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Avneet Kumar Singla

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Beschreibung

This book tries to describe a great life story and experiences of T.E. Lawrence. This is a large Non-fiction biographical book consists of 122 chapters divides in 10 parts and consists of 260000 words (approximately).
Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO (16 August 1888-19 May 1935), a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat and writer, became known for his role in the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) and the Sinai and Palestine campaign (1915-1918) against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to vividly describe them in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used in 1962 for the film based on his wartime activities.
He was born in August 1888, the son of Sarah Junner (1861 - 1959), a governess, and Thomas Chapman (1846 - 1919), an Anglo-Irish nobleman. Chapman left his wife and family in Ireland to live with Junner. Chapman and Junner called themselves Mr and Mrs Lawrence, with the surname of Sarah's likely Father; their mother had been employed as a servant for a Lawrence family when she became pregnant with Sarah. In 1896 the Lawrences moved to Oxford, where Thomas attended high school and studied history at Jesus College, Oxford from 1907 to 1910. Between 1910 and 1914, he worked as an archaeologist for the British Museum, mainly in Carchemish in Ottoman Syria.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war in 1914, he volunteered for the British Army and was stationed in Egypt in the intelligence unit Arab Bureau, founded in 1916. In 1916 he travelled with intelligence missions to Mesopotamia and Arabia and quickly participated in the Arab Revolt as a link to the Arab forces, along with other British officers who supported the war of independence of the Arab kingdom of Hejaz against its former overlord, the Ottoman Empire. He worked closely with Emir Faisal, a leader of the revolt, and sometimes participated as a leader in military actions against the Ottoman forces that culminated in the capture of Damascus in October 1918.
Lawrence was appointed a companion of the order of the bath on 7 August 1917, a companion of the Distinguished Service Order on 10 May 1918, a knight of the legion of Honour (France) on 30 May 1916 and a Croix de guerre (France) on 16 April 1918.
A bronze bust of Lawrence by Eric Kennington was erected in the Crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral in London on January 22, 1936, next to the graves of the greatest British military leaders. A recumbent stone effigy of Kennington was installed in 1939 in St Martin's Church, Wareham, Dorset.
An English Heritage Blue Plaque Marks Lawrence's childhood home at 2 Polstead Road, Oxford, and another appears on his London home at 14 Barton Street, Westminster. Lawrence appears on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band of the Beatles. In 2002, after a British vote, Lawrence was voted 53rd on the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons.

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The Great Arabic-English Colonel Lawrence

Avneet Kumar Singla

Copyright © 2021-2040 by Avneet Kumar Singla

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Avneet Kumar Singla

[email protected]

Disclaimer

All the Information Provided in this book is best to our knowledge and believe. However, the author, distributor or publisher will not guarantee the Authenticity, Completeness and accuracy of the information. And neither the author nor distributor nor publisher be responsible for the accuracy of the information provided in this book.

Table of Contents

Preface

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION. Basics of revolt

CHAPTERS I TO VII

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

PART ONE. The discovery of Feisal

CHAPTERS VIII TO XVI

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

PART TWO. Opening of the Arab Offensive

CHAPTERS XVII TO XXVII

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

PART THREE. A Train Diversion

CHAPTER XXVIII TO XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

PART FOUR. Extension to Akaba

CHAPTER XXXIX TO LIV

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER XLIV

CHAPTER XLV

CHAPTER XLVI

CHAPTER XLVII

CHAPTER XLVIII

CHAPTER XLIX

CHAPTER L

CHAPTER LI

CHAPTER LII

CHAPTER LIII

CHAPTER LIV

PART FIVE. Marking time

CHAPTER LV TO LXVIII

CHAPTER LV

CHAPTER LVI

CHAPTER LVII

CHAPTER LVIII

CHAPTER LIX

CHAPTER LX

CHAPTER LXI

CHAPTER LXII

CHAPTER LXIII

CHAPTER LXIV

CHAPTER LXV

CHAPTER LXVI

CHAPTER LXVII

CHAPTER LXVIII

PART SIX. The attack on the bridges

CHAPTER LXIX TO LXXXI

CHAPTER LXIX

CHAPTER LXX

CHAPTER LXXI

CHAPTER LXXII

CHAPTER LXXIII

CHAPTER LXXIV

CHAPTER LXXV

CHAPTER LXXVI

CHAPTER LXXVII

CHAPTER LXXVIII

CHAPTER LXXIX

CHAPTER LXXX

CHAPTER LXXXI

PART SEVEN. The Dead Sea Campaign

CHAPTER LXXXII TO XCI

CHAPTER LXXXII

CHAPTER LXXXIII

CHAPTER LXXXIV

CHAPTER LXXXV

CHAPTER LXXXVI

CHAPTER LXXXVII

CHAPTER LXXXVIII

CHAPTER LXXXIX

CHAPTER XC

CHAPTER XCI

PART EIGHT. The Ruin of high hope

CHAPTER XCII TO XCVII

CHAPTER XCIII

CHAPTER XCIV

CHAPTER XCV

CHAPTER XCVI

CHAPTER XCVII

PART NINE. Compensation for a last effort

CHAPTER XCVIII TO CVI

CHAPTER XCVIII

CHAPTER XCIX

CHAPTER C

CHAPTER CI

CHAPTER CII

CHAPTER CIII

CHAPTER CIV

CHAPTER CV

CHAPTER CVI

PART TEN. The house is Perfected

CHAPTERS CVII TO CXXII

CHAPTER CVII

CHAPTER CVIII

CHAPTER CIX

CHAPTER CX

CHAPTER CXI

CHAPTER CXII

CHAPTER CXIII

CHAPTER CXIV

CHAPTER CXV

CHAPTER CXVI

CHAPTER CXVII

CHAPTER CXVIII

CHAPTER CXIX

CHAPTER CXX

CHAPTER CXXI

CHAPTER CXXII

EPILOGUE

 

 

Preface

Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO (16 August 1888-19 May 1935), a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat and writer, became known for his role in the Arab Revolt (1916-1918) and the Sinai and Palestine campaign (1915-1918) against the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to vividly describe them in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used in 1962 for the film based on his wartime activities.

