In his letters home from Carchemish Lawrence sounds like a man who has at last found his place in the world. Increasingly, he joined Gregorios in directing the men as they labored to move huge stones, some weighing many tons. He “devised a derrick” to help pull upright fallen statuary, repaired equipment, learned how to make his own paint, and wrote home to have another pair of boots made and sent out to him, “with slightly thicker soles” and leather laces, since the rocky terrain was already wearing out his present boots.

Hogarth was preparing to return to England, where he would publish the results to date in the London Times; he was taking Gregorios withhim, effectively leaving Thompson and Lawrence in charge of the site. Since Thompson was basically a language expert, that would put Lawrence in charge of the dig—no small responsibility for a young man of twenty-two. To replace Gregorios as overseer of the workforce, Hogarth selected a local man, Sheikh Hamoudi, surely a good choice, since he was “tall, gaunt … long-armed and immensely powerful,” boasted that he had in his youth “provoked other men to fight for the sheer pleasure of killing them,” and “admitted to six or seven murders.” Hamoudi was to become a great friend and admirer of Lawrence’s, and taught him much that would come in handy later, when Lawrence was dealing with the blood feuds and intertribal violence that were endemic in the Arab army.

Lawrence seems to have devised ways of keeping the workforce happy and active, by encouraging contests of one team against another in raising large stones, rather like a tug-of-war, and by instituting a system of small additional payments for each object found, though no matter how hard they dug, layer after layer of the ruins of the Roman city remained between them and the Hittite city below. Hogarth was disappointed, though realistic—some digs worked out; others didn’t—but Lawrence continued to be almost irrationally happy. Between Thompson and himself, they managed to get rid of an incompetent and intrusive Turkish “commissaire,” whose job it was to ensure that the Turkish Museum got its correct share of the finds; and to Lawrence’s joy they were witnesses to a lively, romantic desert abduction, when a “black-bearded … & picturesque” young man galloped up on a horse, picked up a girl who had been washing at the spring, “set her before him on his horse, and galloped out of the village, offering to shoot anyone that stood in his way.” They were cousins, and her parents had refused to give her to him. Her male relatives immediately mounted and sped after the eloping couple. A few days later there was an unrelated double marriage, in which “the whole people turned out, the men afoot, or on horse in such as had them, the women perched in threes and fours on the humps of camels: everybody in the most brilliant colours, new or clean.”

This was a long way from Oxford, indeed about as far as Lawrencecould get, and far outweighed Thompson’s regret that they had not so far unearthed something like the Rosetta Stone, a stone or seal with writing in Hittite and in Assyrian cuneiform, without which most of what they were unearthing in the way of epigraphical specimens would remain unreadable. In the same letter, on May 16, Lawrence took the trouble of drawing the Carchemish “mound” and the surrounding countryside, in three-dimensional detail. He ends the letter with the reassuring note that the countryside has been peaceful, since “the Kurd chief of Kiranshehir was poisoned … by the Vali [governor] of Aleppo,” a nice comment on ethnic politics in the Ottoman Empire.

On May 23, he reported home on the long-awaited arrival of Gertrude Bell, who at first took a rather high-handed approach to the work of her two young rivals in archaeology, but as the day went on was eventually dazzled and silenced by the sheer breadth of Lawrence’s erudition. He thought her “pleasant,” but “not beautiful (except with a veil on, perhaps).” Already a celebrity, Bell had traveled in the Jebel Druze against the wishes of the Turkish authorities, camped in Petra, and conducted her own expedition across the Syrian desert all the way to Baghdad, boldly pushing deeper into the life of the desert tribes than any European woman had ever gone (though her most daring journeys were still ahead of her). She was bold, fearless, impatient, formidably well educated, a chain-smoker in an age when women did not smoke in public, inured to hardship, and never at a loss when faced with Turkish interference with her plans or Arab hostility toward a foreign woman traveling alone.

Bell was disappointed not to find Hogarth; she had ridden across the desert from Damascus on her mare to see him, accompanied by her servant Fattuh, and dressed in her desert explorer costume: a long, divided khaki skirt and a linen jacket, with an Arab head cloth wrapped around her hat. She was prepared to be skeptical about the excavations carried out so far, but was immediately struck by Lawrence, about whom she wrote in her diary, “an interesting boy, he is going to make a traveler.” Lawrence appears to have dressed for the occasion—for news of Bell’s approach had preceded her—in his Magdalen blazer, white shorts, red Arab slippers with upturned pointed toes, and a crimson woven Arab belt with extra-long tassels hanging over the left hip, which indicated that he was a bachelor.

After lunch, the three of them proceeded to the mound, where Bell observed the men excavating and condemned the methods being used as “prehistoric” (she was notoriously outspoken and critical), compared with those of the Germans. Lawrence maintained that the German methods, while they looked neater, involved a great deal of reconstruction, but eventually they made peace over dinner, and parted friends and mutual admirers when she retired to the tented camp Fattuh had set up for her. They would remain friends until her death, despite many furious arguments. On her departure, at five-thirty in the morning, Bell was dismayed that the villagers gathered to jeer at her—she did not realize that they assumed she had come to Carchemish to marry Lawrence. In order to calm them Lawrence had explained that she was too plain and old for him.

Hogarth was not certain that it was worth continuing the dig at Carchemish for a second season, but, always looking out for Lawrence’s interests, suggested that he might benefit from a season or half a season of “tomb digging” for the great Flinders Petrie, the dean of Egyptian archaeology and the head of the British School of Archaeology in Cairo. This would represent a substantial step up in Lawrence’s professional qualifications as an archaeologist, a career about which Lawrence remained nevertheless unsure—he toyed with the idea of becoming a newspaperman or a novelist, and continued to speculate on how best he might find a local source of fine vellum, to be “stained [purple] with Tyrian die,” for the artistic binding of the books that he and Richards were still planning to print. Meanwhile, Hogarth, never one to delay once a plan had occurred to him, wrote about Lawrence to his colleague Petrie: “Can you make room on your excavations next winter for a young Oxford graduate, T. Lawrence, who has been with me at Carchemish? He is a very unusual type…. If he goes to you he would probably come on foot from north Syria. I may add that he is extremely indifferent to what heeats or how he lives. He knows a good deal of Arabic…. I can assure you that he is really worth while.”

Lawrence did not learn until early in June that the excavation in Carchemish was to go on until August, though perhaps without a second season. By now the level of the Euphrates was falling, exposing sandbanks and islands, and the area was experiencing a plague of locusts, one of which he dried and sent to his youngest brother, Arnie. There was also an invasion of vast numbers of fleas and biting sand flies as the weather warmed. The constant company of Thompson seems to have been getting on his nerves—"any little thing upsets [him],” Lawrence remarked.