Beirut was then one of the most vibrant cities in the Middle East: Lawrence himself characterized it as ‘the door to Syria, a chromatic Levantine screen through which … foreign influences entered …’ 17When I arrived there in his footsteps, ninety years on, however, it was a shell of a place, its famous ‘Downtown’ quarter reduced to rubble – a maze of shell-shocked buildings without interiors or roofs. Though the war between Muslims and Christians had long since ceased and Israeli troops had pulled out of the city, they were still fighting the Palestinians in southern Lebanon, which made it impossible for me to follow that part of Lawrence’s 1909 route. Instead I had to approach it indirectly, taking a bus from Cairo to Jerusalem and up the Jordan valley to Tiberias, on the Sea of Galilee, where I found a room in the Church of Scotland Hostel. The verandah of my cell-like room looked into a private beach-garden full of spruce and cypress and old eucalypts. There were glowering clouds over the lake, a ponderously spinning carousel casting beams of light on the embroiled waters. Gulls and shearwaters rose and fell on the waves like paper boats. Lawrence had found the lake ‘very blue and always moving: never quite calm’, but ‘pretty’ rather than ‘grand’. 18He described Tiberias itself as a ‘hot and dirty’ town, but found it not altogether unpicturesque: he loved its tiny port and fishing-boats, and thought its ruined walls ‘interesting’. The walls were still there, but their effect was spoiled by the dozen great ziggurats of modern hotels which towered over them.
The following day I hired a mountain bike to ride up to Safed, the highest town in Galilee, where Lawrence had spent a few days. It had rained in the night. The road along the lakeside through Magdala was wet and the wheels sprayed a rash of mud over my oilskin jacket. I climbed painfully above Capernaum, around an endless series of hairpins, through green meadows full of grey boulders, fat, grazing cows and elegant white egrets. At Rosh Pinna, the air was thick with mist and the road darkened by avenues of stone-pines. I halted to drink coffee at a papershop-cum-cafй, where a very fat man – the proprietor of the place – was sitting at a table reading the sports page of a Hebrew newspaper. He seemed interested in my search for Lawrence. ‘Lawrence was a friend of the Jews,’ he told me. ‘He believed in Israel as a National Homeland for us. We will never forget him for that!’ This was essentially true, I thought. Like many Britons of his day, Lawrence had been excited by the idea of restoring the Jews to their ancestral homeland after 2,000 years: the British had seen themselves as secret guardians of time, capable of using their vast wealth and power to replay history. On his first journey through Galilee in 1909, indeed, Lawrence had been disappointed to find the country derelict by comparison with the image he had formed of it through his biblical study. Instead of the ‘polished streets, pillared houses and rococo baths’ he had imagined, he found a place of ‘dilapidated Bedu tents, with the people calling to [one] to come in and talk, while miserable curs came snapping at [one’s] heels’. 19There is little trace here of the later Arabophile. He believed that Palestine had been a ‘decent’ country in Roman times and could be made so again: ‘The sooner the Jews farm it all the better,’ he wrote. ‘Their colonies are bright spots in the desert.’ 20
From Rosh Pinna, I rode up into ice-cold mist which settled over the hills like a blanket, and the pedalling became agony. Headlights loomed out of the fog at regular intervals, like demonic eyes. Occasionally a waft of wind pushed the mist on, and there were momentary glimpses of the country below, a magical, sunlit country of hills and fields. I had never imagined that the road to Safed would ascend so relentlessly for all of its 2,700 feet: at times it seemed that I was pedalling all the way up to heaven. I had been cycling upwards in first gear for almost five solid hours, and my calves were screaming, when the mist suddenly cleared and I saw Safed, a large town spread round the skirts of five or six peaks. As I rode into the centre, rain came bucketing down through the eucalyptus groves. There seemed to be no sign of the crusader castle. I stopped an old man to ask directions. He was friendly enough, but shook his head: ‘No English! No Hebrew! No Arabic! Only Yiddish!’ he said. Safed was a place of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Why should they be interested in crusader castles? There was only one history for them. I never did find the castle, but I was content enough with the stunning view I had of Mount Hermon, when the rain peeled back the last skeins of mist.