He was born in August 1888, the son of Sarah Junner (1861 - 1959), a governess, and Thomas Chapman (1846 - 1919), an Anglo-Irish nobleman. Chapman left his wife and family in Ireland to live with Junner. Chapman and Junner called themselves Mr and Mrs Lawrence, with the surname of Sarah's likely Father; their mother had been employed as a servant for a Lawrence family when she became pregnant with Sarah. In 1896 the Lawrences moved to Oxford, where Thomas attended high school and studied history at Jesus College, Oxford from 1907 to 1910. Between 1910 and 1914, he worked as an archaeologist for the British Museum, mainly in Carchemish in Ottoman Syria.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war in 1914, he volunteered for the British Army and was stationed in Egypt in the intelligence unit Arab Bureau, founded in 1916. In 1916 he travelled with intelligence missions to Mesopotamia and Arabia and quickly participated in the Arab Revolt as a link to the Arab forces, along with other British officers who supported the war of independence of the Arab kingdom of Hejaz against its former overlord, the Ottoman Empire. He worked closely with Emir Faisal, a leader of the revolt, and sometimes participated as a leader in military actions against the Ottoman forces that culminated in the capture of Damascus in October 1918.

After the First world war, Lawrence joined the British foreign office and worked with the British government and with Faisal. He retired from public life in 1922 and spent the years until 1935 as an employed man, mainly in the Royal Air Force (RAF), with a short time in the army.

Early Life

Thomas Edward Lawrence was born on 16 August 1888 in Tremadog, Carnarvonshire, Wales, in a house called Gorphwysfa, now known as Snowdon Lodge. His Anglo-Irish father Thomas Chapman had left his wife Edith after having a son with Sarah Junner, who had been his daughters ' governess. Sarah had been an illegitimate child herself, having been born in Sunderland to Elizabeth Junner, a servant employed by a family called Lawrence; She was released four months before Sarah's birth, and identified Sarah's father as "John Junner, Shipwright journeyman".

Lawrence's parents did not marry, but lived together under the name Lawrence. In 1914, his father inherited the Chapman baronetcy of Killua Castle, the ancestral home of the family in County Westmeath, Ireland. They had five sons, Thomas (called "Ned" by his immediate family) was the second oldest. From Wales the family moved to Kirkcudbright, Galloway, in the south west of Scotland, then to Dinard in Brittany, then to Jersey.

The family lived from 1894 to 1896 at Langley Lodge (now demolished) in private woods between the eastern borders of the New Forest and Southampton Water in Hampshire. The residence was isolated, and the young Lawrence had many opportunities for outdoor activities and visits to the water. Victorian-Edwardian Britain was a very conservative society in which the majority of people were Christians who regarded premarital and extramarital sex as shameful, and extramarital children were born in disgrace. Lawrence was always something of an outsider, a bastard who could never hope to achieve the same level of social acceptance and success that others who were legitimately born could expect, and no girl from a respectable family would ever marry a bastard.

In the summer of 1896 the family moved to 2, Polstead Road, Oxford, where they lived until 1921. from 1896 to 1907 Lawrence attended the city of Oxford High School for Boys, where one of the four houses was later named "Lawrence" in his honour. Lawrence and one of his brothers became commissioned officers in the Church Lads' Brigade at St Aldate's Church.

Lawrence claimed that he had run away from home around 1905 and had served for a few weeks as a boy soldier in the Royal Garrison Artillery at St Mawes Castle in Cornwall, from which he was purchased. However, there is no evidence of this in the Army records.

Travel, antiquities and archaeology

At the age of 15, Lawrence and his school friend Cyril Beeson cycled through Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, visiting almost the Parish Church of each village, studying its monuments and antiquities, and making rubbish of its monumental garments. Lawrence and Beeson monitored construction sites in Oxford and presented everything they found to the Ashmolean Museum. The Ashmolean's annual report for 1906 stated that the two teenagers " by incessant vigilance secured everything of antiquarian value that was found."In the summers of 1906 and 1907 Lawrence toured France by bicycle, sometimes with Beeson, collecting photographs, drawings and measurements of medieval castles. In August, 1907, Lawrence wrote home:"the Chaignons and the Lamballe congratulated me on my wonderful French: I was twice asked what part of France I come from."

From 1907 to 1910 Lawrence read history at Jesus College, Oxford. In July and August, 1908, he cycled alone through France to the Mediterranean and back to explore French castles. In the summer of 1909, he set off alone on a three-month hike through Crusader castles in Ottoman Syria, covering 1,600 km on foot. During his time with Jesus, he was an enthusiastic member of the University Officers ' Training Corps (OTC). He graduated with first—class honours after submitting a Dissertation entitled The Influence of the Crusades on European Military Architecture-until the end of the 12th Lawrence was fascinated by the Middle Ages; his brother Arnold wrote in 1937 that " medieval research "was a"dream path from bourgeois England".

In 1910 Lawrence was offered the opportunity to become a practising archaeologist at Carchemish during the expedition set up by D. G. Hogarth on behalf of the British Museum. Hogarth arranged a "Senior Demyship" (a form of scholarship) for Lawrence at Magdalen College, Oxford to fund his work at £100 a year. He sailed to Beirut in December 1910 and went to Byblos, where he studied Arabic. He then worked on the excavations at Carchemish, near Jerablus in northern Syria, where he worked until 1914 under Hogarth, R. Campbell Thompson of the British Museum, and Leonard Woolley worked. He later explained that everything he had achieved he owed to Hogarth. Lawrence met Gertrude Bell while digging in Carchemish. He worked briefly with Flinders Petrie in 1912 in Kafr Ammar in Egypt.

