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Updated June 2012
T. E. Lawrence to his family
Jerablus
July 29, 1911
I am sending in a man from here to Biredjik tomorrow, so I will send a line to you. From Biredjik I went up to Rum Kala'at: from there to Nizib, and thence to Tell Bashar and Jerablus. You will find most of these places in the map in my Thesis, if that sorely battered book is now in peace. I have seen nothing very new, nothing very good: the castle of Rum Kala'at yielded some new points, mostly Arab: it had a most enormous moat a perfectly appalling thing:... It cut off a mountain from a mountain along a col like the coupée at Sark. I am very well, and en route now for Aleppo. I got a letter from you here which Thompson sent up three weeks ago from Tell el Hamra. I am probably going now to stop wandering in Ramadan. I dare hardly ask for food from a Mohammedan house, and Christians are not common enough. I have had the pleasant experience since a week of being the best Arabic scholar in all the villages I entered. In every single one, except Rum Kala'at, someone knew a little Arabic but I knew more than all: the people were all Turks and Kurds; a few Armenians and Yezidis, Rum Kala'at was my Northern point.
This is nearly all I can write: the man is waiting anxiously - his own business, and I cannot delay him. I have the luxury of clean clothes, and am overhauling my stores. Thompson gave me free run of all the spare stores of the expedition, and as a result I am fitted out like the Swiss Family: only I have no embroidery silk or sugar mill.
L.
Note. Lawrence wrote this while recovering from serious illness, after returning from his 1911 tramp. The handwriting is shaky.
| Source: | HL 176 |
| Checked: | jw/ |
| Last revised: | 29 January 2006 |
T. E. Lawrence chronology
1888 16 August: born at Tremadoc, Wales
1896-1907: City of Oxford High School for Boys
1907-9: Jesus College, Oxford, B.A., 1st Class Hons, 1909
1910-14: Magdalen College, Oxford (Senior Demy), while working at the British Museum's excavations at Carchemish
1915-16: Military Intelligence Dept, Cairo
1916-18: Liaison Officer with the Arab Revolt
1919: Attended the Paris Peace Conference
1919-22: wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1921-2: Adviser on Arab Affairs to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office
1922 August: Enlisted in the Ranks of the RAF
1923 January: discharged from the RAF
1923 March: enlisted in the Tank Corps
1923: translated a French novel, The Forest Giant
1924-6: prepared the subscribers' abridgement of Seven Pillars of Wisdom
1927-8: stationed at Karachi, then Miranshah
1927 March: Revolt in the Desert, an abridgement of Seven Pillars, published
1928: completed The Mint, began translating Homer's Odyssey
1929-33: stationed at Plymouth
1931: started working on RAF boats
1932: his translation of the Odyssey published
1933-5: attached to MAEE, Felixstowe
1935 February: retired from the RAF
1935 19 May: died from injuries received in a motor-cycle crash on 13 May
1935 21 May: buried at Moreton, Dorset