Lawrence In Arabia Part 2

Throughout 1913 and well into 1914, the two groups of Western workers who improbably found themselves in this same remote corner of northern Syria had an alternately amicable and contentious relations.h.i.+p. The German railwaymen in Jerablus a.s.sisted the British archaeologists by hauling away the discarded stone from their excavations for use in their railroad embankments. In turn, the Germans frequently sought out the Britons-and, with his fluent Arabic, especially Lawrence-to mediate in their perpetually tense relations with local workers. A chief source of that tension was the difficulty the Germans had in finding good help, their best workers routinely jumping s.h.i.+p for the higher wages and more respectful supervision of Lawrence and Woolley.

Very soon, these two groups would be on opposite sides of a world war, and a different railroad-the Hejaz line, running from Damascus seven hundred miles south to the city of Medina-would become the most vital transportation link in the Middle Eastern theater of that conflict. The knowledge Lawrence gained from watching the railway construction in Jerablus was undoubtedly of great a.s.sistance to him when, in a few years' time, he would make blowing up the Hejaz Railway a personal pastime.

AT MIDMORNING ON September 15, 1913, twenty-six-year-old William Yale was part of a three-man crew "pulling rods"-detaching and stacking drill sections, just about the most miserable job to be had in an oilfield-in the Kiefer field of northern Oklahoma when a courier on horseback approached. Minutes later, the Kiefer straw boss called Yale over to hand him a telegram. It was from the corporate headquarters of the Standard Oil Company of New York, and it was succinct: "Report to New York immediately."

After graduating from his eponymous university in 1910, Yale had struggled to find his calling until, in 1912, he came across a notice soliciting applicants for the "foreign service school" of the Standard Oil Company of New York. On a whim, he applied.

Operating out of Standard's corporate headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York, the "school" consisted of a four-month intensive lecture and seminar program, designed to educate its applicants in all aspects of the petroleum industry, as well as to instill in them the "Standard man" ideal. Just what that ideal might consist of was difficult to say, for by 1912 Standard Oil was the most infamous corporation in the history of international commerce, its name synonymous with capitalist greed run amok.

Through cutthroat tactics devised by its princ.i.p.al shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, Standard had so thoroughly dominated the U.S. petroleum industry over the previous four decades that by the early 1900s it controlled nearly 90 percent of the nation's oil production. For nearly as long, it had operated a complex web of front companies and sh.e.l.l corporations that had defeated the efforts of every "trust buster" lawman trying to break its stranglehold. Finally, in 1911, just the year before Yale's job application, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Standard to be an illegal monopoly and decreed it be broken up into thirty-four separate companies.

Whether this divest.i.ture truly ended the Standard monopoly is still the subject of debate, but it did have the effect of forcing its component parts to specialize, either to focus on supplying regional domestic markets or on building international exports. Among the most aggressive in this latter sphere was the new Standard Oil Company of New York-often referred to by its acronym, Socony-the second largest of the thirty-four "baby Standards."

While other baby Standards turned inward, Socony looked at the great world beyond and saw a plethora of burgeoning markets thirsting for petroleum. It was to coordinate and standardize its marketing approaches in these far-flung spots that the company had launched its foreign service school. William Yale, an enthusiastic pupil, would call the program's teaching methods "far more effective and efficient" than anything he'd encountered at either prep school or university.

And the Socony administrators clearly liked what they saw in William Yale. At the conclusion of his coursework, he was selected to stay on and dispatched to take a firsthand look at oil production in the United States in preparation for future work abroad. Through the autumn of 1912, Yale shuttled to a variety of Standard oilfields in the Midwest, tasked only to write up weekly reports on what he observed and send them back to Socony headquarters.

But the endless tour of oilfields had soon become monotonous to the restless Yale. In early 1913, he wrote to his New York supervisors asking to be given a field job, arguing that if he was to learn any more about the oil business it would have to be by doing rather than observing. That letter undoubtedly further endeared him to 26 Broadway; the notion that a college man-an Ivy League graduate, no less-would request to toil as a laborer indicated just the sort of employee Standard was looking for. Yale was soon sent to the new Cus.h.i.+ng field in western Oklahoma to work as a roustabout.

For a time, he reveled in the hard labor. Living in the middle of nowhere for weeks on end, Yale worked a succession of Oklahoma fields, where he cleared drill sites, laid piping, hauled machinery, and constructed derricks. He had been doing this for several months when the cable arrived from New York.

Just three days removed from the Kiefer field, Yale walked into the lobby of the Socony corporate headquarters at 26 Broadway in lower Manhattan. There, he was taken up to the thirteenth-floor office suite of Standard's vice president, William Bemis. Yale found two other men already waiting in the suite, hats in hand, and all three maintained a respectful silence as the officious Bemis fired off directives to his scurrying staff.

"My mind was in a dream world," Yale recounted, "as I listened to him dictating instructions to his secretary about s.h.i.+pments of kerosene oil to Shanghai, about contracts for asphalt to pave the streets of a city in India, and contracts with the Greek government for fuel oil to supply the Greek navy at Piraeus."