 

In Carchemish, Lawrence was often involved in a high-tension relationship with a German-led team working near the Baghdad Railway in Jerablus. While there was never open warfare, there were regular conflicts over access to land and the treatment of the local workforce; Lawrence gained experience in leadership practices and conflict resolution in the Middle East.

Military Intelligence

In January 1914, Woolley and Lawrence were co-opted by the British military as an archaeological fog wall for a British military survey of the Negev desert. They were funded by the Palestine Exploration Fund to search for an area referred to in the Bible as the wilderness of Zin, and they did an archaeological survey of the Negev Desert along the way. The Negev was strategically important because an Ottoman army attacking Egypt would have to cross it. Woolley and Lawrence subsequently published a report on the archaeological findings of the expedition, but a more important result was the updated mapping of the area, with particular attention to features of military relevance such as water sources. Lawrence also visited Aqaba and Shobek, not far from Petra.

After the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914, Lawrence did not immediately enlist in the British Army. He held out until October on the advice of S. F. Newcombe, when he was included in the general list. By the end of the year, he was appointed by renowned archaeologist and historian Lt. CMDR David Hogarth, his mentor in Carchemish, to the New Arab Bureau intelligence unit in Cairo, and he arrived in Cairo on 15 December 1914. The head of the bureau was general Gilbert Clayton, who reported to the Egyptian High Commissioner Henry McMahon.

The situation was complex in 1915. There was a growing Arab nationalist movement within the Arabic-speaking Ottoman territories, including many Arabs serving in the Ottoman forces. They were in contact with Sharif Hussein, Emir of Mecca, who negotiated with the British and offered to lead an Arab uprising against the Ottomans. In return, he wanted a British guarantee for an independent Arab state including the Hejaz, Syria and Mesopotamia. Such an uprising would have been very helpful to Britain in its war against the Ottomans, which would have greatly reduced the threat to the Suez Canal. However, there was opposition from French diplomats who insisted that Syria's future was a French colony and not an independent Arab state. There were also strong objections from the Indian government, which was nominally part of the British government, but operating independently. His vision was British-controlled Mesopotamia, which served as a granary for India; moreover, it wanted to hold on to its Arab outpost in Aden.

At the Arab Bureau, Lawrence oversaw the creation of maps, produced a daily bulletin for the British generals operating in the theatre, and interviewed prisoners. He was a proponent of a British landing at Alexandretta, which never materialized. He was also a consistent advocate of an independent Arab Syria.

The situation came to a crisis in October 1915 when Sharif Hussein demanded immediate commitment from Britain, threatening that otherwise he would throw his weight behind the Ottomans. This would create a credible pan-Islamic message that could have been very dangerous for Britain, which was in serious trouble during the Gallipoli campaign. The British responded with a letter from High Commissioner McMahon, which was generally acceptable and at the same time reserved obligations with regard to the Mediterranean coast and the Holy Land.

In the spring of 1916, Lawrence was sent to Mesopotamia to ease the siege of Kut by a combination of the beginning of an Arab uprising and the bribery of Ottoman officials. This mission yielded no useful result. Meanwhile, the Sykes-Picot agreement was negotiated in London without the knowledge of British officials in Cairo, which gave much of Syria to France. This also meant that the Arabs would have to conquer the four major cities of Syria if they had a state there: Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. It is unclear at what point Lawrence became aware of the content of the contract.

Awards and commemorations

Lawrence was appointed a companion of the order of the bath on 7 August 1917, a companion of the Distinguished Service Order on 10 May 1918, a knight of the legion of Honour (France) on 30 May 1916 and a Croix de guerre (France) on 16 April 1918.

A bronze bust of Lawrence by Eric Kennington was erected in the Crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral in London on January 22, 1936, next to the graves of the greatest British military leaders. A recumbent stone effigy of Kennington was installed in 1939 in St Martin's Church, Wareham, Dorset.

An English Heritage Blue Plaque Marks Lawrence's childhood home at 2 Polstead Road, Oxford, and another appears on his London home at 14 Barton Street, Westminster. Lawrence appears on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band of the Beatles. In 2002, after a British vote, Lawrence was voted 53rd on the BBC's list of the 100 Greatest Britons.

In 2018, Lawrence was featured on a £5 coin (in silver and gold) in a six-coin set commemorating the centenary of the first World War issued by the Royal Mint.

Thomas Edward Lawrence was a great man. This Book is written in the good spirit and in that way like Thomas Edward Lawrence himself telling his life story. So the word, I, my, me should be taken in regards to Thomas Edward Lawrence.

 

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

The following story was first written during the peace conference in Paris, from notes written daily on the road, reinforced by some reports sent to my bosses in Cairo. Subsequently, in the autumn of 1919, this first draft and some notes were lost. It seemed to me historically necessary to reproduce the story, since perhaps no one but myself in Feisal's army had thought of writing at that time what we felt, what we expected, what we were trying to do. So in the winter of 1919-20 it was built with great disgust in London again from the memory and my surviving notes. The record of events was not boring in me and perhaps only a few actual errors slipped in, except in Details of dates or numbers, but the contours and meaning of things had lost meaning in the haze of new interests.

The dates and locations are correct as far as my notes have kept them: but personal names are not. Since the adventure, some of those who worked with me have been buried in the shallow grave of the civil service. Their names were freely used. Others still possess themselves, and here they keep their secret. Sometimes a man had several names. This can conceal individuality and make the book a scattering of uncharacteristic puppets rather than a group of living people: but once a man's good is counted and again evil, and some would not thank me for guilt or praise.

This isolated image that throws the main light on me is unfair to my British colleagues. I am particularly sorry that I did not say what the non-responsible of us did. But they were wonderful, especially considering that they did not have the motive, the imaginative vision of the end that officers held. Unfortunately, my concern was limited to this goal, and the book is only a planned procession of Arab freedom from Mecca to Damascus. It aims to rationalise the campaign so that everyone can see how natural the success was and how inevitable, how little dependent on direction or brain, how much less on the outside help of the few Britons. It was an Arab war waged and waged by Arabs with Arab aims in Arabia.

