Book 4, Letter 3, Part 1 of 3 To Epictetus, on a full moon night.

Dear Epictetus,

A man cannot learn what he thinks he already knows.

My dear friend, my teacher from beyond the grave, how I long to spend an hour with you. A moment in your company would allow me the opportunity to listen, to absorb the presence of your living wisdom. There is only so much I can gain from the written word, and so in my mind I have planted a garden.

In my mind I have built a seat.

In my mind I find you sitting there among the students and teachers, the young and old, women and men, the children too. I look for you among the crowd and I hear you say something that arrests my heart and mind and I feel as though I am a deer caught in the yellow eyed stare of a wolf.

I am a guilty man caught in flagrante by the grip of your words.

A man cannot learn what he thinks he already knows.

Everyone falls silent in the shadow of your voice.

Yet, I can hear Socrates murmur beside me, another of his unanswerable questions.

Can a man really know what he thinks he knows?

Someone in the crowd laughs...Shut up Socrates!

I stop, caught up in the rebellion of questioning Socrates. Does Socrates assume that he he knows nothing, and thereby, can he never know the truth of his own knowledge?

If Socrates thinks that he knows that he already knows nothing.......then really, he cannot know anything at all about nothing.

I stop and look around for Aspasia; if Socrates is here, then surely she must be somewhere nearby.

Ryokan, the Japanese Zen monk, who can read my mind, laughs quietly. He was sitting only a few feet away, but he was so unobtrusive with his head bowed and fingers fiddling with a glass marble, that I did not see him, did not recognise him.

I look up and see, shining down upon us all, a beautiful, full moon.

It is crowded in my garden tonight, Epictetus. I came here to speak to you, but I find that I have nothing to say.  I only wish to listen...

Book 4, Letter 2, Part 4 of 4 To T E Lawrence, on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

It is through adversity that we come to know our strengths, and he who is never tested can only know the shallowness of his private striving. To say that we live in trying times is obvious, for we have always lived in trying times, my study of history reveals the truth that the world is always ending in some way, and always being reborn. My current era is no different from your own Mr Lawrence, and your years of struggle in the Arab desert give me continual comfort to know that a man (or woman), may face such suffering, and through those experiences, come to know their own strengths.

The sign on the door

to my heart says:

Business As Usual

-only now,

I may prove my heart worthy

not only of my own ideals and goals

but now,

also,

I may prove myself worthy

of being called a man

of virtue

in a time of

calamity.

- Me

I am a poet, not a warrior with a rifle. My struggle is against apathy. My goal is the liberation of my own mind and heart, and through the beauty of my language, I may share this liberation with others, and offer an open door through which they may pass into their own freedom. To describe the struggles of my simple civilised life, through peace and calamity, and to make beautiful music from whatever events may transpire, seems a worthy use of my talents.

But what exactly is this 'liberty' of which I speak? What is this freedom that I strive towards? There are many kinds of freedom, and not all of them are good, but you, Mr Lawrence, I think perhaps that you found something very important early in your long adventure, in the ruins of a Roman settlement.

From Chapter III

The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly. A first knowledge of their sense of the purity of rarefaction was given me in early years, when we had ridden far out over the rolling plains of North Syria to a ruin of the Roman period which the Arabs believed was made by a prince of the border as a desert-palace for his queen. The clay of its building was said to have been kneaded for greater richness, not with water, but with the precious essential oils of flowers. My guides, sniffing the air like dogs, led me from crumbling room to room, saying, 'This is jessamine, this violet, this rose'.

But at last Dahoum drew me: 'Come and smell the very sweetest scent of all', and we went into the main lodging, to the gaping window sockets of its eastern face, and there drank with open mouths of the effortless, empty, eddyless wind of the desert, throbbing past. That slow breath had been born somewhere beyond the distant Euphrates and had dragged its way across many days and nights of dead grass, to its first obstacle, the man-made walls of our broken palace. About them it seemed to fret and linger, murmuring in baby-speech. 'This,' they told me, 'is the best: it has no taste.' My Arabs were turning their backs on perfumes and luxuries to choose the things in which mankind had had no share or part.

The Bedouin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free. He lost material ties, comforts, all superfluities and other complications to achieve a personal liberty which haunted starvation and death. He saw no virtue in poverty herself: he enjoyed the little vices and luxuries—coffee, fresh water, women—which he could still preserve. In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness. There was no human effort, no fecundity in Nature: just the heaven above and the unspotted earth beneath. There unconsciously he came near God. God was to him not anthropomorphic, not tangible, not moral nor ethical, not concerned with the world or with him, not natural: but the being, thus qualified not by divestiture but by investiture, a comprehending Being, the egg of all activity, with nature and matter just a glass reflecting Him.