When finally Bemis turned his attention to the three waiting men, it was to inform them that they had been selected for a special overseas a.s.signment, that in just two days' time they would board SS Imperator in New York harbor for its voyage to Calais, France. From there, they would travel overland across the length of Europe to Constantinople, where they would receive further instructions from the manager of Standard's branch office. Before dismissing them, Bemis stressed to the three men that they were embarking on a highly confidential mission. As such, they were to tell no one of their ultimate destination or of their affiliation with Standard Oil. Instead, they were to pa.s.s themselves off as wealthy "playboys" en route to a Grand Tour of the Holy Land, a charade lent credence by their deluxe travel accommodations: the Imperator was the newest and most luxurious pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p plying the Atlantic crossing, their rail pa.s.sage to Constantinople was to be aboard the fabled Orient Express, and they would be traveling first-cla.s.s the entire way.

But upholding the playboy ruse was easier said than done for Yale's two companions. J. C. Hill, the leader of the team, was a rough-around-the-edges crew boss from the steel mills of Pennsylvania. Rudolf McGovern was a dour and socially awkward geologist in his late twenties. Even if these two could manage to put on airs suggesting that they came from money-and that seemed doubtful-they hardly seemed prime candidates for a pilgrimage to biblical sites. Perhaps wisely, their answer to the playboy directive was to interact with the s.h.i.+p's other first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers as little as possible.

William Yale had no such difficulties. To the contrary, the voyage was like a disorienting return to his former life. Among the Imperator's first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers were a great many young people, the offspring of America's industrial magnates and landed aristocracy, setting off on their requisite Grand Tour of Europe, the sort of tame adventure that until a few years earlier would have been his lot.

Yale would recall one peculiar detail of that journey. The Imperator (German for emperor) was the new flags.h.i.+p of the Hamburg-America Line, and at every dinnertime its German officers rose to offer a toast to "der Tag" (the day). Unschooled in the nuances of German, Yale a.s.sumed that the gesture was in quaint celebration of the day just lived; it would be some time before he understood it was actually a kind of code, a toast in giddy antic.i.p.ation of the coming world war, then less than a year away.

ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1913, the same day that William Yale received his cable at the Kiefer oilfield ordering him to New York, T. E. Lawrence was at the train station in Aleppo, sixty miles to the west of Carchemish, awaiting the arrival of his brother Will.

Of his four brothers, Lawrence had always been closest to Will, the middle child and just two years his junior. Upon learning that his brother was leaving England to take up a teaching position in India, he had implored Will to stop off in Syria en route.

Despite their closeness, the visit must have been the source of some anxiety for Lawrence, who had long since been consigned to the role of family bohemian; it was easy to imagine that his brother might be quite shocked by the primitiveness of his surroundings and to report back as much to Oxford. Lawrence needn't have worried. After the two spent some ten days together at Jerablus, Lawrence saw Will off at the local train station for the return to Aleppo, a moment Will recounted in a letter to their parents: "You must not think of Ned as leading an uncivilized existence. When I saw him last as the train left the station, he was wearing white flannels, socks and red slippers, with a white Magdalen blazer, and was talking to the governor of Biredjik in lordly fas.h.i.+on."

That parting at Jerablus was to be the last time the brothers would ever see each other.

Chapter 3.

Another and Another Nice Thing Always my soul hungered for less than it had.

T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM.

How do you put a collar on a leopard? Very carefully, according to the old joke, but in the autumn of 1913, T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley were in need of a practical answer to that question. They had recently been given a young leopard as a gift by a government official in Aleppo, and had found that so long as he remained chained in the courtyard of the Jerablus compound, he made for a very effective watchdog. The problem, though, was that leopards grow very quickly, and it was now just a matter of time before he tore through the flimsy collar he had been delivered in.

The archaeologists' first idea was to throw a large slatted box over the cat, then reach through the slats to effect the collar exchange, but since the leopard was "not very sweet tempered" to begin with, according to Lawrence, this confinement only put him in a fouler mood. Their solution was a rather clever one. Slightly enlarging an opening in the box, they kept stuffing in burlap sacks until eventually the leopard was wedged so tightly that he couldn't move.

"Then we took the top off the box, collared him, and let him loose again," Lawrence wrote to his family. "He will make a most splendid carpet some day."

Along with learning how to recollar a leopard, it was in that autumn 1913 digging season at Carchemish, Lawrence's fifth, that he and Woolley would make a spectacular find-the site's main temple. It was an archaeologist's dream, the discovery of a lifetime, and it helped fuel in Lawrence a sense that he had found his true calling, and perhaps his true home. The s.p.a.cious main living room of the Jerablus compound was now a cozy s.p.a.ce adorned with artwork on the walls and carpets and animal hides on the floor, a library with books in seven languages, and an enormous fireplace constantly stoked with hot-burning olivewood. He revealed his feelings in a letter to a close friend from his Oxford days that autumn.

"I have got to like this place very much," he wrote, "and the people here-five or six of them-and the whole manner of living pleases me.... Carchemish will not be finished for another four or five years and I'm afraid that, after that, I'll probably go after another and another nice thing."

But heartbreakingly, funding from the British Museum-always extremely tight and always conditionally doled out from one season or year to the next-had been effectively exhausted. Unless an unforeseen new funding source suddenly appeared, the next digging season, spring 1914, was slated to be the last. This knowledge hung over Lawrence and Woolley, and it overshadowed their excitement over that season's discoveries with a deepening sense of despair. It was only when they began closing down the site in preparation for their off-season break that a new possibility presented itself.

Under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British Museum director explained, a group of Royal Engineers was about to embark on an archaeological survey of the so-called Wilderness of Zin of southernmost Palestine; might Lawrence and Woolley be interested in joining them during their upcoming break?

