Forbidden map-work, Lawrence spent his time scouring the ruins of the ancient citadel of Ayla, where he picked up some sherds of pottery. He tried to hire a boat to take him to Pharaoh’s Island – the Crusaders’ Оl e de Graye –about ten miles south of Aqaba, where there was a medieval castle. Unfortunately, the boatman he had engaged was immediately arrested by the police, and when Lawrence and Dahoum tried to take the boat out themselves, the police prevented them. Undaunted, Lawrence borrowed three ten-gallon water-drums from Newcombe, and hiked with his camels around the coast to Taba, from where the island lay only 400 yards offshore. He blew air into the tanks, and paddled across using a wooden plank as an oar, towing Dahoum behind him on one tank and his camera on another. Unfortunately, the ruins were not worth the effort, and on his return he was obliged to leave the district under military escort.
Lawrence decided to march north up the Wadi ‘Araba to Petra, the ancient Nabataean city carved in solid rock, which he had wanted to reach since his first expedition in Syria in 1909. Photography was forbidden, but despite his escort he managed to get half a dozen photographs by pretending to be suffering from diarrhoea and taking frequent leave. He sent his twelve camels and five camel-men on to Wadi Musa, at the entrance to Petra, and he and Dahoum stalked off fast, managing to lose their military guards in the maze of valleys around Mount Hor. While alone, they discovered a route through the hills which Bedu raiding-parties used when heading for Sinai. Lawrence found Petra itself a feast. Though he had read a great deal about it previously, he was unprepared for the overwhelming effect of the place. It was not the rock-cut tombs and temples which awed him, but the natural beauty of the site, with its marbled colours of red, black and grey, its great cliffs and pinnacles, and its gorge, or Siq,like an undersea cavern, abrim with oleanders, ivy and ferns. For once he felt his powers of description inadequate: ‘Be assured,’ he wrote Edward Leeds, ‘that till you have seen it you have not the glimmering of an idea how beautiful a place can be.’ 3Although the rock city was mercifully unmarred by the thousands of visitors who flock through it today, there already existed a tourist camp run by Thomas Cook, and there was a slow trickle of privileged sightseers. From one of them, a Lady Evelyn Cobbold, Lawrence managed to beg the train fare from Ma’an to Damascus, while making a slightly snobbish mental note to have his mother look her up in Who’s Whoto find out ‘what’ she was.
Ma’an lay only a short distance away across the Belqa hills, and Lawrence sent his baggage caravan on ahead as usual. He was annoyed to find on his arrival that the camels had been impounded by the police for grazing on public pasture, and would not be released until he paid a fine. Lawrence had learned the correct response to such problems at the hands of the firebrand Woolley, and he suddenly snatched a couple of the rifles which the policemen had piled before them and, with the weapons tucked under his arm, marched briskly towards the local Governor’s office. The policemen, too cowed to snatch them back, trotted close behind. He confronted the Governor, and demanded that the fine be waived in exchange for the rifles. The Governor was furious, but reluctantly agreed, instructing his men to free the camels, upon which Lawrence cocked a deliciously arrogant verbal snook, saying, ‘Please don’t trouble yourself. They left the town an hour and a half ago!’ 4He waited at Ma an two days for a train, grumbling about the inefficiency of the Turkish railway engineers, and finally managed to travel to Damascus third class. He was not to see Ma an again for three years, and then it would be a distant vision from the desert, as he rode towards Aqaba at the head of a Hashemite force.
Lawrence was glad to be back at Carchemish, and took with him no yearning for the desert. He looked forward instead to the routine of the dig, wanting it to go on and on for years. At last the young man who had wished to spend his life as an artistic dilettante saw himself turning into a ‘professional’: in his letter to Vyvyan Richards at the end of the previous season he had confessed that ever since he had got to know the East, the idea of settling down at home had faded: ‘… gradually I slipped down,’ he wrote, ‘until a few months ago when I found myself an ordinary archaeologist. I fought very hard at Oxford… to avoid being labelled: but the insurance people have nailed me down now.’ 5However, work could not begin until the end of March since Kenyon had neglected to renew the digging permit, and on the day Lawrence and Woolley arrived back from Aleppo with the permit, there was fighting in the railway camp.
It began when one of the labourers – a Kurd called Ali – discovered that his wage for a month’s hard labour was only five piastres. The workers were paid eight piastres a day by the German company, but the paymaster had built up a fine racket in docking wages for bread which the labourers did not eat, and for water, which came free from the Euphrates. ‘Ali protested that five piastres was not a proper reward for his labour, and when the German paymaster refused to listen, the Kurd dashed the money in his face. The paymaster’s Circassian steward promptly knocked him down, and when ‘Ali came up with a stone, the steward tried to shoot him. The other Kurds – 150 strong – broke ranks and began hurling stones at the German engineers’ office, smashing the windows. The Germans cocked their rifles, and opened up phlegmatically at everyone in sight, wounding five or six Arab workmen who were innocently engrossed in their labours thirty yards away. The Arabs downed tools, drew their pistols and fired back at the common enemy. The besieged engineers telephoned to their camp, and soon a solid phalanx of thirty armed Circassians, Turkish soldiers and fellow engineers swept across the bridge and began shooting from the near side. It was at this point that Lawrence and Woolley, who had run out of their house to find out what was happening, came under fire themselves. Lawrence saw a Circassian guard named Ahmad Zakkari step out about sixty yards away and take deliberate aim at Woolley. Fortunately, the man’s aim was bad, and the bullet simply richocheted around his feet. Lawrence sprinted across to the engineers’ office to tell the Germans that he and Woolley were not to be shot at. When he arrived back at the mound he was astonished to find that about 300 Kurds and Arabs had climbed it from the back, and were preparing to take the party on the bridge in a suicidal rush. Those who had revolvers were reloading them, and others had picked up crowbars and clubs. Lawrence and Woolley tried to push them back, even knocking some of them down, but soon the Circassian Ahmad Zakkari began shooting again, missing Lawrence but hitting a Kurdish boy he was talking to. This sent the Kurds into a mad frenzy, and it was only with tremendous force of will that the Englishmen managed to prevent them from opening fire. The crisis point had passed, however, and Lawrence and Woolley finally persuaded the men to carry their wounded to the Expedition House. About an hour later the crowd began to disperse into the village. One Kurd had been killed and about twenty men wounded by German fire.