I could go on and on, quoting passages from your book, and perhaps I will write another letter, you certainly deserve more than one conversation. I have carried your book with me for months, sharing passages with anyone who will listen to me read. I have breathed life into the dry pages and found in your story a vigour and stimulation that has encouraged me to face my own life with greater courage.

I cannot thank you enough.

With gratitude and respect

Morgan.

Book 4, Letter 2, Part 3 of 4 To T E Lawrence, on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

To read a book such as yours, is to have you as a friend with me everywhere. While my children talk of their games, while my friends talk of music, you speak of the great and terrible trials of life on the march...

From Chapter LXXXI

Step by step I was yielding myself to a slow ache which conspired with my abating fever and the numb monotony of riding to close up the gate of my senses. I seemed at last approaching the insensibility which had always been beyond my reach: but a delectable land: for one born so slug-tissued that nothing this side of fainting would let his spit free. Now I found myself dividing into parts. There was one which went on riding wisely, sparing or helping every pace of the wearied camel. Another hovering above and to the right bent down curiously, and asked what the flesh was doing. The flesh gave no answer, for indeed, it was conscious only of a ruling impulse to keep on and on: but a third garrulous one talked and wondered, critical of the body's self-inflicted labour, and contemptuous of the reason for effort.

...The spent body toiled on doggedly and took no heed, quite rightly, for the divided selves said nothing which I was not capable of thinking in cold blood: they were all my natives. Telesius, taught by some such experience, split up the soul. Had he gone on, to the furthest limit of exhaustion, he would have seen his conceived regiment of thoughts and acts and feelings ranked around him as separate creatures; eyeing, like vultures, the passing in their midst of the common thing which gave them life.

So, Mr Lawrence, I took your mention of Telesius and did a little further reading, and while I did not find reference to his division of the soul, I did find such a reference from Xenophon, (which I will discuss in a later letter to Xenophon). However, I found my own way to this idea some years ago, taught by my own experience:

From: Indivisible From Magic 

I cast a magic spell today, a kind of magic mirror, or mirrors I suppose, that lets me see all the parts of myself as if we were a circle of friends, facing inwards. Anxiety, doubt, courage, creativity, all the others, all the old gang together under one roof. When they speak, now they speak to me, not through me, and in their overt gestures I can see machinations, hear clever word games and no longer am I their unwilling conspirator in the complication of my inner life.

So now that I can see them, I can speak to them by name, and when they assert their ignorance and call it experience, I can say to them...I know you. I see you. I know your NAME. Though at first the circle only had a few recognisable forms, the number of faces and names is increasing, while their unseen, Unseely voices grow tired with even their own games, as I, as I, step into the light of their acceptance.

The above is from my second blog, Indivisible from Magic. I am fascinated by the creative powers of the human mind, and the division of the identity into separate parts in order to cope with extremes of stress or trauma, seems to me to be worthy of deep study. Dissociative Identity Disorder, true cases of which are exceedingly rare, still stands up as a shining example of this power of the mind to invent coping mechanisms. My own experience is not an example of this medical phenomenon, but rather an expression of my own need to see and feel more than my sober mind can ordinarily conceive.

But this is not about me, your story is far worthier of recounting. For before this episode of exhaustion and mental separation, you suffered a trauma more common to men than is commonly discussed.

From Chapter LXXX

Soon after dark three men came for me. It had seemed a chance to get away, but one held me all the time. I cursed my littleness. Our march crossed the railway, where were six tracks, besides the sidings of the engine-shop. We went through a side gate, down a street, past a square, to a detached, two-storied house. There was a sentry outside, and a glimpse of others lolling in the dark entry. They took me upstairs to the Bey's room; or to his bedroom, rather. He was another bulky man, a Circassian himself, perhaps, and sat on the bed in a night-gown, trembling and sweating as though with fever. When I was pushed in he kept his head down, and waved the guard out. In a breathless voice he told me to sit on the floor in front of him, and after that was dumb; while I gazed at the top of his great head, on which the bristling hair stood up, no longer than the dark stubble on his cheeks and chin. At last he looked me over, and told me to stand up: then to turn round. I obeyed; he flung himself back on the bed, and dragged me down with him in his arms. When I saw what he wanted I twisted round and up again, glad to find myself equal to him, at any rate in wrestling.

He began to fawn on me, saying how white and fresh I was, how fine my hands and feet, and how he would let me off drills and duties, make me his orderly, even pay me wages, if I would love him.

