|
Journal
of the T. E. Lawrence Society Vol. VII, No. 1, Autumn 1997 Edited by Philip Kerrigan The Spell of Arabia: Charles Doughty and T. E. Lawrence Sir Ronald Storrs Originally published in The Listener, 25 December 1947 What first took Charles Doughty, and, forty years later, T. E. Lawrence, into Arabia? The 'spell', which avowedly drew Richard Burton, Wilfred Blunt, and the rest, or something else? Something else beyond all doubt: and that something was, for both, the past; in whose interest and magic both had been from earliest youth profoundly steeped. Of the two, Doughty's past was by far the remoter, for it began with geology and culminated in ancient inscriptions; the first he himself proclaims: 'Of surpassing interest to those many minds which seek after philosophic knowledge and instruction, is the Story of the Earth, Her manifold living creatures, the human generations and Her ancient rocks', and he appends to Arabia Deserta 'a notice of the geological constitution of Arabia'. He had travelled there after measuring glaciers and studying glaciation in Norway, through Europe, Egypt and the Bible lands, always with the idea of perfecting his knowledge of those parts of his epic poem, The Dawn in Britain. In Edom he first heard of Petra and the Nabathean inscriptions. After transcribing these, Doughty learnt of others at Medain Salih, whither he journeyed with the Syrian Pilgrimage; these also he transcribed while waiting for the return of the pilgrims from Mecca. At Medain Salih he decided, instead of going back with them to Damascus, to live awhile in the high desert with a friendly shaikh and the Bani Zaid and Fukara Beduin. 'Though but slenderly provided', Doughty says, 'I did not greatly err when I trusted my existence amongst an unlettered and reputed lawless tribesfolk, who amidst a life of never-ending hardship and want, continue to observe the great Semitic Law, unwritten: namely the ancient Faith of their illimitable empty wastes'. His transcriptions were thought worthy of acceptance by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, and were edited with translations in a special volume by Renan himself. As for Lawrence, he was a born archaeologist. From early boyhood he collected coins, arranged fragments of ancient pottery, visited old churches, passionately studied the military architecture of the Crusaders - and was thus drawn to their tremendous castles in Syria (which then included Palestine and TransJordan), and later to the excavation of Hittite Karchemish, on the Euphrates. The past was thus, for Lawrence also, the original eastward impetus, but his avowed reasons for dedicating himself to Arabia are by no means as clear as Doughty's Herodotean directness. On an added page, unnumbered and in italics, at the end of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he writes, 'I had dreamed, at the City School in Oxford, of hustling into form, while I lived, the new Asia which time was inexorably bringing upon us; Mecca was to lead to Damascus; Damascus to Anatolia, and afterwards to Bagdad; and then there was Yemen'. I can find no trace of these dreams in anything else he ever wrote - nor did I ever hear him mention them. Still, an archaeologist who is also a Lawrence may well be irritated by the dead hand of the past, which stultifies his natural eagerness to progress. A Doughty will be content to observe and record. Again, on this same page, with obvious reference to the cryptic poem at the beginning of the book, you will read: 'The strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to me, I think, every hour of these two years. Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but, refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element of life, till near the end. It was dead, before we reached Damascus'. Here is a tragic mystery that can never be revealed. Neither of these men can then be termed Arabia-born, of sentiment, imagination or 'the East a-calling', but (more generally perhaps than some others) each became Arabian by a sort of recognition - if you will, by adoption and grace. For they were not called by the past anywhere; their education and inclination would hold them happily within the wide boundaries of the classical and biblical Near East. The Bedu embodied Lawrence's doctrine of bareness in materials. The Arab, he writes, 'had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature; just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he came near God'. Again, after savouring ancient perfumes: 'Dahoum drew me: "Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all", and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. "This", they told me, "is the best: it has no taste". My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part'. Again, 'We were shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars'. It was not only by reason of their entry into Arabia through the gate of antiquity that these two resembled each other. Blunt had wandered as a poet and much-adored delightful fairy prince; Gertrude Bell as a scholarly venturesome lady with whom money was no object. Most subsequent explorers have travelled amply provided with elaborate equipment. Doughty had little money; Lawrence almost none. Both journeyed in Beduin simplicity; and when Lawrence gives as his reason 'no man could be their leader except he ate the ranks' food, and wore their clothes, and yet appeared better in himself ', he is merely elevating to a principle the practice of his free archaeological nonage. Doughty accepted the primitive life without question. Both sometimes rebelled against the uncongenial sides of their existence: Lawrence abuses 'the pestilent beating of the Arabian sun', and the equable Doughty rounds upon the rubaibe - the one-stringed desert viol; 'doubtless a very archaic minstrelsy, in these lands, but a hideous desolation to our ears'. And more gravely, of the Pilgrimage: 'All charity is cold in the great and terrible wilderness of that way-worn suffering multitude'. Yet Doughty's 'two long and weary years' were 'not without happy turns in the not seldom finding, as I went forth, of human fellowship amongst Arabians and even some true and very helpful friendships which, from this long distance of years, I vividly recall and shall, whilst life lasts, continue to esteem with grateful mind'. Both clearly saw and dispassionately analysed the defects and excesses of the Arab character: neither failed to appreciate and extol their finer qualities. Lawrence savours their hard certainty. 