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height of the brutal Middle East summer. It was a 1,200-mile walk that carried him into villages that had never seen a European before—certainly not an unaccompanied European who, at 5-foot-4, looked to be all of 15—and it marked the beginning of his fascination with the East. “I will have such difficulty in becoming English again,” Lawrence wrote home amid his journey, sounding much like any modern college student on a junior year abroad; the difference in Lawrence’s case was that this appraisal proved quite accurate.
    The transformation was confirmed when, after graduating from Oxford, he wheedled his way onto a British Museum–sponsored archaeological expedition decamping for Carchemish. As the junior assistant on that dig, and one of only two Westerners permanently on-site, Lawrence saw to his scientific duties—primarily photographing and inventorying the finds—but developed an even keener interest in understanding how Arab society worked.
    Learning Arabic, he took to quizzing members of the local work crew on their family histories, on the region’s complex clan and tribal affiliations, and often visited the laborers in their homes to glimpse their lives up close. To the degree that these workmen had dealt with Westerners before, it had been in the master-servant form; to meet someone who took a genuine interest in their culture, joined to Lawrence’s very un-Western tolerance for hardship and hard work, drew them to the young Briton as a kindred spirit. “The foreigners come out here always to teach,” he wrote his parents from Carchemish, “whereas they had much better learn.”
    The dig in northern Syria, originally funded for one year, stretched into four. He wrote a friend in 1913, extolling his comfortable life in Carchemish, that he intended to remain as long as the funding lasted and then go on to “another and another nice thing.” That plan abruptly ended with the onset of World War I in August 1914, and Lawrence, back in England on leave, was destined never to see Carchemish again.
    From his time in Syria, Lawrence had developed a clear, if simplistic, view of the Ottoman Empire—admiration for the free-spirited Arab, disgust at the corruption and inefficiency of their Turkish overseers—and looked forward to the day when the Ottoman “yoke” might be cast aside. That opportunity, and the chance for Lawrence to play a role, arrived when Turkey entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Because of his experience in the region, Lawrence was dispatched to Egypt, the British base of operations for the upcoming campaign against the Turks, as a second lieutenant in military intelligence.
    Despite the fact that he and other members of the intelligence branch urged that Britain forge alliances with Arab groups ready to revolt against the Turks, the generals in Cairo seemed intent on fighting the same conventional frontal assault war that had already proved so disastrous in Europe. The most immediate result was the Gallipoli fiasco of 1915, in which the British Commonwealth suffered nearly a quarter-million casualties before finally conceding failure. Making it all the more painful for the deskbound Lawrence was the death in quick succession of two of his brothers on the western front. “They were both younger than I am,” he wrote a friend, “and it doesn’t seem right, somehow, that I should go on living peacefully in Cairo.”
    It wasn’t until October 1916, two years after his arrival in Egypt, that Lawrence would find himself catapulted to his destiny.
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    To approach the Arabian Peninsula by sea is to invite one of the more unsettling of natural phenomena, that moment when the sea-cooled air abruptly collides with that coming off the desert, when the temperature can jump by 20, even 30, degrees in a matter of seconds. Probably no one described this better than T. E. Lawrence, who,