For Lawrence and Woolley, it presented a choice between spending two months of leisure in England, or trekking through one of the world's most inhospitable corners. But the lure of exploration really made this no choice at all; both men immediately signed on.

LATE ONE NIGHT in early October 1913, William Yale lay in his tent in the mountains of Anatolia, struck by a sense of wonder at how quickly a life could change. Just three weeks earlier he had been living in a two-room shanty and pulling rods in an Oklahoma oilfield, and now he was traveling through one of the most ruggedly beautiful landscapes on earth, a land only a handful of Americans had ever seen.

Adding to his sense of awe was that in all the time he'd spent in Oklahoma daydreaming about where Standard Oil might send him, he had scarcely considered the Near East. Instead, on that day he walked into the Socony headquarters in New York, he had a.s.sumed he was being dispatched as a sales representative to China.

Yale's misconception was understandable. In 1913, Socony was primarily an exporter of petroleum products, and China was by far its largest market. In comparison, the company's exports to the Ottoman Empire, primarily kerosene to fuel its embryonic industrial facilities, were minuscule. To put into perspective how minuscule, while Standard's kerosene represented the second biggest American export to the Ottoman Empire, the largest was Singer sewing machines.

But as the Standard vice president, William Bemis, had explained to the three men brought to his office that morning, they weren't being sent to the Near East to rustle up new purchasing clients, but rather to find and develop new sources of oil.

It was simple economics. By the end of 1913, the exponentially growing demand for oil and petroleum products around the globe meant that demand would soon outstrip supply. In the United States alone, the number of combustion-engine vehicles on the road had increased twentyfold in less than a decade, from some seventy-five thousand in 1905 to well over 1.5 million in 1913-and already a number of the oldest American oilfields were starting to run dry.

Oil was rapidly becoming a crucial military a.s.set as well. In 1912, just a year before Yale's summoning to New York, the first lord of the admiralty of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, had made international headlines with his plan to convert the entire Royal Navy from coal to oil. As might be expected, this proposed modernization of the world's most powerful fleet was already causing the navies of other nations, including Germany, to scramble to follow suit.

As a consequence, both American and European oil companies were now rus.h.i.+ng to find and exploit new fields wherever they might exist. One especially promising region was the Near East. In the 1870s, huge oil and gas deposits had been discovered around Baku on the Caspian Sea, and this had been followed by another large strike in the Persian Gulf in 1908. Those fields were quickly dominated by European consortiums, and the race was on to tap and lay claim to the next big find.

To that end, the Socony branch office in Constantinople had quietly obtained a six-month option from a consortium of three Jerusalem-based businessmen who held vast exploration concessionary rights in three different regions of the Ottoman Empire. It was to perform preliminary fieldwork in these concessionary zones that Yale, McGovern, and Hill had been dispatched from New York. As for the elaborate secrecy surrounding their mission, there were two reasons: to throw any potential compet.i.tors off the scent, naturally, but also to keep the Standard name in the background for as long as possible. Its recent breakup notwithstanding, the Standard brand was still regarded with such abiding distrust in the Near East, as in many other parts of the world, that the easiest way to besmirch the reputation of a business rival was to accuse it of being a Standard Oil front.

But despite its stealth approach, there were indications that Standard Oil of New York was not quite the smoothly run, rapacious machine its progenitor had been. Indeed, one such indication was the composition of the team it had sent to explore the Ottoman concessions. J. C. Hill, the chief, was a Pittsburgh steel man with no experience in the oil industry. Rudolf McGovern was a college-trained geologist, but had never actually set foot in an oilfield. And while William Yale certainly knew his way around an oilfield, he had absolutely no knowledge of geology.

Certainly J. C. Hill had an unusual approach to exploration, one that might best be described as fatalistic. Arriving in Constantinople in early October, the team had set out for the first concessionary zone, a broad stretch of mountainous terrain in central Anatolia, just south of the Black Sea. Accompanied by a small team of local guides, the three Americans spent a couple of weeks roaming the high plateau on horseback, but each time McGovern pointed to a distant spot he deemed worthy of closer inspection, Hill thought better of it. A critical moment came when the group learned there was a boat heading back to Constantinople in thirty hours' time, and that there wouldn't be another for at least two weeks; they made the boat with just minutes to spare.

Their pace slowed considerably once they reached the second exploration zone, the Dead Sea valley in Palestine, in November 1913. Essentially a continuation of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, from a geological standpoint the region held a good deal more promise than Anatolia. For several weeks, the team traveled the western sh.o.r.e of the Dead Sea, picking their way through shale screes and the surrounding limestone cliffs. Time and again, they found tantalizing clues to the presence of oil-lumps of pure asphalt floating in the sea, surface limestone so impregnated with petroleum that it gave off the odor of gasoline-but nothing to confirm that a commercially viable reservoir might lie beneath.

Then again, it was hard to say much with any definitiveness since Hill, employing the exploratory style he had honed in Anatolia, soon began to veto nearly every spot that McGovern recommended for closer investigation. At times it seemed to Yale that they weren't so much looking for oil as trying to hide from it.

Matters finally came to a head in early January when Hill announced that their work there was done and ordered the breaking of camp for the return journey to Jerusalem. Yale, fueled by three months of frustration, could hold his tongue no longer. He confronted Hill, and the two ended up in a heated argument.

