6. Hediyya bridge. Solidly built by German architects and Turkish labour between 1902 and 1908, many of the original bridges on the Hejaz railway have survived till the present day. The line was revived briefly in the 1920s, but much of it has been disused ever since.
7. Guweira plain from the Nagb ash–Shtar pass, Jordan. Lawrence halted to take in this breathtaking sight at dawn on 2 July 1917, just before his patrol engaged a Turkish force at Aba l–Lissan, the major battle in the Aqaba operation. Once Aba l–Lissan was taken, the Arabs were free to descend into the plain and approach Aqaba from the landward.
8. Atwi station, Jordan. Lawrence’s patrol attacked Atwi on 27 June 1917 during a side mission on the Aqaba operation, killing two Turks and capturing a flock of sheep. Such pin-prick attacks were intended to confuse the enemy and distract them from the real target: Aqaba.
9. Tent in the Wadi Rum, Jordan. A unique geological formation, created by the irruption of sandstone strata elsewhere confined under limestone, the Wadi Rum was considered by Lawrence to be the most spectacular sight in the whole of Arabia. Many of Rum’s Howaytat Bedu still live in traditional black tents as they did in Lawrence’s day.
10. Howaytat woman, Wadi Rum. Proudly displaying the facial tattoos she received as a girl on the eve of her wedding, this matriarch of the Howaytat, one of the celebrated bards of her tribe, still chants poems recalling the days of Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayyi.
11. The author with Sabah ibn ‘Iid at Mudowwara well, Jordan. Lawrence’s patrol watered at the pool here on 17 September 1917, on their way to attack Mudowwara station, which lies about three miles away. The Turks had deliberately polluted the water with dead camels, ensuring that Lawrence’s British gunners came down with diarrhoea. Today, due to local irrigation projects, the well is completely dry.
12. Loading a camel at Mudowwara well. A Bedui of the Howaytat loads his camel at the same point from which Lawrence’s patrol moved south to hit the railway near Hallat Ammar. They watered again at Mudowwara well on the exfiltration to Wadi Rum.
13. Wrecked railway wagon, Mudowwara. This wagon of 1914-18 vintage stands near the site where, on 19 September 1917, Lawrence and his patrol successfully mined a train drawn by two locomotives, and killed seventy Turks by machine-gun and mortar fire within ten minutes – one of the most perfectly executed guerrilla operations of the war.
14. A Bedui filling a waterskin. Lawrence wrote that the ways of the Bedu were hard even for those brought up in them, and for a stranger terrible – a death in life. The Bedu saw things differently, however: the desert offered them what to their eyes was a relatively comfortable way of life.
15. A Bedui of the Haywat, Jordan. One of the small Bedu tribes inhabiting southern Jordan and the Sinai peninsula, the Haywat joined the Hashemite forces on Lawrence’s final push on Aqaba in July 1917.
1. T. E. Lawrence (Ned) aged about ten or eleven. A detail from a studio photograph in Oxford, c.1900.
2. Sarah Lawrence with her children, in the porch of their home at Fawley on the shores of Southampton Water. Ned is sitting with his brothers Will, baby Frank and Bob. The photograph may have been taken by their father, Thomas Lawrence, shortly after their arrival in England, c.1894.
3. In 1896 the family moved to Oxford, and Ned and his elder brother Bob went to school at the City of Oxford High School for Boys. Ned is sitting on the ground in the centre, surrounded by his form mates and their teacher, c.1900.
4. Portrait of Gray,by Henry Scott Tuke. This painting, apparently showing Lawrence as a young soldier, was found among his possessions after his death and claimed as evidence of his disputed service in the artillery whilst still a schoolboy, perhaps in 1906. Though Lawrence may have met Tuke as a boy, the artist listed this portrait as having been painted in 1922. How it came into Lawrence’s possession is unknown.
5. In 1909 Lawrence spent three months travelling through Syria, visiting crusader castles. In August he spent three days at Kala’at al-Husn (Crak des Chevaliers), inspecting and photographing it. He wrote later that it was ‘the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world’.
6. The castle of Sahyun, with its slender needle of rock supporting the centre of a drawbridge, was one of the highlights of Lawrence’s 1909 tour.
7. Lawrence visited many other castles, including left,the Norman keep at Safita (this view from inside) and right,Harran, photographed on a subsequent visit in 1911.
8. Lawrence’s years at Carchemish were the happiest of his life. Here he worked with Leonard Woolley (right)over five seasons from 1912 until 1914. In this photograph they are standing on either side of a large Hittite slab.
9. Carchemish, a Hittite capital as early as 2500 BC,had been built on the intersection of two waterways and centred on a 130-foot acropolis which dominated the flat landscape.
10. Lawrence had two close friends among the local workforce at Carchemish: left,Dahoum, Salim Ahmad – the water-boy – and right,Sheikh Hammoudi, a former bandit, who was the foreman. Lawrence took these photographs in 1911.
11. (above)Workmen dragging up a large block of masonry at Carchemish. Photographed by Lawrence in 1911.
12. By the outbreak of war in 1914 Lawrence had already mastered Arabic and had managed to pass himself off occasionally as a native in northern Syria, where many non-Arab races intermingled. However, though he wore Arab dress throughout the Revolt he never imagined that he could masquerade as a true Arab, and though his Arabic was fluent witnesses say he spoke with a noticeably foreign accent.