Strange little story from Arabia

As I have said, I am reading the Gutenberg version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T E Lawrences's memoir. It is chock full of the strange little stories. Here is one of Lawrence and his Arab irregulars camping within the walls of an old Arab fortress:

In these slow nights we were secure against the world. For one thing, it was winter, and in the rain and the dark few men would venture either over the labyrinth of lava or through the marsh--the two approaches to our fortress; and, further, we had ghostly guardians. The first evening we were sitting with the Serahin, Hassan Shah had made the rounds, and the coffee was being pounded by the hearth, when there rose a strange, long wailing round the towers outside. Ibn Bani seized me by the arm and held to me, shuddering. I whispered to him, 'What is IT?' and he gasped that the dogs of the Beni Hillal, the mythical builders of the fort, quested the six towers each night for their dead masters.

We strained to listen. Through Ali's black basalt window-frame crept a rustling, which was the stirring of the night-wind in the withered palms, an intermittent rustling, like English rain on yet-crisp fallen leaves. Then the cries came again and again and again, rising slowly in power, till they sobbed round the walls in deep waves to die away choked and miserable. At such times our men pounded the coffee harder while the Arabs broke into sudden song to occupy their ears against the misfortune. No Bedouin would lie outside in wait for the mystery, and from our windows we saw nothing but the motes of water in the dank air which drove through the radiance of our firelight. So it remained a legend: but wolves or jackals, hyasnas, or hunting dogs, their ghost-watch kept our ward more closely than arms could have done.

He offers no explanation beyond that last half sentence. But his Arabs knew all about wolves, jackals, and the rest, and they were scared out of their daring. As was Lawrence, apparently.

T E Lawrence has an encounter.

Lawrence, he of Arabia, was on campaign and climbed up an escarpment to bathe in a fresh pool of water flowing from between the rocks.

Upon the water-cleansed and fragrant ledge I undressed my soiled body, and stepped into the little basin, to taste at last a freshness of moving air and water against my tired skin. It was deliciously cool. I lay there quietly, letting the clear, dark red water run over me in a ribbly stream, and rub the travel-dirt away. While I was so happy, a grey-bearded, ragged man, with a hewn face of great power and weariness, came slowly along the path till opposite the spring; and there he let himself down with a sigh upon my clothes spread out over a rock beside the path, for the sun-heat to chase out their thronging vermin.

He heard me and leaned forward, peering with rheumy eyes at this white thing splashing in the hollow beyond the veil of sun-mist. After a long stare he seemed content, and closed his eyes, groaning, 'The love is from God; and of God; and towards God'.

His low-spoken words were caught by some trick distinctly in my water pool. They stopped me suddenly. I had believed Semites unable to use love as a link between themselves and God, indeed, unable to conceive such a relation except with the intellectuality of Spinoza, who loved so rationally and sexlessly, and transcendently that he did not seek, or rather had not permitted, a return. Christianity had seemed to me the first creed to proclaim love in this upper world, from which the desert and the Semite (from Moses to Zeno) had shut it out: and Christianity was a hybrid, except in its first root not essentially Semitic.

This observation leads him into a dream like incantation of the progress of Christianity.

A most peculiar man.

taken from Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Reading projects for the summer

I have set aside an enormous pile of books to read this summer. Probably overly ambitious, but I might as well dream.

One that I am reading on Gutenberg.org is Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence, a memoir of his service during World War I among the Arabs of what would become Saudi Arabia. It is fascinating on many levels, not least as a peek into an arresting and complex personality. Lawrence is a superb observer of the natural world and an even better one of human natures. The pen-portraits he draws of so many are fully fleshed, subtle, and convincing.

But Lawrence is a peculiar person, one who constantly goes off on tangents you would not expect. Here he is after a battle in which the Arabs destroyed most of a battalion of Turkish troops.

The dead men looked wonderfully beautiful. The night was shining gently down, softening them into new ivory. Turks were white-skinned on their clothed parts, much whiter than the Arabs; and these soldiers had been very young. Close round them lapped the dark wormwood, now heavy with dew, in which the ends of the moonbeams sparkled like sea-spray. The corpses seemed flung so pitifully on the ground, huddled anyhow in low heaps. Surely if straightened they would be comfortable at last. So I put them all in order, one by one, very wearied myself, and longing to be of these quiet ones, not of the restless, noisy, aching mob up the valley, quarrelling over the plunder, boasting of their speed and strength to endure God knew how many toils and pains of this sort; with death, whether we won or lost, waiting to end the history.

After a battle that had lasted most of the day in a heat Lawrence describes as the worst he had ever experienced in Arabia and in which he had exerted himself far beyond his last nerve, he finds time to wander among the dead, admiring their beauty and arranging them in neat little rows.

A most peculiar fellow. And absolutely ruthless.

actually it was Anactoria who showed me how to find Lawrence on the internet. I don't think she visits anymore, but thanks anyway.

Team Bush in the Middle East

Another little item I found in that same Newsweek I mentioned in the last post.

Both the Israelis and Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president, warned the Bush administration about upcoming elections because of the growing political clout of Hamas. Then Hamas won in an open and fair election won.

[Secretary of State Condi Rice said] "Nobody saw it coming." The line could describe much of what has resulted from George W. Bush's efforts to transform the world.

I especially like that 'nobody saw it coming' line.

More on Books from the WSJ!

This time about America's long and not often smooth relation with the Arab world, from The Wall Street Journal:

1. An Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania by Peter Markoe (1787).
Written as a spoof to convince Americans to form a more perfect Union by convincing them there was an Arab spy haunting Philadelphia! It worked.

2. Sufferings in Africa by James Riley (1817).
The story of an American shipwrecked off Africa, captured and tortured by Arabs, finally escaping to tell the tale (and writing a best seller). Having been a slave himself, Riley included an impassioned call for the abolition of slavery. Young reader Abraham Lincoln took it to heart.

3. Valley of Vison by George Bush (1847)
Bush called for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which would be freed from Ottoman hands by American military force! In 1847! A truly visionary exhortation by an ancestor and namesake of two of our recent presidents who ... manfully support a Jewish state in Palestine.

4. The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
The book that made Twain a national treasure - and a small fortune. Twain did his best to present the Arabs (and everyone else he met) in the worst possible light. Alas, the American romantic vision of the Arab world remained mired in the Arabian Nights (pre-Walt Disney and Princess Jasmine version). OTOH, his views on Germans gained some currency around 1917.

5. The Arabist by Robert Kaplan (1993)
Kaplan goes on a tear ripping up the academic experts on the Arab world - who have, now that I think on it, been wrong about most things, with the possible exception of our decision to invade Iraq. Anti-academic polemic at its best, or at least most heart felt.

That's it folks - the conservative reading list on America and the Arab world! Some good stuff here, though I could come up with my own list with a slightly different slant. Fiasco might head it up.


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