Whether that argument had some effect or it was mere coincidence, on the very next day, as the group climbed into the Judean foothills for the return to Jerusalem, Hill suddenly drew up his horse to gaze at a mountainous outcrop some thirty miles to the south. It was a strange geological formation, an irregular ma.s.sif rising from the surrounding desert plain. Examined through binoculars, there appeared to be pools of something collected at the mountain base, something s.h.i.+mmering and iridescent.

"There." J. C. Hill pointed off to the mountains of Kornub. "That is where we will find oil."

Events moved very quickly after that. Hurrying his bedraggled caravan back to Jerusalem, Hill immediately cabled Socony headquarters with news of his "find." By return telegram, he was ordered to gather up the two primary concession holders of the Palestine tracts, Jerusalem businessmen Ismail Hakki Bey and Suleiman Na.s.sif, and personally deliver them to the Socony office in Cairo as soon as possible. In Hill's absence, Yale and Rudolf McGovern were to go on to Kornub and conduct tests to determine just how immense this new strike might be.

Hastily hiring guides and camp orderlies for the expedition, Yale and McGovern decamped from Jerusalem around January 6, only to meet T. E. Lawrence and his companions outside Beersheva a few days later. Following that humiliating encounter, the Socony party continued south until they at last reached the desolate peaks of Kornub. What they were to discover there would have momentous consequences.

ON MARCH 15, 1913, Aaron Aaronsohn was invited to a luncheon at an exclusive club in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. The guest of honor was former president Theodore Roosevelt.

Maybe it was out of respect that Aaronsohn's hosts, two prominent American Jewish leaders named Julian Mack and Felix Frankfurter, sat their guest beside the former president, or maybe it was born of a sense of mischief; both Aaronsohn and Roosevelt, still referred to as "the Colonel" by his intimates, had hard-earned reputations for being nonstop talkers, and their table companions may have thought it amusing to see who would win out. To the amazement of Mack and Frankfurter, it was President Roosevelt who barely got a word in; instead he listened to Aaronsohn with rapt attention. Aaronsohn clearly appreciated the uniqueness of his achievement; he wrote in his diary that night that "from now on, my reputation will be the man who made the Colonel shut up for 101 minutes."

Much like the former president, Aaron Aaronsohn came on like a force of nature. A towering man given to portliness, he was both brilliant and arrogant, pa.s.sionate and combative, one of those people who seem to believe they are always the most interesting person in a room. In the case of the thirty-seven-year-old Aaronsohn, he was usually right.

By March 1913, he had also emerged as one of the most persuasive spokesmen for a cause that had recently gained currency in certain Jewish circles: Zionism. Calling for a return of the Jewish diaspora to their ancestral homeland of Eretz (Greater) Israel, the Zionist movement had gained some adherents among international Jewry over the previous two decades, but more frequently had been met with skepticism, even hostility. What made Aaronsohn so influential was that his Zionist arguments were not based on political or religious abstractions, but on the purely practical, almost the mundane: agriculture. Already recognized as one of the most accomplished agronomists in the Middle East, Aaronsohn had spent thirty-one of his thirty-seven years in Palestine, and he was now conducting a wide range of scientific experiments-on plants and trees and soils-that might restore the region to the verdant land it had been in ancient times. All high-minded Zionist principles aside, he frequently pointed out, the first prerequisite for the Jews' return to Israel was to have something to eat; Aaronsohn knew how to feed them.

He hadn't come to any of this easily. The eldest child of a Jewish grain merchant, Aaronsohn was born in 1876 in a small town in central Romania. He was just two when the Russo-Turkish War led to Romania's independence from the Ottoman Empire. For the nation's large Jewish population, what had been a tolerably bad existence under a Muslim autocracy quickly became an intolerably bad one under a Christian democracy. Effectively barred from obtaining citizens.h.i.+p, which also meant being barred from most schools and professions, the Jews began a ma.s.s exodus out of Romania. In 1882, when Aaron was six, his parents joined the flight. Rather than make for the emigres' preferred destination of the United States, however, the Aaronsohns joined some 250 other Romanian Jews in sailing for the Palestine region of Ottoman Syria.

The group settled on a barren tract of rocky hillside near the port city of Haifa, an outpost they named Samarin. There they quickly discovered that the "land flowing with milk and honey" described in the Book of Exodus had changed a very great deal in the interim. The few Samarin settlers who knew how to farm-most had been small merchants back in Romania-were soon defeated by the arid landscape and poor soil. Within the year, the emigres were so dest.i.tute they were forced to p.a.w.n their sacred Torah scrolls.

Salvation came in the form of the enormously wealthy French Jewish financier Baron Edmond de Rothschild. An early supporter and benefactor of Jewish immigration to Palestine, Rothschild had already established or bailed out a number of Jewish colonies in the region, and in 1884 he did the same with Samarin, renaming it Zichron Yaakov (Jacob's Memorial), in honor of his deceased father. As the community soon discovered, though, Rothschild's patronage came at a very steep price. In agreeing to lend financial support, his first condition had been "that he alone shall be the colony's sole lord and that all things in its domain be under his rule"-and he hadn't been kidding. The residents of Zichron Yaakov were told what crops they could grow, how they should dress, even who had earned the right to marry, and Rothschild's resident agents made sure the rules were enforced.