I was obdurate, so he changed his tone, and sharply ordered me to take off my drawers. When I hesitated, he snatched at me; and I pushed him back. He clapped his hands for the sentry, who hurried in and pinioned me. The Bey cursed me with horrible threats: and made the man holding me tear my clothes away, bit by bit. His eyes rounded at the half-healed places where the bullets had flicked through my skin a little while ago. Finally he lumbered to his feet, with a glitter in his look, and began to paw me over. I bore it for a little, till he got too beastly; and then jerked my knee into him.

He staggered to his bed, squeezing himself together and groaning with pain, while the soldier shouted for the corporal and the other three men to grip me hand and foot. As soon as I was helpless the Governor regained courage, and spat at me, swearing he would make me ask pardon. He took off his slipper, and hit me repeatedly with it in the face, while the corporal braced my head back by the hair to receive the blows. He leaned forward, fixed his teeth in my neck and bit till the blood came. Then he kissed me. Afterwards he drew one of the men's bayonets. I thought he was going to kill me, and was sorry: but he only pulled up a fold of the flesh over my ribs, worked the point through, after considerable trouble, and gave the blade a half-turn. This hurt, and I winced, while the blood wavered down my side, and dripped to the front of my thigh. He looked pleased and dabbled it over my stomach with his finger-tips.

In my despair I spoke. His face changed and he stood still, then controlled his voice with an effort, to say significantly, 'You must understand that I know: and it will be easier if you do as I wish'. I was dumbfounded, and we stared silently at one another, while the men who felt an inner meaning beyond their experience, shifted uncomfortably. But it was evidently a chance shot, by which he himself did not, or would not, mean what I feared. I could not again trust my twitching mouth, which faltered always in emergencies, so at last threw up my chin, which was the sign for 'No' in the East; then he sat down, and half-whispered to the corporal to take me out and teach me everything.

They kicked me to the head of the stairs, and stretched me over a guard-bench, pommelling me. Two knelt on my ankles, bearing down on the back of my knees, while two more twisted my wrists till they cracked, and then crushed them and my neck against the wood. The corporal had run downstairs; and now came back with a whip of the Circassian sort, a thong of supple black hide, rounded, and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver) down to a hard point finer than a pencil.

He saw me shivering, partly I think, with cold, and made it whistle over my ear, taunting me that before his tenth cut I would howl for mercy, and at the twentieth beg for the caresses of the Bey; and then he began to lash me madly across and across with all his might, while I locked my teeth to endure this thing which lapped itself like flaming wire about my body.

To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count, and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I had prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of my whole being by some too-great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, to clash terribly together. Somewhere in the place a cheap clock ticked loudly, and it distressed me that their beating was not in its time. I writhed and twisted, but was held so tightly that my struggles were useless. After the corporal ceased, the men took up, very deliberately, giving me so many, and then an interval, during which they would squabble for the next turn, ease themselves, and play unspeakably with me. This was repeated often, for what may have been no more than ten minutes. Always for the first of every new series, my head would be pulled round, to see how a hard white ridge, like a railway, darkening slowly into crimson, leaped over my skin at the instant of each stroke, with a bead of blood where two ridges crossed. As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. They soon conquered my determination not to cry, but while my will ruled my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful sickness choked my utterance.

At last when I was completely broken they seemed satisfied. Somehow I found myself off the bench, lying on my back on the dirty floor, where I snuggled down, dazed, panting for breath, but vaguely comfortable. I had strung myself to learn all pain until I died, and no longer actor, but spectator, thought not to care how my body jerked and squealed. Yet I knew or imagined what passed about me.

I remembered the corporal kicking with his nailed boot to get me up; and this was true, for next day my right side was dark and lacerated, and a damaged rib made each breath stab me sharply. I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me: and then that he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin. This doubled me half-over, screaming, or, rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. One giggled with amusement. A voice cried, 'Shame, you've killed him'. Another slash followed. A roaring, and my eyes went black: while within me the core of life seemed to heave slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang.

By the bruises perhaps they beat me further: but I next knew that I was being dragged about by two men, each disputing over a leg as though to split me apart: while a third man rode me astride. It was momently better than more flogging. Then Nahi called. They splashed water in my face, wiped off some of the filth, and lifted me between them, retching and sobbing for mercy, to where he lay: but he now rejected me in haste, as a thing too torn and bloody for his bed, blaming their excess of zeal which had spoilt me: whereas no doubt they had laid into me much as usual, and the fault rested mainly upon my indoor skin, which gave way more than an Arab's.

So the crestfallen corporal, as the youngest and best-looking of the guard, had to stay behind, while the others carried me down the narrow stair into the street. The coolness of the night on my burning flesh, and the unmoved shining of the stars after the horror of the past hour, made me cry again. The soldiers, now free to speak, warned me that men must suffer their officers' wishes or pay for it, as I had just done, with greater suffering.

