In Jidda, Lawrence met King Hussein, whom he described as “an obstinate, narrow-minded, suspicious character, little likely to sacrifice his vanity to forward a unity of control.” This was putting it mildly—almost all the British, while they admired him as a “splendid old gentleman,” found Hussein difficult to deal with, unreasonable, intolerably long-winded, and vain. The only exception was Ronald Storrs, who had been negotiating with the old man since 1914, and described him more generously as a “gracious and venerable patriarch … of unparalleled dignity and deportment,” and whom the king in turn addressed familiarly as ya ibni(“my son”) or ya azizi(“my dear”).

Toward Lawrence, King Hussein seems to have been more than usually suspicious, perhaps because of Lawrence’s youth, perhaps because he feared Lawrence’s growing influence over Feisal, perhaps because the shrewd old man guessed that Lawrence’s passion for the Arab cause was deeply conflicted, that he did not so much want to give the Arabs what they wanted as what the British wanted them to have. In any case Colonel Wilson, General Wingate’s patient and long-suffering representative in Jidda, managed to talk Hussein around to the advantages of putting Feisal under Allenby’s command instead of his own; and with that the king lapsed into a long and “discursive” description, “as usual without obvious coherence,” of his religious beliefs, a tactic he seems to have used with British visitors to prevent them from asking questions he did not want to answer. For their part, both Wilson and Lawrence were embarrassed by the supposition that they knew more about the Sykes-Picot agreement than the king did and by trying to put the best light on it they could—wasted efforts, since the king by now surely knew more about the treaty than he let on, and was better at dissembling than either of them.

Lawrence seems to have made a quick, unauthorized visit to Mecca, a city closed to unbelievers, certainly without the knowledge of the king or Feisal, to shop for a gold dagger to replace one that he had given to a Howeitat chief. For an Arab of Lawrence’s rank to go without a curved gold dagger in his belt was the equivalent of being “half-naked,” and he was determined to have the best and the lightest dagger that could be made, one that would establish his sharifian status at a glance. Though in general Lawrence disliked being tied down by possessions, there were certain areas in which he was unapologetically extravagant, and in which only the best would do: pistols, fine bookbindings, motorcycles, the art he commissioned for Seven Pillars of Wisdom,and the famous dagger were all examples of this. He would later write in detail about ordering the dagger from a goldsmith named Gasein, “in the third little turning to the left off the main bazaar,” and once it was delivered, he would wear it through the rest of the war, whenever he was in Arab dress. It wouldbecome something of a trademark, and was often wrongly described as being the symbol of “a prince of Mecca,” a title which did not exist, and which he never claimed.

The pleasure Lawrence felt at the king’s rapid assent was marred by news from Cairo that Auda Abu Tayi and his Howeitat were in secret negotiations with the Turks, which, if they succeeded, would have meant the loss of Aqaba, and everything that Lawrence had planned. Lawrence’s naval friend Captain Boyle provided him with a fast armed steamship, HMS Hardinge, to take him at flank speed north to Aqaba, where Nasir told him that the Turks had indeed already retaken several outposts and gave him a “swift camel” and a guide to take him to Auda’s camp in the desert. Lawrence intended to surprise Auda, and did—he “dropped in on them,” walking unarmed into Auda’s tent, where the old warrior was in conversation with his confederates, just in time to join in their meal. After the ritual fulsome greetings of desert courtesy, Lawrence revealed that he knew about Auda’s correspondence with the Turks, and was even able to quote phrases from the letters that had passed between Auda and the governor of Maan. Auda dismissed it all with a laugh—unbeknownst to him, he explained, one of his men who could read and write had sent a letter to the Turkish governor under Auda’s seal, seeking out terms for his switching sides. The governor had agreed on a price, and to a demand for a down payment. When Auda found out about it, he caught the messenger with the gold in the desert and robbed him “to the skin,” for his own benefit. It was a mere matter of business—brigandage being the main business of the Bedouin.

Behind this farce, however, Lawrence correctly divined that Auda had grievances strong enough to tempt him to seek out better terms from the Turks, one of them being that Lawrence was receiving more attention than Auda for the capture of Aqaba, and the other that the gold Auda had been promised was slow in coming. Lawrence explained in detail what was on the way—more gold, rifles, ammunition, food—and made “a down payment” on the gold that would be coming to Auda when Feisal arrived in Aqaba with the rest of the army. Like two old friends, they laughedover the incident, but it served as a lesson to Lawrence that even the best of the Bedouin were cold and crafty, and that it was foolhardy to make them wait for their money. Henceforth, sacks of gold sovereigns would always be the most urgent of his supplies, more important by far than high explosives, ammunition, or fuse wire.

Showing a capacity for duplicity that equaled Auda’s, Lawrence then returned on the Hardingeto Cairo, where he declared that he had looked into the situation and that there was “no spirit of treachery abroad,” and vouched for Auda’s loyalty. In this Lawrence recognized a great truth; “the crowd wanted book-heroes,” and would never understand the complexity of a man like Auda, who not only was moved by greed for gold, but, as a tribal leader, would always want to keep a way open to the enemy. Over the next two years Lawrence would have many occasions to deal with the combination of greed and caution that was a natural part of Arab politics, an instinctive survival mechanism that would emerge in moments of setback or defeat, and that had to be concealed at all costs from the simpler minds of the British leaders.

Lawrence’s duplicity has been an issue for some who have written about him, and in fact a number of biographies are intended to debunk him wholly or in part. This is partly Lawrence’s own fault. He sometimes embellished the truth, and he invariably placed himself at the center of events, but it must be said that when the British government finally released most of the papers and documents relating to Lawrence, almost everything he claimed was confirmed in meticulous detail. Sir Ernest Dowson, KBE, the director-general of the Egyptian Survey, who had clashed sharply with Lawrence over the transliteration of Arabic place-names on maps in 1914 and later became an admirer, remarked on his “puckishness,” and went on to comment: “Many men of sense and ability were repelled by the impudence, freakishness and frivolity he trained so provocatively … and regarded him in consequence at the bottom as a posturing stage player whose tinsel exploits were the fruits of freely lavished gold.” (Dowson also shrewdly observed that it was “idle to pretendhe was not ambitious. He was vastly so. But, like all men of large calibre, he was ambitious for achievement rather than recognition.”)

The fact remains that Lawrence loved to “take the Mickey out of someone” as the English say, particularly if that person was pompous, obstructive, or slow to give him what he wanted, and not everyone enjoyed being on the receiving end, or forgave him for the experience.

A sense of humor is often the most difficult thing to convey about great men. Winston Churchill, for example, certainly had a robust sense of humor, but it was very often at the expense of people who were in no position to answer back, ^*and reads badly in cold print. Something similar is true of Lawrence. With him, exaggeration was a form of teasing rather than boasting, and was usually aimed at those who were senior to him in rank and slow to recognize his ability. Once he had joined the ranks as a simple aircraftman or soldier after the war, he never did it to his barracks mates; he targeted only officers who had provoked him by some form of injustice to those mates.