But for the young and extraordinarily bright Aaron Aaronsohn, this feudalistic system had its benefits. In 1893, at the age of sixteen, he was chosen by Rothschild's agents to be educated in France, all expenses paid, and for the next two years he studied agronomy and botany at the Grignon Inst.i.tute outside Paris, one of the most prestigious agricultural academies in Europe. When he returned to Palestine, it was not to take up the life of a Rothschild serf in Zichron Yaakov but to serve as an agricultural "instructor" at another of the baron's settlements. The arrangement didn't last long. Within a year, Aaronsohn, just nineteen but already headstrong and impatient, broke with the baron and his agents and struck out on his own.

Finding work as an agricultural advisor to large absentee landowners, he also began meticulously studying and cataloging the flora and geology of Palestine. In this endeavor, his intense curiosity and indefatigable energy soon became legendary. By his midtwenties, already fluent in a half dozen languages, Aaronsohn began publis.h.i.+ng articles in European agronomy journals. No one in the tightly knit and highly credentialed fraternity of European agronomists had ever heard of their colleague in Palestine, and the frequency and eclectic range of Aaronsohn's work-learned studies on everything from sesame oil extraction to silk production-led some to wonder whether the name was a pseudonym for a collective of scientists.

His true breakthrough came in 1906 with his discovery of wild emmer wheat, a progenitor of cultivated wheat long thought extinct, growing on the slopes of Mount Hermon. At a time when the world's population was still over 80 percent agrarian, the find made international headlines and won the young, virtually self-taught Jewish scientist the recognition of his peers around the globe. Three years later, he accepted an invitation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct a wide-ranging tour of the American West. There he was treated as something of a celebrity, offered college professors.h.i.+ps, his highly antic.i.p.ated lectures attended by overflowing audiences. But Aaronsohn's time in the United States-his stay extended to nearly eight months-also exposed him to the currents of modern Jewish political thought, and especially to some of the foremost leaders of the American Zionist movement.

While the notion of a return to Israel had been a cornerstone of Jewish faith for millennia-for nearly two thousand years, Jewish Yom Kippur and Pa.s.sover services have ended with the recitation, "next year in Jerusalem"-it was a Hungarian writer, Theodor Herzl, who transformed it into a modern political idea. In the face of inst.i.tutionalized anti-Semitism in even the most "enlightened" nations of Europe, and the periodic ma.s.sacre of Jews in places like czarist Russia, Herzl had argued in his 1896 book The Jewish State that international Jewry could only ever be truly safe and free by establis.h.i.+ng their own homeland in the ancient land of Israel. The following year, Herzl presided over the first meeting of the World Zionist Congress in Switzerland, an event that electrified Jewish audiences around the world.

It also provoked a furious backlash. In both Europe and the United States, many Jewish leaders-perhaps most-saw Zionism as a dangerous instrument that would isolate Jews from the nations of their birth, and provide fuel to the long-repeated accusation of Jews harboring a divided loyalty; some even suspected Zionism to be an anti-Semitic plot. For the anti-Zionists, the answer to the "Jewish Question" was not Israel but a.s.similation, full political and economic partic.i.p.ation in the nations of their births, a goal finally coming within reach in much of Europe through the spread of democracy.

The "a.s.similationists" also appeared to have a powerful practical argument in their favor. Already by the early 1900s, some sixty thousand Jews lived in the Holy Land, and the great majority of them were either desperately poor or subsisting on subscriptions raised by their religious brethren abroad. Considering this, how could the wastelands of Palestine possibly sustain any significant percentage of the some ten million Jews then scattered about the globe?

It was in retort to this question that Aaron Aaronsohn-not just an agronomist, but an amateur archaeologist and an avid reader of history-could pose a compelling one of his own. What had sustained the Romans and the Babylonians and the a.s.syrians? From both archaeological excavations and old histories, it was clear that Palestine had once supported populations much greater than the estimated 700,000 inhabitants of the early 1900s, and it wasn't as if the water sources or soil beds that sustained those civilizations had simply vanished. Rather, they had been lost to time, and were waiting to be rediscovered, retapped. Aaronsohn also had a persuasive modern example to point to. During his travels in the American West, he had made a special study of California, a place with very similar climate and soil conditions to Palestine. With water diverted from the Sierra Nevada, California's Central Valley was already becoming the agricultural breadbasket of America and bringing in a flood of new settlers. The very same, Aaronsohn argued, could be achieved in Palestine, and with his unrivaled knowledge of the region, he was the man to do it.

In the face of such optimism, not to say arrogance, an expanding circle of wealthy American Jews warmed to Aaronsohn's vision of a restored Israel. Before he left the United States in the autumn of 1909, a consortium of these businessmen and philanthropists had raised some $20,000 toward the creation of the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station in Palestine, a modern research center that Aaronsohn would oversee and that he vowed would become the preeminent such scientific facility in all the Middle East.

For his new venture, Aaronsohn set up operations on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean some eight miles north of Zichron Yaakov, a place named Athlit. Over the next several years, he laid in fields of experimental seedbeds and orchards, built a complex of greenhouses and laboratories. He also saw to the construction of a large two-story building, housing for the facility's library and permanent workers, with a commanding view of the sea just one mile away. With a lack of sufficiently educated locals, Aaronsohn drew most of those permanent workers from among his own family-at various times all five of his siblings would be employed at Athlit-and it was they who oversaw its day-to-day operations, including supervising the field workers drawn from nearby Arab villages. "Before long," biographer Ronald Florence noted, "the experimental plots at the research center were producing more wheat, barley and oats per dunam [about one thousand square meters] than long-established farms on much better soils."