My proper participation was less, but because of a fluid pen, a freedom of speech, and a certain cerebral ability, I assumed, as I describe it, a simulated precedence. I never really had an office among the Arabs: he was never in charge of the British mission with them. Wilson, Joyce, Newcombe, Dawnay and Davenport were all over my head. I flattered myself that I was too young, not that they had more heart or mind at work, I did my best. Wilson, Newcombe, Dawnay, Davenport, Buxton, Marshall, Stirling, young, Maynard, Ross, Scott, Winterton, Lloyd, Wordie, Siddons, Goslett, stent Henderson, Spence, Gilman, Garland, Brodie, Makins, Nunan, Leeson, Hornby, Peake, Scott Higgins, Ramsay, wood, Hinde, Hell, MacIndoe, Greenhill, Grisenthwaite, Dowsett, Bennett, Wade, Gray, Pascoe and the others too, did everything possible.

It would be essential in me to praise her. If I mean the evil of one of our number, I do: although there is less of it than in my diary, since the passage of time seems to have lightened the spots of men. If I want to praise outsiders, then I do: bur our family affairs belong to us. We have done what we set out to do and have the satisfaction of this knowledge. The others one day have the freedom to record their story, a parallel to mine, but not to mention more of me than I do of them, because each of US has done his job for himself and as he would like, hardly see his friends.

These pages are not about the Arab movement, but about me. It is a story of everyday life, bad events, Little People. There are no lessons for the world, there are no revelations that will surprise the Nations. It is full of trivial things, partly that no one is wrong by history, the bones of which a man can one day write history, and partly by the pleasure of reminding me of the community of revolt. We liked it together, for the swing of the open spaces, the taste of the winds, the sunlight and the hopes in which we worked. The moral freshness of the world-to-be intoxicated us. We were forged in unspeakable and steamy ideas, but to fight for them. We lived many lives in these revolving campaigns and did not forgive ourselves: however, when we succeeded and the new world dawned, the elders came out again and used our victory to restore in the likeness of the former world they knew. The youth could win, but had not learned to hold: and was unfortunately weak against age. They stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.

All men dream: but neither do those who dream at night in the dusty corners of their minds wake up in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, because they can act their dream with open eyes to make it possible. I did that. I wanted to make, restore a new nation! a lost influence to give twenty million Semites the foundation on which to build an inspired palace of dreams of their national thoughts. Such a lofty goal called the inherent nobility of her spirit and made her play a generous role in events: but when we won, I was accused of making British Gas charges in Mesopotamia dubious and ruining French colonial policy in the Levant.

I'm afraid I hope so. We pay too much for these things in honor and in innocent lives. I climbed the Tigris with a hundred Devon territories, young, clean, charming companions, full of the power of happiness and make women and children rejoice. For them it was vividly seen how good it was to be his relative and the Englishman. And we have thrown them into the fire in thousands to suffer the worst death, not to win the war, but that the corn, the rice and the oil of Mesopotamia might be ours. The only necessity was to defeat our enemies (Turkey among them), and this finally happened in the wisdom of Allenby with less than four hundred dead, resorting to the hands of the oppressed in Turkey. I am proud of my thirty fights in which I have not shed my own blood. All our subjects were not worth a dead Englishman to me.

 

We were in this effort for three years and I had to contain many things that cannot yet be said. Nevertheless, parts of this book will be new to almost anyone who sees it, and many will look for familiar things and not find them. I once fully informed my bosses, but I knew they were rewarding me with my own tests. This was not as it should be. Honors may be necessary in a professional army, as so many emphatic mentions in dispatches, and by hiring we had voluntarily or not placed ourselves in the position of regular soldiers.

For my work on the Arab front, I had decided not to accept anything. The Cabinet lifted up the Arabs to fight for us, after which there were certain self-promises of self-government. Arabs believe in people, not institutions. They saw me as a free agent of the British government and demanded confirmation of their written promises. So I had to join the conspiracy and for what my word was worth, I assured the men of their reward. In our two years of association under fire, they got used to believing me and thinking that my government, like me, is righteous. With this hope, they have achieved some good things, but instead of being proud of what we have done together, I was bitterly ashamed.

It was clear from the beginning that if we had won the war, these promises would be dead paper, and if I had been an honest adviser to the Arabs, I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives to fight for these things: but I greeted myself in the hope that by leading these Arabs madly to final victory, I would establish them with weapons in other words (without seeing another leader with the Will and power), that he would survive the campaigns and Turks on the battlefield, but for my own country and its allies in the Council chamber. It was an immodest guess: it is not yet clear whether I succeeded; but it is clear that I had no shadow of permission to put the Arabs in such danger without knowing it. I risked deceit in my belief that Arab aid was necessary for our cheap and quick victory in the East and that we win better and break our word than we lose.

The dismissal of Sir Henry McMahon confirmed my belief in our essential insincerity: but I could not explain myself to general Wingate while the war lasted, as I was nominally under his command, and he did not seem to be sensible how false his own reputation was. The only thing left was to refuse rewards for being a successful scammer, and in order to avoid this inconvenience, I began in my reports to hide the true stories of things and to persuade the few Arabs who knew it to show equal restraint. In this book also, for the last time, I mean to be my own judge of what to say.

 

INTRODUCTION. Basics of revolt

CHAPTERS I TO VII

Some Englishmen, of whom Kitchener was chief, believed that an Arab rebellion against Turks would enable England to simultaneously defeat her ally Turkey during the struggle against Great Germany.

Her knowledge of the nature and power and Land of the Arab-speaking peoples made her think that the subject of such a rebellion would be happy: and indicated its character and method.

So they allowed it to begin to receive formal assurances of help from the British government in return. nevertheless, the rebellion of the sherif of Mecca came as a surprise to most and found the allies already. It aroused mixed feelings and made strong friends and strong enemies, in the midst of whose clash jealousy began to miscarry his affairs.

