was pleased to find excellent goat’s milk and an ample supply of lentils; how pleased Hogarth and Thompson were is unrecorded. Gregorios the Cypriot, Hogarth’s man Friday, had the task of rounding up about 100 men to do the digging, while Thompson surveyed the site, Hogarth wrote up the results for the British Museum, and Lawrence did the drawingand “squeezing” of the inscriptions.* Lawrence was also charged with putting up doors and shelves, the kind of hand work he delighted in, invariably producing something finer than what was expected or required. Indeed his transformation of their living quarters soon became something of an obsession—oddly enough, for a man who would spend many years of his life in the desert or in barracks, he had a passion and a real talent for domestic improvement and decoration. As for the digging, they began in the area where the British had stopped work thirty years ago, and soon uncovered “a great entrance staircase” and a number of large bas-relief slabs. The work was difficult, involving the movement, without machinery, of huge rocks, slag, and shattered stone fragments of a later city, and went slowly. The kaimakam (police chief) of the Biridjik district, prodded by the government in Constantinople, had provided a small, tented garrison of Turkish soldiers to guard the archaeologists from any local hotheads, and Lawrence noted with interest the numerous deficiencies in these soldiers’ equipment and training. At the end of a letter home, he adds briefly that they are expecting a visit from a “Miss G. Bell,” the desert explorer, archaeologist, traveler, and author of Between the Desert and the Sown, then forty-two years old and already a famous and glamorous figure.