In light of his growing role as a recruiter for Zionism, it's somewhat curious that Aaronsohn appeared to have spent very little time thinking through its social or political ramifications. He could put more Jews on the ground in Palestine, of that he was certain, but what it meant or what form their governance might take was all rather vague.

But this same vagueness extended to the Zionist movement itself. Among "social" and religious Zionists, the goal was quite modest: increased Jewish immigration to Palestine for those who wished to go, with no upsetting of the existing local political framework. Indeed, many of the businessmen who had donated to Aaronsohn's research station considered themselves anti-Zionists, somehow imagining their involvement as apolitical, akin to helping rebuild a synagogue.

Even among those who embraced the idea of a "Jewish state," there was very little agreement on its definition. In 1901, Theodor Herzl had met with the Ottoman sultan in hopes of actually purchasing Palestine. When that overture went nowhere, most successive Zionist leaders had advocated an incremental approach, of Jewish financiers gradually buying up land in Palestine for settlement, while simultaneously negotiating with Constantinople-negotiations that might take the form of bribes or the paying off of a portion of the Ottomans' crus.h.i.+ng foreign debt-to ensure Ottoman acceptance and protection of the new settlers. Whether such a scheme could ever lead to the kind of demographic s.h.i.+ft allowing for Jewish majority rule was highly doubtful, however, given that Palestine's existing non-Jewish population outnumbered Jews by ten to one. By the time of Aaronsohn's luncheon with Teddy Roosevelt in 1913, however, a new, more promising prospect had presented itself. With the Ottoman Empire being torn at from all sides, its final collapse suddenly appeared imminent. If that fall did come and a European power took control of Palestine, the Zionists might be able to establish themselves under their protection. Both the most likely and most desirable such patron, in Aaronsohn's estimation, was Great Britain.

STEWART NEWCOMBE WAS a legendary figure in the Near East, although not in a uniformly positive way. At the age of thirty-five, the Boer War veteran had already surveyed and mapped vast tracts of Egypt and the Sudan for the British government, and had gained the reputation of being an indefatigable explorer, capable of the work of ten ordinary men. That was part of the problem. Due to his habit of driving others as hard as he drove himself, the Arabs who worked with him in the coming war would say of Captain Stewart Newcombe that "he was like fire, burning both his friends and enemies."

Not surprisingly then, Newcombe had been in a rather black mood as he left his camp in the Zin Desert on the morning of January 8 and made for Beersheva, a day's camel ride away. He was going there to meet up with the two eminent archaeologists, lately working on a dig in northern Syria, who had been a.s.signed to his mission in southern Palestine. Although he fully appreciated the need for the archaeologists-they were the political cover that would allow his five military mapping teams to do their clandestine work-this operation was designed to be a fast-moving one over an unspeakably harsh landscape, and tending to the needs of two Oxford scholars was the last thing Newcombe needed. He had earlier sent ten camels to meet their boat in Gaza to transport their gear-archaeologists always had lots of gear-and he was coming out of the desert with more to handle the inevitable overflow.

A very pleasant surprise awaited him in Beersheva. "I expected to meet two somewhat elderly people; [instead] I found C. L. Woolley and T. E. Lawrence, who looked about twenty-four years of age and eighteen respectively.... My letters to them arranging for their reception had clearly been too polite. Undue deference ceased forthwith."

Far from needing a small camel caravan to haul their equipment, when Lawrence and Woolley had come off the boat in Gaza, accompanied by Lawrence's young a.s.sistant Dahoum, all their possessions had fit neatly onto the back of one small donkey. That had now been expanded somewhat by the purchase of camping and photographic supplies, but clearly the two young archaeologists appreciated the need for traveling light on the brutal terrain they were about to enter.

That evening, Newcombe spelled out to the men from Syria both what they were expected to do and the sub rosa purpose of the expedition. On this latter aspect, Lawrence had already pretty well figured things out. "We are obviously only meant as red herrings," he had written his parents en route to Palestine, "to give an archaeological colour to a political job."

That political job arose from a problem that Great Britain had largely brought upon itself. As the European power most dependent on control of the seas, Britain had been the driving force behind the construction of the Suez Ca.n.a.l in Egypt in the 1870s, seeing the linking of the Mediterranean to the Red Sea as a vital military and commercial shortcut in keeping its far-flung empire knitted together. So vital did it deem the ca.n.a.l that Britain had been willing to sacrifice its long-standing good relations with the Ottoman Empire in order to take possession of it outright, a feat accomplished by its 1882 invasion of Egypt under the pretext of quelling local unrest. That had delivered up the west bank of the Suez Ca.n.a.l, Egypt's de facto frontier, but it left the now hostile Ottomans still hovering on its east bank in the Sinai Peninsula. This problem was soon resolved; in 1906, Britain had capitalized on a minor diplomatic dispute to grab that territory also. The end result was something of a trade-off. The British now had their ca.n.a.l, along with the 120-mile-wide buffer zone of the Sinai Peninsula separating Egypt from the heavily settled Palestine region of southwest Syria. On the flip side, they had won the undying resentment of the Ottomans.