CHAPTER I

Some of the evils of my story may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived together anyway in the naked desert, under the indifferent Sky. In the day the hot sun fermented us; and we became dizzy with the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silence of stars. We were an egocentric army without parade or gesture, dedicated to freedom, the second creed of man, a purpose so tenacious that it swallowed up all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded into their glory.

Over time, our need to fight for the ideal grew into an unconditional possession that drove with Spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a belief. We had sold ourselves into his slavery, mingled in his chain gang, bowed to serve His Holiness with all our good and bad content. The mentality of ordinary human slaves is terrible -- they have lost the world, and we had surrendered, not body alone, but soul to the overwhelming greed of victory. By our own action we were deprived of morality, of Will, of responsibility, like dead leaves in the wind.

The eternal struggle has taken away our concern for our own lives or for others. We had ropes around our necks and on our heads that showed that the enemy intended abominable tortures for us when we were captured. Every day some of US passed by; and the living knew only sentient puppets on God's stage: indeed, our taskmaster was merciless, merciless as long as our bruised feet could stagger forward on the street. The weak envied those tired enough to die; for success looked so far away, and was a near and sure, though sharp, release from toil. We always lived in the expansion or sagging of the nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of the emotional waves. This impotence was bitter for us and made us live only for the horizon we saw, ruthless, which despite We have inflicted or endured, since the physical sensation proved to be mean temporary. Gusts of cruelty, perversions, desires ran lightly over the surface without troubling us; because the moral laws that seemed to speak about these stupid accidents must be even lighter words. We had learned that there was pain that was too sharp, grief too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When the emotions reached this pitch, the mind suffocated; and the memory became white until the circumstances were once more humdrum.

Such an exaltation of thought as it drove the mind, and gave it in strange airs, it lost the old patient dominion over the body. The body was too coarse to feel the extremity of our worries and joys. That is why we have abandoned it as garbage: we have left it among us to march forward, a breathing simulacrum, on its own level, exposed to influences from which in normal times our instincts would have shrunk. The men were young and robust; and hot flesh and blood unconsciously claimed a right in them, tormenting their bellies with strange longings. Our privations and dangers fueled this masculine heat in a climate as rainy as you can imagine. We had no closed places where we could be alone, no thick clothes to hide our nature. Man lived openly with man in all things.

The Arab was by nature continent; and the use of universal marriage had almost abolished irregular courses in his tribes. The public women of the rare settlements we had encountered during our months of wandering would have had nothing to do with our numbers, even if their raddelfleisch had been tasty for a man with healthy parts. In terror of such dirty trade, our young people began indifferently to slacken each other's few needs in their own clean bodies—a cold comfort that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, swearing that friends who shivered together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in Supreme embrace found there a sensual coexistence of mental passion that welded our souls and spirits in a flaming effort. Several who were thirsty to punish the appetite, which they could not quite prevent, were wildly proud of degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in some habit that promised physical pain or dirt.

I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or to sign their faith, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to develop to the highest pitch every movement of them that came to England in their war. If I could not accept their character, I could at least conceal my own and pass through them without apparent friction, neither a Discord nor a critic, but an unnoticed influence. Since I was her companion, I will not be her apologist or lawyer. To this day, I have been able to play the spectator in my old clothes, obedient to the sensations of our theater...but it is more honest to record that these ideas and actions then passed naturally. What now looks wanton or sad, seemed inevitable or simply unimportant routine on the field.

Blood was always on our hands: we were licensed to do so. Wounding and killing seemed ephemeral pain, so very short and sore was life with us. With the grief of living so great, the grief of punishment had to be relentless. We lived for the day and died for it. When there was reason and desire to punish, we immediately wrote our lesson with weapon or WHIP into the grumpy flesh of the sufferer, and the case was beyond appeal. The desert has not been able to afford the sophisticated slow penalties of courts and idols.

Of course, our rewards and joys were as sudden as our problems; but especially for me, they were less great. Bedouin ways were hard, even for those who brought them up, and terrible for Strangers: a death in life. When the March or labour ended I had no energy to record sensation, nor while it lasted any leisure to see the spiritual loveliness which sometimes came upon us. In my notes, the cruel rather than the beautiful place found. We undoubtedly enjoyed more the rare moments of peace and oblivion; but I remember more the torment, the terrors and the mistakes. Our lives are not summed up in what I have written (there are things that cannot be repeated in cold blood out of shame); but what I have written was in and of our lives. Pray to God that men who read the story do not go out for love of the glamour of strangeness to prostitute themselves and their talents to serve a A man who pretends to be possessed by extraterrestrials leads a long life after he has swapped his soul for a brute master. He is not of them. He can stand against them, convince himself of a mission, beat them and twist them into something they would not have been by themselves. Then he uses his old environment to push her out of hers. Or, according to my model, he can imitate them so well that they mistakenly imitate him again. Then he gives away his own environment: his pretensions; and pretensions are hollow, worthless things. In no case does he do anything of himself, nor anything so clean as to be his own (without thinking of conversion), and let them take what action or reaction they expect from the silent example.

In my case, the effort of these years to live in the clothes of the Arabs and to imitate their spiritual basis has left me my English self and made me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they have destroyed everything for me. At the same time, I could not honestly accept the Arab skin: it was just an affectation. A man was easily made an unbeliever, but he could hardly be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken the other and had become like Muhammad's coffin in our legend, with a resulting feeling of intense loneliness in life and a contempt, not for other men, but for everything they do. Such detachment sometimes came to a man who was exhausted by prolonged physical exertion and isolation. His body continued to clump mechanically as his rational mind left him, and from above looked down critically at him, wondering what this futile Wood was doing and why. Sometimes they would entertain themselves in the void; and then the madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two training, two surroundings.

