Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia by Michael Korda Read Free Book Online Page B

“almost regal in appearance … Very much like the monument of Richard I at Fontevraud,” which Lawrence had seen during his bicycling tours of French castles and cathedrals. This comparison to the brave but pious king, an inspired leader of men and the supreme warrior of the Middle Ages, who fought his own father and brothers for the throne and who has passed into English history as Richard the Lionheart, was high praise indeed, for he was a figure Lawrence admired greatly. It was also, perhaps, something of a political daydream, for Feisal, courageous and inspiring as he may have been,would have been the last person to take arms against his father and his brothers to become sharif of Mecca himself. (He and his brothers still signed their letters to their father as “Your Slave.”)
    Later, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence would write: “I felt at the glance that now I had found the man whom I had come to Arabia to seek…. He looked very tall and pillar-like, very slender, dressed in long white silk robes and a brown headcloth bound with a brilliant scarlet and gold cord. His eyelids were drooped, and his close black beard and colourless face were like a mask against the strange still watchfulness of his body. His hands were loosely crossed in front of him on his dagger.”
    Feisal ushered Lawrence into a small dark room, in which Lawrence, whose eyes were still accustomed to the outside glare, could only just distinguish the presence of a crowd of people seated on the floor. Feisal and Lawrence sat down on the carpet—Lawrence comments that Feisal stared down at his hands, “which were twisting slowly about his dagger,” without drawing our attention to the fact that for Arabs the eye-to-eye stare, which among Britons and Americans signifies an honest man-to-man approach, is instead either a challenge or sheer bad manners by someone who doesn’t know any better—a European, for example.
    In a soft voice, speaking Arabic, Feisal asked Lawrence, “And do you like our place here in Wadi Safra?”
    To which, after a pause, Lawrence replied, “Well; but it is far from Damascus.”
    To quote Lawrence, his words fell “like a sword into their midst,” and all those in the room held their breath for a silent moment. Damascus was their dream—the capital of an Arab state, or nation, that would stretch from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.
    Then Feisal smiled, and said, “Praise be to God, there are Turks nearer us than that.”
    What Feisal thought of Lawrence was—and would always be—harder to know. The bond between them would grow stronger than either of them could have foreseen that day, but Feisal’s personality was of necessity farmore opaque than Lawrence’s—he was a prince, of a great and proud ruling family trapped between its Arab rivals in the desert (of whom the most dangerous was the future king of Saudi Arabia, ibn Saud * ), and its Turkish overlords in Constantinople. Feisal was a politician, a man skilled at hiding his emotions and veiling his thoughts, hardly one to trust a stranger, and certainly not one who would imagine that a British officer might put Arab interests before those of his own country. At their very first meeting, Feisal took in Lawrence’s admiration for his own person, his unusual knowledge of Arab ways, his lack of racial prejudice toward Arabs, and his undisguised enthusiasm for the Arab cause; but Feisal was cautious by nature, not impulsive, except in the heat of battle, and he cannot initially have been sure why this young Englishman had been sent to him. Yet Feisal came quickly to feel affection, trust, and respect for Lawrence, and from the first instant was encouraged by his arrival at Wadi Safra, as might not have been the case had Lawrence been a more conventional British officer. The British were powerful friends and allies, but that is not to say Feisal trusted them completely, any more than he trusted any other European colonial power with ambitions in