That was a small price to pay in 1882 and 1906, perhaps, but a rather different story by the beginning of 1914. With Europe stumbling ever closer toward a continent-wide war, the British were suddenly quite concerned by the sorry state of British-Ottoman relations, and by ominous signs that Constantinople was sliding into the orbit of Britain's avowed enemy, Germany. If the war everyone expected did come, the Suez Ca.n.a.l would be the crucial pa.s.sageway for bringing British territorial troops from India and Australia to Europe; of course, if Turkey joined with Germany in that war, they would undoubtedly target the ca.n.a.l for this same reason. Britain's problems wouldn't end there. In the event that the enemy succeeded in crossing the ca.n.a.l and getting into Egypt itself, it was very likely to spark an anti-British insurrection by a population that thoroughly despised them, tying up British soldiers who would be needed for the fight in Europe.

In contemplating this scenario the British belatedly came to appreciate the downside to their Sinai buffer zone, one inherent to the very concept of buffer zones: how to know what lies on the other side? The British had a very good idea of what lay at the Sinai's northeastern tip-the populous and long-cultivated region of the Palestine coast-but they knew virtually nothing of the desert frontier that ran southeast from that coast to the Gulf of Aqaba, one hundred miles away. Were there roads there, water wells that might sustain an invasion force?

The person most preoccupied with finding out was Egypt's de facto ruler, the British agent and consul general, Horatio Herbert Kitchener. By 1914, Lord Kitchener was Britain's preeminent living war hero-he had crushed a native revolt in the Sudan during the Mahdi War in 1898, then led British forces to victory in the Boer War in 1902-but by one of those peculiar happenstances of history, as a young man Kitchener had been a geographical surveyor, and his crowning achievement was the mapping of Palestine. The one corner of Palestine that Kitchener and his cosurveyors had skipped over was the desolate wastelands of Zin-essentially the triangle-shaped lower half of modern-day Israel-the survey sponsors figuring there was simply no political or economic reason to include it. But it was precisely this unmapped triangle that now lay on the other side of the Sinai buffer zone.

Considering the enmity that had developed between the two empires, Kitchener had shown remarkable chutzpah in 1913 when "offering" the Ottomans the services of the British Royal Engineers to conduct a survey of Zin; unsurprisingly, Constantinople quickly turned the offer down. By happy coincidence, however, Zin also figured prominently in the biblical Book of Exodus, the region that Moses and the Israelites pa.s.sed through at the end of their forty-year flight out of Egypt. This provided a handy theological and historical explanation for why a Christian nation might want to explore the region, and when the British tried this tack on Constantinople-repackaging their earlier offer so that it was now to be an archaeological survey of biblical sites under the auspices of the respected Palestine Exploration Fund-the ploy actually worked. It was this ruse that had brought Lawrence and Woolley to Beersheva, and that gave Newcombe the necessary cover for his military mapping teams.

Very quickly, whatever initial reservations Newcombe may have harbored at being saddled with the two archaeologists were erased. In Lawrence especially, he seemed to find a kindred spirit, a man so indifferent to creature comforts and possessed of such astounding endurance that it bordered on the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic.

He also detected a curious quirk in Lawrence's personality, a tendency to rise out of his core shyness in response to those who would obfuscate or stand in his way. An early example of this was his verbal torturing of the poor American oilmen in Beersheva. Most shy people tend to become more so when faced with a potentially confrontational situation, but with Lawrence and the Americans it had been precisely the opposite, the young archaeologist turning the encounter into a game of cat-and-mouse, with himself playing the cat. It indicated a streak of gamesmans.h.i.+p in Lawrence, a quality that would stand him in good stead as he faced off with the petty Ottoman officials who, Newcombe was sure, would try to obstruct their every move.

But in fact, far more than the Ottomans, it was the "Wilderness" of Zin itself that posed the greatest challenges to Lawrence and Woolley. Operating independently of the military survey teams, although frequently checked in on by Newcombe, they maintained a relentless pace over the bleak terrain, driving their camels and small team of camp orderlies to the point of ruin. At least these locals were accustomed to the region; coming from the more temperate climes of northern Syria, Lawrence and Woolley suffered terribly in the parched and sunbaked land.

These discomforts might have been partially offset if they'd found what they came to look for. They didn't. Instead, other than a few ruins dating from the Byzantine period or later, they found very few structures at all in the region-and certainly nothing suggesting an Exodus-era settlement.

But then there had always been something of a built-in fallacy to the Zin project, one the Ottomans might have deduced if they'd pondered matters a bit longer. In a landscape so inhospitable that even the hardy Bedouin nomads abandoned it in summer, why would Moses and the Israelites-forty years wandering in the desert and presumably eager to finally get somewhere nice-have lingered in this h.e.l.lhole any longer than necessary? This was a point Lawrence touched on in a somewhat arch letter to his parents: "The Palestine Fund, of course, wants to find sites ill.u.s.trating the Exodus, which is supposed to have pa.s.sed this way. But of course a people 40 years out of Egypt could hardly leave much trace of themselves in their later camping grounds."

ON THE MORNING of November 12, 1913, Curt Prfer made a most painful decision. For a brief time it had appeared that he might finally attain the respect and status he had always sought-as a scholar, as a sterling example of the new Germany-but then it had all turned to ash. Actually, it was worse than that, for in the bitter struggle waged over his candidacy to a prestigious position in the Egyptian power structure, Prfer's British enemies had not only made sure he was denied the post, but professionally destroyed him in the process. On that morning, Prfer sat at his desk in the German emba.s.sy and composed a terse letter of resignation from the foreign ministry, the inst.i.tution that had been his home for the previous seven years. A few days later, the now former emba.s.sy official left for Jerusalem, there to await the arrival of his artist friend Richard von Below for their extended journey up the Nile.