CHAPTER II

A first difficulty of the Arab movement was to say who the Arabs were. As an established people, their name had slowly changed in meaning year after year. Once it meant an Arabian. There was a country called Arabia; but that was nothing to the point. There was a language called Arabic; and therein lay the test. It was the current tongue of Syria and Palestine, of Mesopotamia and the great peninsula called Arabia on the map. Before the Muslim Conquest, these areas were inhabited by various peoples who spoke the languages of the Arab family. We called them Semitic, but (as with most scientific terms) incorrectly. Arabic, Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac were related tongues; and indications of common influences in the past, or even a common origin, were strengthened by our knowledge that the appearances and customs of the present Arabic-speaking peoples of Asia, while as varied as a field full of poppies, had an equal and essential likeness. We could call them cousins with perfect decency-and cousins certainly, if sadly, aware of their own relationship.

The Arabic-speaking areas of Asia in this sense were a rough parallelogram. The north side ran from Alexandretta on the Mediterranean Sea via Mesopotamia to the east to the Tigris. The southern side was the edge of the Indian Ocean from Aden to Muscat. In the West it bordered the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to Aden. In the east on the Tigris and on the Persian Gulf to Muscat. This country as large as India was the home of our Semites, in which no foreign race had held firm, although Egyptians, Hittites, Philistines, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Franks had tried it on various occasions. In the end, all were broken, and their scattered elements drowned in the strong characteristics of the Semitic race. Semites had sometimes pushed outside this area and had drowned themselves in the outside world. Egypt, Algiers, Morocco, Malta, Sicily, Spain, Cilicia and Great France absorbed and destroyed Semitic colonies. Only in Tripoli in Africa and in the eternal wonder of Judaism had distant Semites retained some of their identity and strength.

The origin of these peoples was an academic question; but for the understanding of their revolt their present social and political differences were important, and could only be by looking at their geography covered. This continent of them fell into certain large regions, whose gross physical diversity imposed on the inhabitants in them different habits. In the West, the parallelogram from Alexandretta to Aden was framed by a mountain belt called Syria (in the North), and from there to the South called Palestine, Midian, Hejaz and finally Yemen. It had an average height of perhaps three thousand feet, with peaks of ten to twelve thousand feet. It looked west, was well watered with rain and clouds from the sea and was generally fully populated.

Another row of inhabited hills overlooking the Indian Ocean was the southern edge of the parallelogram. The eastern border was initially an alluvial plain called Mesopotamia, but south of Basra a flat coastal strip called Kuwait, and Hasa, after Gattar. Much of this plain was populated. These inhabited hills and plains framed a Gulf of thirsty desert, in the heart of which was an archipelago of irrigated and populous oases called Kasim and Aridh. In this group of oases lay the true center of Arabia, the preservation of its native spirit and its most conscious individuality. The desert lapped it around and kept it contactless.

The desert, which performed this great function around the oases and thus made the character of Arabia varied in nature. South of the oases, it seemed to be a sand sea without a path, stretching almost to the populous embankment of the coast of the Indian Ocean and excluding it from Arab history and above all from the influence on Arab morals and politics. Hadhramaut, as they called this southern coast, formed part of the history of Dutch India; and his thought swayed to Java rather than Arabia. West of the oases, between them and the Hejaz Hills, was the Nejd desert, an area of gravel and lava with little sand. East of these oases, between them and Kuwait, a similar gravel surface spread, but with some large soft sand sections that made the road difficult. To the north of the oases lay a sand belt and then a huge gravel and lava city that filled everything between the eastern edge of Syria and the banks of the Euphrates, where Mesopotamia began. The practicality of this northern desert for men and cars enabled the Arab revolt to achieve its first success.

The hills of the West and the plains of the East were the most populous and active parts of Arabia. Especially in the West, the mountains of Syria and Palestine, of Hejaz and Yemen repeatedly penetrated into the current of our European life. Ethically, these fertile healthy hills were in Europe, not in Asia, as the Arabs always to the Mediterranean Sea, not the Indian ocean, for their cultural sympathies, to your company and, in particular, their expansions looked at, since the migration problem was the greatest and most complex force in Arabia, and General to it, but it could vary in the different Arabic districts.

In the north (Syria), the birth rate in the cities was low and the mortality rate high, due to the insane conditions and the hectic life led by the majority. Consequently, the surplus peasantry found openings in the cities and was swallowed up there. In Lebanon, where sanitation had been improved, a major exodus of young people to America took place every year, threatening (for the first time since Greek days) to change the prospects of an entire district.

In Yemen the solution was different. There was no foreign trade and no mass industries to accumulate the population in unhealthy places. The towns were just market towns, as clean and simple as ordinary villages. Therefore, the population slowly increased; the extent of life was brought very low; and an overload of numbers was generally felt. They could not emigrate overseas; for Sudan was an even worse country than Arabia, and the few tribes that ventured there were forced to profoundly change their way of life and their Semitic culture in order to exist. They could not move north along the hills; for these were blocked by the holy city of Mecca and its port of Jidda: a foreign belt, which was constantly reinforced by strangers from India and Java and Bokhara and Africa, very vital, fiercely hostile to the Semitic consciousness and preserved despite economy and geography and climate by the artificial factor of a world religion. The overload of Yemen, therefore becoming extreme, found only relief in the East by reducing the weaker aggregations whose border down and down the slopes of the hills along the Widian, the half-Waste District of the great water-carrying valleys of Bisha, Dawasir, Ranya and Taraba, which ran towards the desert of the Nejd. These weaker clans had to constantly exchange good springs and fertile palms for poorer Springs and sparser palms, until they finally reached an area where a real agricultural life became impossible. They then began to make up for their precarious position by breeding sheep and camels, and over time they became more and more dependent on these herds for their livelihood.

Finally, under the last impulse of the population behind them, the border dwellers (now almost entirely pastoral) were hurled as nomads from the farthest mad oasis into the oppressed wilderness. This process, in order to be observed-day-with individual families and tribes whose marches can be set an exact name and date, must be completed since the first day of Yemen. The Widian below Mecca and Taif are crowded with the memories and place-names of half a hundred tribes which have gone from there, and can be found to this day in Nejd, in Jebel Sham-mar, in the Hamad, even on the borders of Syria and Mesopotamia. It is the source of migration, the factory of nomads, the emergence of the Gulf stream of desert Wanderers.

