From Beersheba south and east there were no roads or railway. Quite apart from the difficulties of the terrain, which were considerable, the Turks wanted nothing that might encourage the British to advance north from Egypt in the event of war, and the British would have regarded any attempt to build roads or a railway as a threat to the canal. “The place isan absolute wilderness,” Lawrence wrote home about the Sinai. “Not even any Arab tribes there: empty, they say.” Gaza was, in those days, “a picturesque little crusading town of about 20,000 people: a fine xiith Cent. Church.” Nothing appeared to have been prepared for them, although a telegram informed them that Captain (later Colonel) S. F. Newcombe of the Royal Engineers was on his way with a caravan of camels. Woolley and Lawrence bought themselves tents, “camp outfit, hired servants, etc. (all on credit, since the P.E.F. had sent our money to Jerusalem),” and made their way to Beersheba with their gear on a donkey, to wait for Newcombe. Lawrence noted that already, “the Turkish Gov. is exceedingly shy of us, and is doing its best to throw all possible difficulties in our way"; this problem would grow worse throughout the expedition. Whatever had been decided about the map survey in Constantinople, here, only a few miles from the Egyptian border, the police recognized a foreign, Christian intrusion when they saw one, and acted accordingly.

Fortunately, Lawrence and Newcombe liked each other at once, and their friendship would last throughout the war years and beyond. Lawrence’s attitude toward professional soldiers was, and would remain, ambivalent. From an early age he felt he had mastered the art of war—very few professional soldiers had anything like his broad knowledge of military history and literature, his ability to inspire others, his endurance, or his sense of terrain and topography. Whatever Lawrence’s preference for the methods of Marshal de Saxe over those of Napoleon, he would not have disagreed with the latter’s comment, “In war, as in prostitution, the amateur is often better than the professional.” As time would show, Lawrence was something of a self-taught genius in tactics and strategy, and he already knew it; this knowledge must have made it all the more difficult for him to accept that he could never have been a regular officer in the post-Edwardian British army. Oxford might be willing to blur or ignore the family background of its scholars, but at Sandhurst, the social conventions were more rigorously enforced, and by people who could read Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage. Illegitimacy was not necessarily a bar to a commission in the British regular army—the future General Sir Adrian Cartonde Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, brilliantly caricatured by Evelyn Waugh as Brigadier Ritchie-Hook in Officers and Gentlemen, was widely believed to be illegitimate, though on the other hand it was also rumored that his father was the king of the Belgians, so Carton de Wiart was a very different proposition from one of the five illegitimate sons of an Anglo-Irish landowner. Even leaving to one side Lawrence’s height, as somebody who was born out of wedlock to a servant he would very likely not have been accepted into Sandhurst as a cadet, or into most of the regiments of the British army as an officer. It never ceased to gall him that men with nothing like his talent or knowledge became regular officers and rose to high rank. This is not to say that Lawrence had ever wanted to go to Sandhurst; he simply did not want to be patronized by those who had gone there. With regulars whom he didn’t like, or whose hostility he rightly or wrongly suspected, no matter how high their rank, he often adopted an attitude of know-it-all superiority and impertinence bordering on insubordination. On the other hand, with those who knew their business and recognized that he knew his, he often formed close and long-lasting friendships, despite great differences of rank. These men included such very dissimilar military figures as Young, Newcombe, Wingate, Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, the future Field Marshal Lord Wavell, Allenby, and of course Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Trenchard.* Throughout most of his life, Lawrence remained a military man manquй—the runaway boy soldier would become a decorated lieutenant colonel, and in the end, an aircraftman first class (the equivalent of a private), sitting on his bunk in a barracks, writing ambitious (and sensible) schemes for the improvement of the Royal Air Force to his old friend, the chief of the Air Staff.

Newcombe turned up in Beersheba to greet Woolley and Lawrence with a caravan of a dozen camels. He had supposed that Woolley and

Lawrence would have a heavy load of equipment, and was surprised to find that they could carry everything they needed on a donkey. He seems to have been expecting a pair of scientific graybeards from the British Museum, and so may have been equally surprised to meet two healthy young men, fit and armed. Newcombe had five surveying teams at work, and collated their findings himself every night. Lawrence, who already supposed himself to be an expert on the subject, would learn a lot about practical mapmaking from Newcombe in the six weeks of the expedition. From the very beginning the archaeological results were disappointing. However long the Jews had wandered in the Sinai, they had been a nomad people, and left no more trace of themselves behind than the modern Bedouin did. Even places that were mentioned as important in Exodus proved to have no ruins older than the Byzantine or Roman period. When they got to Kadesh (from which Moses had sent envoys to the king of Edom asking for passage for his people, and where Miriam is buried), Lawrence wrote, typically, “[It] is a filthy dirty little water hole, and we more than sympathize with the disgust of the Children of Israel when they got here.” Isaac’s well at Rehoboth, although nearly 300 feet deep, showed no signs of ancient origin; and Zephath, one of the cities of the Canaanites attacked by Joshua, was unfindable. Everywhere Lawrence looked, the land was wasted and abandoned, although he believed, correctly, that if some of it was plowed and irrigated it could be rendered as fruitful as it had been in Roman times. Even the normally ebullient Woolley was pessimistic about finding any trace of biblical cities, let alone of Moses’s route from Egypt. The complete absence of any local food crops made them dependent on what little they carried with them, plus an occasional pigeon that they managed to shoot. At one point they failed to make contact with their baggage caravan and wandered through the desert in search of their tent camp, while the Turkish police, alerted to their disappearance, searched ineffectually for them. Eventually, Woolley and Lawrence split up, Lawrence and Dahoum accompanying Newcombe to the southeast across the Sinai toward Aqaba, over what even Lawrence describes as very “rugged” country.

At Aqaba, the Turks lost patience with what had been described to them as a biblical expedition; or perhaps it simply became clear to the men on the spot that Lawrence and Woolley were merely the window dressing for a team of British military topographers. Newcombe was not dismayed—Aqaba had already been surveyed—but Lawrence was annoyed, and decided to tweak the noses of the kaimakam and his policemen. For his own amusement he had wanted to visit the ruins of a crusader fort on the island of Geziret Faraun, a few hundred yards from the shore at Aqaba. When the kaimakam refused to allow this, Lawrence constructed a crude raft out of old gasoline cans, and he and Dahoum paddled it out to the island, despite the presence of large sharks, for which the Red Sea is well known. As a result, he and Dahoum were marched out of town under escort. They eventually managed to shake off the escort in the steep, rocky defiles that rose behind Aqaba—very close to the route down which Lawrence would lead the Howeitat in 1917. Skeptics who attribute the capture of Aqaba to the plans or local knowledge of Auda Abu Tayi or Sharif Nasir almost always overlook the fact that the countryside around Aqaba and the approaches to it from inland were familiar to Lawrence because he had been there only three years before, and on foot, and had later mapped it from an aerial survey. Aqaba’s defenses and its weaknesses were well known to him and, with his almost photographic memory for topography, familiar. It was, as he described it, “a country of awful crags and valleys, impassible for camels, and very difficult on foot,” and the Turkish policemen assigned to escort him were still wandering back into Aqaba exhausted days after Lawrence and Dahoum had left them behind.