In one of the more curious features of the European imperialist era, the dueling European powers often employed an intricate division-of-spoils system in their colonial realms with their imperial rivals, a way both to secure acceptance of their claims to hegemony and reduce those rivals' incentive for stirring local unrest.

From the standpoint of scholarly prestige, few foreigner-allotted positions in Cairo were more coveted than that of director of the khedival library. Since the signing of a bilateral accord in 1906, that post was reserved for a German. In late 1911, with the sitting German director slated for retirement, the German emba.s.sy put forward the name of Dr. Curt Prfer as his replacement.

Its innocuous-sounding t.i.tle notwithstanding, the post was a very sensitive one. In Ottoman times, the khedive had been the designated Egyptian head of state, and for the British to maintain the fiction that they had somehow been acting as a guarantor of Ottoman rule by their 1882 invasion, they had kept the khedive on as a figurehead. Since 1892, this had been Abbas Hilmi II. While Abbas was understandably never a big supporter of British rule to begin with, his dissatisfaction had dramatically deepened with Lord Kitchener's arrival on the scene in 1911. As the new British agent to Egypt, Kitchener had quickly grown so tired of Abbas-or as he preferred to call him, "this wicked little khedive"-that he'd begun stripping him of even his purely ceremonial duties. In response, Abbas had increasingly taken to using the offices of his "library" to stay in quiet contact with a host of Egyptian dissidents opposed to British rule.

Of course, what was bad for Britain was good for Germany, and by their control of the library directors.h.i.+p the Germans enjoyed the perfect cover to cultivate and maintain their own contacts with the anti-British Egyptian community. This was precisely what the outgoing German director had done, and in late 1911 the British had every expectation that Dr. Curt Prfer, now promoted from dragoman to Oriental secretary at the German emba.s.sy, would uphold the tradition.

Certainly, Prfer had done little to endear himself to the British authorities in Cairo, having continued with the pan-Islamic destabilizing efforts of his mentor, Max von Oppenheim. Most alarming to the Cairo authorities, Prfer had long maintained a close relations.h.i.+p with a host of anti-British Egyptian figures, as well as with the disgruntled khedive himself. Indeed, on several occasions, Egyptian secret police had tracked the good doctor to clandestine meetings with some of British Egypt's most committed and dangerous enemies.

Consequently, placing such a man in the khedival library seemed a bit like putting an arsonist in a fireworks factory; shortly after Prfer's name was put forward, the British diplomatically informed the Germans that his candidacy was "unsuitable." The Germans pressed their case, with the German amba.s.sador in Cairo taking his spirited defense of Prfer's nomination directly to Kitchener. At the end of October 1911 the German amba.s.sador to Great Britain, Count Paul Metternich, took the matter all the way up to British foreign secretary Edward Grey.

But the more the Germans pushed on the Prfer issue, the more suspicious the British became. In early 1912, Kitchener informed the German emba.s.sy that the issue had been referred to the Egyptian government's Ministry of Education, where Prfer's candidacy had been rejected anew. It was an utterly transparent maneuver-the so-called Egyptian government would do exactly Britain's bidding-but it did finally bring an end to the matter. For Prfer, it was a professionally devastating turn of events. Not only had he been publicly humiliated in losing the directors.h.i.+p, but with the intelligence reports of his intrigues now well known throughout the British government, he was effectively prevented from advancing further at the German emba.s.sy in Cairo.

But that was the least of it. However much the elitist structure of German society had been reformed in other spheres, those changes had not permeated into the diplomatic branch of the foreign ministry; in 1912, as in 1812, that branch was the province of the German aristocracy, its counts and princelings and n.o.blemen. Indeed, no better example existed of the near impossibility of an outsider being admitted to this exclusive club than the long and futile struggle of Prfer's mentor, Count von Oppenheim.

Although highly educated and clearly brilliant, Oppenheim possessed one fatal flaw in the eyes of the German diplomatic branch-he was of Jewish ancestry-and that had been enough to defeat his many efforts over some two decades to win a transfer from the far less prestigious consular branch. He probably came closest in 1898, when his request was accompanied by a raft of supporting letters from gentile German aristocrats, friends of his from the Union Club in Berlin, except that Oppenheim had the misfortune of submitting his pet.i.tion at the same time as another Jew. In the entire history of the German diplomatic service there had been only one Jewish member, a Rothschild, and the notion that there might suddenly be two more cast alarm.

"I am absolutely persuaded," a senior foreign ministry official wrote in response to the situation, "that what we have here is not a question of one Jew, but of his numerous coreligionists who will press through the breach which he makes.... If [even] one is let in, a cry of lamentation will ensue if others are refused." On such concerns, both applications were promptly denied.

On paper, the chances of Curt Prfer-a lower-middle-cla.s.s commoner with a doctorate from a middling university-pa.s.sing into the foreign ministry's higher ranks looked nearly as bleak as Oppenheim's, but his Oriental secretary appointment had afforded a glimmer of hope; this was the one consular branch position where an elevation into the diplomatic branch occasionally occurred. Obviously, the odds of that happening would have been vastly improved had Prfer a.s.sumed the library directors.h.i.+p. Conversely, having fought for that posting and lost, his odds now were exactly nil.