Because the people in the desert were as little static as the people in the hills. The economic life of the desert was based on the supply of camels, which were best bred on the strict highland pastures with their strong nutritious thorns. Through this industry lived the Bedouins; and it in turn shaped their lives, distributed the tribal lands, and kept the clans turning by their reds from spring, summer, and winter pastures, when the flocks in turn circumcised the scanty growths of each. The camel markets in Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt determined the population that could support the deserts and strictly regulated their standard of living. So also the desert occasionally overwhelmed; and then there were skies and thrusts of crowded trunks as they elbowed their way through natural corridors to the light. You could not go south towards the inhospitable sand or sea. They could not turn to the West, for there the steep hills of Hejaz were densely lined with mountain peoples, who took full advantage of their defenses. Sometimes they went towards the central oases of Aridh and Kasim, and, if the tribes looking for new homes were strong and vigorous, they might succeed in occupying parts of them. However, if the desert did not have this strength, its peoples were gradually pushed northward, between Medina of Hejaz and Kasim of Nejd, until they were at the fork of two roads. They could strike east, from Wadi Rumh or Jebel Sham-mar, to eventually follow the Batn to Shamiya, where they would become River Arabs of the lower Euphrates; or they could climb the ladder of Western oases—Henakiya, Kheibar, Teima, Jauf and Sirhan—by 180 degrees until fate saw them approaching Jebel Druse in Syria or watering their flocks over Tadmor of the northern desert on their way to Aleppo or Assyria.

Even then, the pressure did not stop: the unstoppable trend to the North continued. The tribes were driven to the edge of cultivation in Syria or Mesopotamia. They and their bellies persuaded them of the advantages of possessing goats and then sheep; and lastly they began to sow, if only a little barley for their animals. They were no longer Bedouins and, like the villagers, began to suffer from the devastation of the Nomads. Insensitive, they made common cause with the peasants who were already on the ground, and found that they too were peasantry. Thus we see clans born in the highlands of Yemen, pushed by stronger clans into the desert, where they unwillingly became nomads to keep themselves alive. We see them wandering, each year moving a little further north or a little further east, as Chance has sent them to one or the other of the well roads of the wilderness, until finally this pressure drives them from the desert back into the sown, with the same unwillingness of their first shrinking experiment in nomadic life. This was the cycle that held strength in the Semitic body. There were few, if indeed there was a single Northern Semite whose ancestors had not crossed the desert at a dark age. The sign of nomadism, this deepest and most biting social discipline, was on each of them in its degree.

CHAPTER III

If tribesmen and citizens in Arabic-speaking Asia were not different races, but only men in different social and economic stages, a family resemblance could be expected in the work of their minds, and so it was only reasonable that common elements should appear in the product of all these peoples. At the beginning, at the first meeting with them, was found a universal clearness or hardness of belief, almost mathematical in its limitation and repellent in its unsympathetic form. Semites had no semitones in their visual register. They were a people of primary colors, or rather of black and White, who always saw the world in outline. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns. They did not understand our metaphysical difficulties, our introspective questions. They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our hesitating retinue of finer shades.

This people was black and white, not only in vision, but by innermost facility: black and white not only in clarity, but in apposition. Her thoughts were only comfortable in extremes. They inhabited superlatives of choice. Sometimes inconsistents seemed to possess them immediately in common fluctuations; but they never compromised: they pursued the logic of several incompatible opinions to absurd ends without perceiving the incongruity. With cool head and calm judgment, steadfastly unconscious of flight, they oscillated from asymptote to asymptote. *

They were a limited, narrow-minded people whose inert intellect lay broken in ominous resignation. Their ideas were vivid, but not creative. There was so little Arab art in Asia that one could almost say that they had no art, even though their classes were liberal patrons, and had fostered all the talents in architecture, or ceramics, or other crafts that their neighbors and Helots showed. They also did not deal with major industries: they had no organizations of mind or body. They invented no systems of philosophy, no complex mythologies. They steered their course between the idols of the tribe and the cave. The least pathological peoples had unquestionably accepted the gift of life as axiomatic. For them, it was an inevitable thing that was due to man, an abuse that got out of control. Suicide was one thing impossible, and death no grief.

They were a people of convulsions, of upheavals, of ideas, of the race of individual genius. Their movements were all the more shocking in contrast to the quiet silence of each day, their great men all the greater in contrast to the humanity of their mob. Their beliefs were instinctive, their activities intuitive. Their greatest production was of creeds: almost they were monopolists of revealed religions. Three of these efforts had survived among them: two of the three had also carried the export (in modified Form) to non-Semitic peoples. Christianity, translated into the various spirits of Greek and Latin and German tongues, had conquered Europe and America. Islam subjected Africa and parts of Asia in various transformations. These were Semitic successes. They kept their failures to themselves. The edges of their deserts were strewn with broken faith.

It was significant that this anger of the fallen religions lay over the meeting of desert and sowing. It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they needed a prophet to set them forth. The Arabs said there were forty thousand prophets: we had records of at least a few hundred. None of them had been in the wilderness; but their lives were after a pattern. Her birth put her in crowded places. An incomprehensible passionate longing drove them into the desert. There they lived more or less in meditation and physical abandonment; and from there they returned with their imaginary message to articulate and preach it to their old and now doubting companions. The founders of the three great creeds fulfilled this cycle: their possible coincidence was proved by the parallel life stories of the countless others as law, the unfortunate ones who failed, whom we could judge of no less true profession, but for whom time and disillusionment had not accumulated dry souls ready to be set on fire. For the thinkers of the city, the impulse to Nitria had never been irresistible, probably not that they dwelt there God, but that in his loneliness they certainly heard the Living Word they brought with them.

