Seven Pillars of Wisdom

by T.E. Lawrence

A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life,

having bartered his soul to a brute-master.

They were a limited, narrow-minded people, whose inert intellects lay fallow in incurious resignation.

It seemed absurd that I should peril my weight in the Arab adventure for a single worthless man.

To remember this, and to foreswear all selfish peace and quiet while wandering with them, was one of the least

pleasant lessons of the desert war: and humiliating, too, for it was a part of pride with Englishmen to hug solitude; ourselves finding ourselves to be remarkable, when there was no competition present.

And we were so musing while the coffee-maker boiled up his coffee, tapped it down again, made a palm-fibre mat to strain it before he poured (grounds in the cup were evil manners),

Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster, and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

In summer the Arab tent was less hot than our canvas tents, for the sun-heat was not absorbed in this loose woven fabric of hair and wool, with the air spaces and currents between its threads.

They lived on a fraction of our bulk-food, and their

systems made exhaustive use of what they got. A nomad army did not dung the earth richly with by-products.

Time seemed to have proclaimed the impossibility of autonomous union for such a land.

In history, Syria had been a corridor between sea and desert, joining Africa to Asia, Arabia to Europe. It had been a prize-ring, a vassal, of Anatolia, of Greece, of Rome, of Egypt, of Arabia, of Persia, of Mesopotamia.

When given a momentary independence by the weakness of neighbours it had fiercely resolved into discordant northern, southern, eastern and western ‘kingdoms’ with the area at best of Yorkshire, at worst of Rutland; for if Syria was by nature a vassal country it w...

Syria remained a vividly coloured racial and religious mosaic. Any wide attempt after unity would make a patched and parcelled thing, ungrateful to a people whose instincts ever returned towards parochial home rule.