'Semites', he remarks 'had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns'. And again, of their Islamic self-surrender to the idea, he says: 'Arabs could be swung on an idea as on a cord: for the unpledged allegiance of their minds made them obedient servants. None of them would escape the bond till success had come, and with it responsibility and duty and engagements. Then the idea was gone and the work ended'. (Yet for all this, neither cared to revisit the people or the places that had once meant so much to him.) Absorbed by
Arabia From Arabs, as from life, you are apt to get according as you give; and such Englishman as had roamed the wilderness had left there a name of men sure of themselves, abiding by their spoken word - for seldom would the written have passed; quiet mannered yet informal (as not of a card-exchanging nation), clean living, often devout, prepared - even preferring to live and work in Arab ways without explaining how much better are the methods of the west; above all humorous. Here is a grimly humorous description from Seven Pillars of Wisdom: feasting with Lawrence in Faisal's tent, Auda leapt up and rushed outside. A noise and hammering followed. It was Auda pounding his false teeth to pieces on a rock. 'I had forgotten', he exclaimed: 'Jemal Pasha gave me these. I was eating my Lord's bread with Turkish teeth!' Yet he had no other set, and his own teeth were few. Lawrence speaks of 'Faisal's humour, that invariable magnet of Arab goodwill' - as indeed I myself have witnessed in many an encounter in train, caravan and bazaar. These are some of the qualities superlatively shown by Doughty and by Lawrence. 'For many Arabs', as Lawrence writes, 'Doughty was the first Englishman they had ever met. He predisposed them to give a chance to other men of his race, because they had found him honourable and good'. Earlier in this series Mr Wilfred Thesiger opposed the view of Arabian travel as something of the past, which modern communications have rendered obsolete'; (The Listener, 4 December 1947.) and he was doubtless right, with regard to the Rub'al-Khali - the Empty Quarter, about which he spoke so convincingly. But for the northern regions, of Doughty and of Lawrence, that Way of the Wilderness, preserved in all essentials intact and unchanged from before the days of the nomad Hebrew patriachs, was disrupted (as was so much of individual interest and loveliness elsewhere) by the internal combustion engine, first made familiar there by Lawrence himself. Nobody who has watched the procession of royal limousines bearing King Ibn Sa'ud and his court from Mecca into Jeddah will be surprised to learn that the breeding of camels has declined, and that they are now destined less and less for transport, and more for meat. The Empty Quarter survives as such mainly because its illimitable wastes of soft waterless sands keep it empty. Of habitable Arab lands only Arabia Felix, the mysterious flowering Yaman, remains, by the craft and subtlety of her ruler, the Imam Yahya, inviolate of the west. Dedicated
Writers It is for this reason that I have found it best to let each repeat, in his own words, some of the impressions and feelings which, apart from those I have suggested, drew him into the heart of Arabia: 'I', says Lawrence, 'was keen on psychology and politics; Doughty only on life and death'. It is true: for Doughty, politics are entirely replaced by Bible traces and parallels. 'The tent-stuff,' he writes, 'is seamed of narrow lengths of the housewives' rude worsted weaving ... [and] of the mingled wool of the sheep and camels' and goats' hair together. Thus it is that the cloth is blackish: we read in the Hebrew Scripture, "Black as the tents of Kedar" '. Then, 'There are no beds in this country: ... you may oftentimes see poor marketing Beduins napping at noon in the town or village, as the lad Jacob, with a stone laid under their heads!' Doughty notes the compelling contrasts throughout the East: 'By the ruins of a city of stone, they received me into the eternity of the poor nomad tents'. Another contrast, now between jewel and setting, lovingly noted: 'Under the most rugged of these riders was a very perfect and startling Arab mare. Never combed by her rude master, but all shining beautiful and gentle of herself, she seemed a darling life upon the savage soil not worthy of her gracious pasterns: the strutting tail flowed down even to the ground, and the same mane was shed by the loving nurture of her mother - Nature'. Hear, lastly, Doughty's magnificent presentation of the mysticism, so often latent in Arab thought and life: their belief in the healing efficacy of precious stones: 'The Oriental opinion of the wholesome operation of precious stones, in that they move the mind with admirable beauties, remains perhaps at this day a part of the marvellous estimation of inert gems amongst us. Those indestructible elect bodies, as stars, shining to us out of the dim mass of matter, are comfortable to our fluxuous feeble souls and bodies; in this sense all gems are cordial and of an influence religious. These elemental flowering lights almost persuade us of a serene eternity'. I have tried to suggest, by citation and inference, two predestined affinities with the desert; but who shall ever set down all the subconscious thoughts and dreams that impelled these greatest Pilgrims to make their Progress in Arabia? - BBC Third Programme 1947. Back to the contents page for this issue You can buy issues of the Journal
from the online shop.
It is
not necessary to be a member of the T. E. Lawrence Society. |