The common Basis of all Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the omnipresent idea of World worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach mercy, renunciation and poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the thoughts of the desert pathetic. A first knowledge of their sense of purity of dilution was given to me in the early years, when we had ridden far across the hilly plains of northern Syria to a Roman ruin that the Arabs believed was created by a frontier prince as a desert palace for his queen. The clay of his building is said to have been kneaded for greater wealth, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from room to room and said, "This is Jessamine, this violet, this rose."

But at last Dahoum attracted me: "come and smell the sweetest fragrance of all," and we went into the main shelter, to the gaping window cavities of its east wall, and there drank with open mouth the effortless, empty, whirling wind of the desert, throbbing by. This slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates, and had for many days and nights drawn dead grass to its first obstacle, the artificial walls of our broken Palace. It seemed to annoy and linger over her, mumbling in baby language. "That," they told me, " is the best: it has no taste."My Arabs turned their backs on perfumes and luxury to choose the things in which humanity had no share or share.

The Bedouin of the desert, who had been born and raised in it, had embraced this nudity, which was too hard for him, with all his soul, for the reason that he felt unequivocally free there. He lost material ties, comfort, all superfluities and other complications in order to achieve a personal freedom that afflicted Hunger and death. He saw no virtue in poverty: he enjoyed the little vices and luxuries—coffee, fresh water, women -- which he could still preserve. In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fertility in nature: only the sky above and the unspoken earth below. There he unconsciously came to God. For him God was not anthropomorphic, not tangible, neither moral nor ethical, not concerned with the world or with him, not natural: but the Being thus qualified not by sale, but by investiture, a comprehending being, the egg of all activity, with nature and matter only a glass reflecting him.

The Bedouin could not look for God in him: he was too sure that he was in God. He could not conceive of anything that was or was not God, who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, a commonplace of that old Arab God who was their food and their struggles and their lusts, the most common of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible for those whose God is so wistfully veiled by them through despair of their carnal unworthiness by him and by the propriety of formal worship. The Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the best known of her words; and indeed we have lost much eloquence in making him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables.

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget their open spaces and emptiness were inevitably encountered by God as the only refuge and rhythm of being. The Bedawi could be a nominal Sunni, or a nominal Wahabi, or anything else in the Semitic compass, and he would take it very lightly, a little in the way of the guards at the Zion Gate who drank beer and laughed in Zion because they were Zionists. Each individual Nomad had his revealed religion, not orally or traditionally or expressed, but instinctively in himself; and thus we all received Semitic creeds with (in character and essence) an emphasis on the emptiness of the world and the fullness of God; and according to the power and opportunity of the believer, the expression was of them.

The desert dweller could not acknowledge his faith. He had never been an evangelist or a proselyte. He came to this intense concentration of himself in God, closing his eyes to the world and all the complex possibilities that were latent in him and that only contact with wealth and temptations could bring about. He achieved a sure confidence and a strong confidence, but how narrow a field! His sterile experience deprived him of compassion and perverted his human kindness to the image of waste in which he was hiding. Accordingly, he injured himself, not only to be free, but to please himself. There followed a joy in pain, a cruelty that was more to him than commodity. The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self-control. He made the nudity of the mind as sensual as the nudity of the body. He saved perhaps his own soul, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness. His desert was turned into a spiritual ice house, where a vision of the unity of God was preserved intact but for all ages. To him sometimes the seekers could escape from the outer world for a season and from there look in detachment on the nature of the generation they would convert.

This belief in the desert was impossible in the cities. It was immediately too strange, too simple, too impassable for export and common use. The idea, the ground belief of all Semitic creeds waited there, but had to be watered down to make us understand. The cry of a bat was too shrill for many ears: the desert spirit escaped through our coarser texture. The prophets returned from the desert with their gaze on God and showed through their colorful medium (as through a dark glass) something of the majesty and brilliance whose full vision would make us blind, deaf, silent, serve us as it had served the Bedouin, make him rude, a man apart.

The disciples stumbled upon human weaknesses and failed in their efforts to free themselves and their neighbors from all things according to the master's word. In order to live, the villager or city dweller must fill himself every day with the joys of acquisition and accumulation, and become the grossest and most material of people through the rebound of circumstances. The luminous contempt of life, which led others into the purest asceticism, drove him to despair. He wasted himself heedlessly, as a spendthrift: ran through his inheritance of flesh in hasty longing for the end. The Jew in the metropolis of Brighton, the miser, the worshipper of Adonis, the lecher in the stews of Damascus were alike signs of the Semitic the ability to enjoy life and expression of the same nerve which gave us at the other pole the self-denial of the Essenes, or the early Christians or the first Khalifas, and the way to heaven was for the poor in the spirit is best. The Semite hovered between lust and self-denial.

Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a string; for the unspoken fidelity of their spirit made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond until success had come, and thus responsibility and duty and obligations. Then the idea was gone and the work ended in ruins. Without a creed, they could be taken to the four corners of the world (but not to heaven), being shown the riches of the Earth and the joys of the Earth; but if on the street, led in this way, they met the prophet of an idea who could not lay his head anywhere and who was dependent on charity or birds for his food, then they would all leave their wealth for his inspiration. They were incorrigible children of the idea, fearless and colorblind, to whom body and mind were forever and inevitably opposed. Her mind was strange and dark, full of depression and exaltation, without Dominion, but with more zeal and fruitful faith than anyone else in the world. They were a people of freedom for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and diversity and the end of nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water might finally prevail. Since the beginning of life they had plunged, in successive waves against the coasts of flesh. Every wave was broken, but, like the sea, always carried away so little of the granite on which it failed, and one day, not yet, could roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move on the face of these waters. Such a wave (and last but not least) I lifted and rolled before the breath of an idea until it reached its crest, and overturned and fell in Damascus. The washing of this wave, thrown back by the resistance of inalienable things, will supply the cause of the following wave, if in the fullness of time the sea is to be raised once more.

CHAPTER IV