Those who were closest to Lawrence and Dahoum, such as Leonard Woolley, have all emphasized that the close friendship between them was perfectly innocent; indeed had this not been the case, there would almost certainly have been a strong reaction among the local Arabs, and either Woolley or Hogarth would have felt obliged to deal with it. If Lawrence had had a physical relationship with Dahoum, it seems unlikely that he would have brought Dahoum home to Oxford to meet his family, as he would do in July 1913, or that he would also bring Sheikh Hamoudi, an unapologetic killer and not by any stretch of the imagination a tolerant soul, or that Hamoudi would have accompanied them had there been anything improper about their relationship.

That Lawrence loved Dahoum is certainly true, and sensing in Dahoum a degree of ambition rare in most Arabs at that time and place, he did his best to provide for Dahoum’s education, and to offer him a broader view of the world. Lawrence’s definition of love was decidedly not carnal—the boundaries he was crossing with Dahoum were those of race, religion, class, and age (Lawrence was seven or eight years older than Dahoum), not sexual. Whether Lawrence had sexual feelings toward Dahoum we cannot know. Certainly, he never expressed such feelings,though perhaps if he had ever allowed them to emerge, they would have been directed at Dahoum. To nobody else in his life was he ever so close, and with nobody else was he as happy.

In some ways, Lawrence’s concern for Dahoum was fatherly; in other ways it was that of an older brother. Certainly he saw in Dahoum the kind of natural nobility he later found among his Bedouin followers, uncorrupted in his view by European or British influence and largely untainted by Turkish overlordship, the equivalent of Rousseau’s homme naturel. That this was in some ways a romantic fantasy is certain—Dahoum was attractive, intelligent, sympathetic, and honest, and all those who met him liked him. On the other hand, he was not a Semitic version of an Arthurian hero as imagined by William Morris—but that was a fantasy Lawrence would follow right through the war to its tragic end, and even afterward, when he wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence would seek throughout his adult life the company of men, and if, in that world, he found a kind of comfort, it was only during the few years he spent with Dahoum that he ever found somebody he loved who could share it.

One does not know how the matter appeared to Dahoum—he was only fourteen when Lawrence (then age twenty-two) met him, and he would have had very little experience of Europeans; but young men mature early in the Arab world, and as a result it is sometimes Lawrence who appears younger than his protйgй. Dahoum cannot have been blind to the fact that Lawrence’s friendship raised his status, as well as opening up for him a world of literacy and education that would have been unimaginable to most poor north Syrian Arab boys in the Ottoman Empire. A degree of self-interest may well have been present in Dahoum. Lawrence was his opportunity for a way out of his small village, and out of a future of herding goats or harvesting licorice root for the local agha, and he seized it eagerly; but this does not mean he did not care for Lawrence in return, and it is possible that he may have risked his life for Lawrence during the war. In one of a famous pair of photographs taken at Carchemish, Lawrence is shown wearing Dahoum’s Arab robes, laughing as he tries to put Dahoum’s headdress on correctly; the other photograph shows Dahoum in the same place and pose, wearing his own robes and headdress, looking straight into the camera, and smiling broadly. What is most significant about the photograph of Dahoum is that he holds lovingly in both hands, with undisguised pride, a nickel-plated Colt Model of 1903.32-caliber “Pocket Hammerless Automatic Pistol,” not a weapon he could have afforded to own unless Lawrence gave it to him. Possession of a modern firearm was almost mandatory for any self-respecting Arab male, and Dahoum’s pleasure in holding the Colt is unmistakable. It hardly matters whether Lawrence gave Dahoum the pistol, or simply lent it to him for the photograph; either way, this was a princely gesture in a society where men did not give away or lend their firearms willingly, and Dahoum’s face is lit up with unfeigned pleasure.

Lawrence enjoyed the years he spent working at Carchemish not just because of the constant presence of Dahoum. Lawrence and Woolley, though in many respects an odd couple, got along well; the expedition house was one of the only two homes that Lawrence would build and decorate to satisfy his own taste; and he was living among the Arabs, whom he came more and more to like and respect. In addition, he could arrange his days and nights to please himself, reading until late into the night, going without sleep or food when he felt like it, working in exhausting bursts according to whim. He was a commanding presence among the Arabs and something of a celebrity among the rare European visitors—as well as being a gadfly to the Turkish authorities and the German railway engineers without any interference, for on this subject, Woolley and Lawrence were of one mind, whatever the kaiser may have told Hogarth.

Lawrence notes in a letter home that he has not received a letter from Richards since November of the previous year—a sign perhaps that Thomas Lawrence’s pessimism on the subject of the hand press has at last sunk in. In another letter, he orders a new pair of boots, always a sure sign that he is planning a long journey on foot. Lawrence never fails to fill his family in on the process of educating Dahoum—another sign that the relationship, however intense it may be, is blameless. In mid-June Woolley was to go home to England—the months from June through August were commonly thought to be unbearable for a white man in Syria, though of course this notion did not deter Lawrence—and on June 20 he writes home to say that he and Woolley have already reached the port of Alexandretta with fifteen cases of Hittite pottery to load on board Woolley’s ship, and that they avoided Aleppo because of an outbreak of cholera. Having brought up the matter of cholera, surely alarming to Sarah, Lawrence writes home three days later from Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo—the danger of cholera apparently forgotten—to say that he wants at least three pairs of regular socks and one pair of white wool, and that people come from far and wide to offer him antikas of every kind, which he is buying for Hogarth, for himself, for the British Museum, and for the Ashmolean. He notes that it is a time of unusually intense confusion andupheaval in the Ottoman Empire, since Turkey and the Balkan states are at war. (This war would end just in time for World War I to begin, and would strip Turkey of its remaining European territory.) Lawrence exults in the fact that “for the foreigner [this country] is too glorious for words: one is the baron of the feudal system.” This is a reference to the German railway builders, who, apparently in awe of the kaiser’s message as it filtered down to them after his talk with Hogarth, had ordered their workers to stop work on the bridge while Lawrence bathed in the Euphrates, so as not to inconvenience him. It also refers to the Turkish government’s eagerness to keep the citizens of all the major European powers resident in the Ottoman Empire as happy as possible at a moment when the Turkish army was being humiliatingly defeated in the Balkans. Turkey was a police state humanized by inefficiency and corruption, but even so when an order was given in Constantinople it eventually made its way down to even such remote places as Jerablus, and for the moment the British archaeologists were the beneficiaries.

To Leeds Lawrence wrote, more frankly, about the epidemic of cholera, and about braving the heat and the epidemic to spend a day in the bazaars, “buying glue and sacking and wire gauze and potatoes and embroidery and Vaseline and gunpowder … and bootlaces and Damascus tiles.” In fact, Lawrence had bought up the entire supply of glue in the province (some twenty-six pounds of it) for his Roman tile floor. Although he obtained fulsome letters of introduction to the governors of all the towns he proposed to visit from the newly obliging vali at Aleppo ordering all kaimakams, mutessarifs, mirdirs, and other “government officials to see that I am well lodged, well fed, provided with transport, with guides, with interpreters and escorts,” and despite his request for new boots and socks from home, the long tramp he had proposed to take with Dahoum never took place.