March or April 1918 (the exact date is uncertain) provided another irritation for Young in the form of the unexpected arrival of Lowell Thomas and Harry Chase. Young jumped to the conclusion that Lawrence had invited the two Americans to Aqaba in pursuit of publicity, whereas in fact they had been allowed to go there by Allenby. Indeed Allenby himself made the suggestion to Thomas at a luncheon in Jerusalem for HRH the duke of Connaught (the seventh child and third son of Queen Victoria), who had come to confer on Allenby “the Grand Cross of the Order of the Knights of Jerusalem.” The duke had hoped to decorate Lawrence too, but Lawrence took good care to be absent. It is a comment on Lowell Thomas’s Yankee persistence, affability, and effectiveness that he had managed to get himself invited to the luncheon, where he was encouraged to go to Aqaba. Thomas’s journey there would prove unexpectedly long and difficult—he and Chase “[sailed] fifteen hundred miles up the Nile into the heart of Africa to Khartum, and then across the Nubian Desert for five hundred miles to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, where we hoped to get accommodation on a tramp vessel of some sort.” Although Allenby had given his blessing to the expedition, he did not apparently feel obliged to provide transportation, since Thomas and Chase could have taken a train from Cairo to Port Suez, and then been accommodated comfortably on a supply ship or a naval vessel from Port Suez directly to Aqaba, a journey of only a few days. The benefit of the roundabout route was that it allowed the pair to record on film Luxor and Thebes, a sandstorm in Khartoum, a visit to “Shereef Yusef el Hindi … the holiest man in the Sudan” (whose desert library, Thomas assured his American readers, apparently with a straight face, contained a volume of speeches by Woodrow Wilson), and a trip across the Red Sea on a steamer loaded with horses, mules, donkeys, and sheep, and a crew consisting of “Hindus, Somalis, Berberines, and fuzzy-wuzzies.” At Aqaba, Thomas and Chase were sent ashore on a barge loaded with mules and donkeys, and when one of the donkeys “was kicked overboard by a nervous mule,” it was immediately torn apart and devoured by two gigantic sharks. Lowell Thomas was not the inventor of “the travelogue” for nothing—all these incidents would play a role in the lecture and film show that would make “Lawrence of Arabia” world famous, so it is perhaps just as well that Thomas and Chase were obliged to take the long way around. Only a few hours after the donkey had been eaten by the sharks, “Lawrence himselfcame down the Wadi Itm, returning from one of his mysterious expeditions into the blue.”

Young.

“To accompany Lawrence and his body-guard on an expedition was a fantastic experience,” Lowell Thomas would write in his best-selling book With Lawrence in Arabia, though he never actually did go on such an expedition. “First rode the young shereef, incongruously picturesque with his Anglo-Saxon face, gorgeous head-dress and beautiful robes. Likely enough, if the party were moving at a walking pace, he would be reading or smiling to himself over the brilliant satire of Aristophanes in the original. Then in a long, irregular column his Bedouin ‘sons’ followed in their rainbow-colored garments, swaying to the rhythm of the camel gait…. At either end of the cavalcade was a warrior poet. One of them would begin to chant a verse, and each man, all along the column, would take his turn to cap the poet’s words with lines of the same meter.”

This vision of the young “prince of Mecca,” engrossed in a volume of the Greek classics (in “the original” Greek, of course) as he and his colorful bodyguard ride across the desert on “one of his mysterious expeditions into the blue,” was one that Lowell Thomas would fix firmly in the popular mind—so firmly that even forty-four years later, when David Lean’s award-winning film Lawrence of Arabia was released to international acclaim, the Lawrence it portrayed still owed much to the colorful reporting of Thomas and the inspired photography of Chase. There is a considerable difference between Lawrence’s estimate of how much time Thomas spent with them and Thomas’s own account. Jeremy Wilson, in his authorized biography of T. E. Lawrence, writes that Thomas “spent less than a fortnight with Feisal’s army and saw Lawrence for only a few days.” This is surely correct, but it leaves out the intensity of the time Thomas and Chase did spend with Lawrence, and their determination to get as many photographs, reels of film, and interviews as they could, as well as Lawrence’s willingness to cooperate. Judging from the number of photographs Chase took (many of them artfully staged), and from Thomas’s voluminous notes, Lawrence was not only cooperative but enthusiastic; and in one of the photographs showing Lawrence and Lowell Thomastogether, Lawrence looks unusually relaxed and good-humored, not at all like a man being inconvenienced by two importunate Yankee journalists. Nor can Lawrence have been under any illusion that Lowell Thomas was going to write a series of thoughtful, fact-filled dispatches about the Arab army and the war in the Hejaz. Thomas was a showman, an inspired huckster in the tradition of P. T. Barnum, a lecturer who would prove every bit as successful as Mark Twain; and anybody meeting him, let alone someone as intelligent as Lawrence, would have known all that about him in five minutes or less. As for Chase, he was a Hollywood cameraman, not a documentary filmmaker—his job was to put glamour on film. Lawrence himself may have enjoyed pulling the leg of the gullible American, but if so, the American had the last laugh. Thomas may or may not have believed everything he was told, but in either case he managed to sell it, burnished with his own additions, exaggerations, romantic touches, and flamboyant prose, to an audience of millions.

With Lawrence in Arabia is artfully written; it suggests that Thomas was an eyewitness to Lawrence’s desert operations, without actually saying so, a familiar journalistic trick. Lawrence himself wrote Thomas out of Seven Pillars of Wisdom altogether, and later made it clear that Thomas “was never in the Arab firing line, nor did he ever see an operation or ride with me.” There is no question, however, that Lawrence posed for innumerable staged photographs then and later on, including one in which he is claimed to be lying in the sand beside his kneeling camel’s neck, holding his Lee-Enfield rifle at the ready, a bandolier of.303 cartridges around his neck, as if there were Turks on the horizon. In another he (or somebody else) appears disguised, his face covered with an embroidered flowered veil, as “a Gypsy woman of Syria,” in which costume he planned to go behind the enemy lines to spy out information—something Lawrence actually did later on. Oddly enough, Thomas went to some trouble to deny that Lawrence cooperated with Chase in these carefully staged pictures. “My cameraman, Mr. Chase,” Thomas wrote, “uses a high-speed camera. We saw considerable of Colonel Lawrence in Arabia, and although he arranged for us to get both ‘still’ and motion pictures of Emir Feisal,

Auda Abu Tayi, and the other Arab leaders, he would turn away when he saw the lens pointing in his direction…. Frequently Chase snapped pictures of the colonel without his knowledge, or just at the instant that he turned and found himself facing the lens and discovered our perfidy.”

Nobody looking at Chase’s photographs of Lawrence could possibly believe this story. They are not casual “snaps"; they are quite clearly well-thought-out formal portraits or carefully faked “action” scenes, for which the subject’s willing cooperation would have been essential; and in fact Lawrence would pose for more of them later on, in London, where studio lighting and a backdrop were required. It suited both Thomas and Lawrence to pretend that Lawrence was the unwitting victim of the photographer—from Thomas’s point of view, it made the whole story more of a scoop; and from Lawrence’s, it freed him from the accusation of seeking publicity—but it cannot be true.