Lawrence arrived in Safed on the evening of 16 July 1909, exhausted after what he called a ‘terrific climb up from the valley and then over undulating country’. 21He had left Tibnin that morning and halted at noon for a drink at the famous Spring of Kadesh, having in the course of the day marched up and down the height of Mont Blanc: ‘Palestine is all like that,’ he wrote, ‘…the roads go either up or down all the time … and never reach anywhere at all.’ 22There was no hotel in Safed then, but he had found accommodation with the family of an English doctor called Anderson who worked for the Jewish Mission Hospital. The doctor was very kind to his young visitor, and took him to see the castle after dark, but the rigours of the journey were already affecting him, and Lawrence came down with the first of several bouts of malaria which were to dog the entire trek.
He had been walking for just over two weeks, having set out alone from Beirut at the beginning of July. On the first day he had hiked down the coast to Sidon, through mulberry orchards and olive groves. The road had been full of movement: peasants in baggy trousers and fezzes, bristling with rifles, revolvers and cartridge belts, riding horses or driving great trains of camels down to the coastal markets with their harvest. There were camels everywhere, and Lawrence looked at them with interest. He thought their faces ‘horrible’, but loved the rough tones of the camel-bells which faded as the caravans wound placidly into the haze of sunset. Sidon stood on the tip of a headland and it was satisfyingly medieval – a walled town of alleys so narrow that two men could scarcely pass, and which no wheeled vehicle could enter. From there he had climbed the hills towards Nabatiyyeh, tramping up deep gorges and enjoying the refreshing breeze off the Mediterranean. He passed through hamlets of baked mud houses among patchworks of brown fields, and practised his Arabic with the villagers. For the first time he stayed with Arabs in their own houses, and delighted in learning the social rituals involved. On greeting his host with ‘Peace be upon you!’ he would be invited inside, where the womenfolk would drag out a heavy quilt for him to sit on. While his host made coffee and plied him with the customary questions, the children would examine his belongings. After tea or coffee, dinner – generally greasy boiled wheat called burghul, and wafer-thin bread – would be presented. There was no talking during the meal, and afterwards, about nine, he would retire with his quilts, either to the verandah or to the roof. The quilts, he discovered, were far too thick for summer nights, and as they were invariably full of fleas anyway, he usually slept on top. He would be up at sunrise, and would join his host at the hearth, and splash a little water over his face for his morning ablutions. After breakfast of bread and sour milk – or fresh milk if he was lucky – he would be on his way. The simplicity of the peasants’ lifestyle appealed to him, and evoked the landscape of Malory and Morris. He felt comfortable in the simple houses with their spartan furniture – rush mats, tiny stools, and sleeping quilts which doubled as chairs and which could be packed away in a stepped alcove when not in use. He admired the way in which the house doubled as a byre – the lower floor for the cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys and horses, the upper one for humans. He approved of the economy of eating with the hands from a communal dish, or of using pieces of bread as a spoon, and appreciated that the Arab way of washing hands – pouring water over them rather than scrubbing them in a basin – was far cleaner than the English method. He also acknowledged the Arabs’ sense of hospitality: ‘this is a glorious country for wandering in,’ he wrote to his father, ‘for hospitality is something more than a name … there are the common people each one ready to receive one for a night, and allow me to share in their meals: and without thought of payment from a traveller on foot.’ 23Though this was not entirely true, for often his hosts would take money, he clearly found their simple dignity attractive. It was an aesthetic appreciation: some of their ways were quaint, they were pleasant and dignified, but ‘very childish and simple of course, and startlingly ignorant’. 24Lawrence also stayed with foreign missionaries, and expressed high praise for their work in ‘civilizing’ and ‘educating’ the natives. In his letters home, he displayed his customary need to bolster self-esteem by revealing his apparent uniqueness: his diet, he said, was that of the natives, and considered ‘lunacy’ by the expatriates, though his habit of drinking fresh milk was viewed as equally crazy by the Arabs. The natives thought him ‘mad’ to walk instead of riding, while the foreigners thought him batty to walk round in the heat of the afternoon. He told his mother that he had become ‘Arab in habit’ yet in the same sentence related proudly how a Frenchman had ‘taken him for a compatriot’, without apparently being aware of the contradiction. On close reading, the character which emerges from Lawrence’s Syrian letters is one who is capable of adapting quickly to a new community, but who essentially belongs to none.