They took me over an open space, deserted and dark, and behind the Government house to a lean-to wooden room, in which were many dusty quilts. An Armenian dresser appeared, to wash and bandage me in sleepy haste. Then all went away, the last soldier delaying by my side a moment to whisper in his Druse accent that the door into the next room was not locked.

I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed, and a locomotive whistled in the station. These and a draining thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy. Had I now been drugged with it, to bewilderment? Yet the first movement was anguish: in which I struggled nakedly to my feet, and rocked moaning in wonder that it was not a dream, and myself back five years ago, a timid recruit at Khalfati, where something, less staining, of the sort had happened.

The next room was a dispensary. On its door hung a suit of shoddy clothes. I put them on slowly and unhandily, because of my swollen wrists: and from the drugs chose corrosive sublimate, as safeguard against recapture. The window looked on a long blank wall. Stiffly I climbed out, and went shaking down the road towards the village, past the few people already astir. They took no notice; indeed there was nothing peculiar in my dark broadcloth, red fez and slippers: but it was only by the full urge of my tongue silently to myself that I refrained from being foolish out of sheer fright. Deraa felt inhuman with vice and cruelty, and it shocked me like cold water when a soldier laughed behind me in the street.

So, Lawrence, you escaped, but it was not to return to the comfort of your home, but merely to return to the camaraderie of the war, and to your own soldiers. I marvel that you survived at all, but this was just an episode, just a chapter, and there was much more to come.

Book 4, Letter 2, Part 2 of 4 To T E Lawrence, on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

From Chapter XXXIV

The stone itself was glistening, yellow, sunburned stuff; metallic is ring and brittle; splitting red or green or brown as the case might be. From ever soft place sprouted thorn bushes; and there was frequent grass, usually growing from one root in a dozen stout blades, knee high and straw coloured: the heads were empty ears between many-feathered arrows of silver down. With these, and with a shorter grass, whose bottle-brush heads of pearly grey reached only to the ankle, the hill sides were furred white and bowed themselves lowly towards us with each puff of the casual wind.

I could describe my own home in very similar terms. I live in a rocky, hilly region, not so distant from the flat lowlands, that  grapevines cannot be seen. I often find myself caught breathless by the sudden beauty of windswept grasslands, or the graceful passing shadows of clouds rushing over the land pushed by the invisible hands of giants in the sky. I often reflect on the phrase attributed to Jesus Christ 'Split a log and you will find me, lift a stone and I am there'. It seems obvious to me that divinity is here on earth in the ordinary moments of nature. It is a divinity too big for religion.

Life, is too big for religion.

So, on and on I read, each morning a chapter, each evening two chapters, and I find myself smiling at the remarkable, but ordinary truths of the world that you reveal with the written word and bring to life in my imagination. Like the story (Chapter XL)of the two young men, Daud the hasty and his love fellow, Farraj; a beautiful, soft framed girlish creature with innocent, smooth face and swimming eyes.

They were an instance of the eastern boy and boy affection which the segregation of women made inevitable. Such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. When innocent they were hot and unashamed. If sexuality entered, they passed into a give and take, unspiritual relation, like marriage.

It is wonderful to read you open minded views of homosexual relations, and strange that this was 1916-17, when now, in 2020 in the same region of the world, men are being imprisoned or exiled for the crime of loving their fellow man. I have mentioned that I am a musician; well, I was drumming for a dancer at the opening of a new restaurant in the central markets of my home city. The restaurant owner had fled his home in Iran to escape persecution for his sexual orientation.

I live in such an age, that stories of homosexuality in the middle east are almost always about persecution. Even in my own country, the laws have only changed so recently that the celebrations have yet to fully fade away. However, on the topic, I thought I would bring up the subject of the Cocek dancers of Turkey, since they are a fascinating slice of homosexual history that is largely unknown.

Flourishing between the 17^th & 19^th centuries, the Cocek dancers were young boys, trained from about eight years of age. They were very popular with the male audiences for their provocative and sexual performances, with fights and even killings resulting from duels to win the sexual favours of these boys, who were also prostitutes, as is common throughout history among dancers. (Though not so much any more – with modern dancers having worked hard to separate themselves from the oldest profession).

Cocek dancers - Wikipedia

The dance was eventually outlawed due to these violent outbursts, yet the rhythms they danced to are as popular as ever among both traditional folk groups and modern gypsy fusion troupes.

*

Your book is as much about desert culture as it is about the war, and I delighted to find your description of tradition coffee making. Sitting around the fire with your companions after another long day of riding through the desert....

From Chapter XLV

While we talked the roasted coffee was dropped with three grains of cardamom into the mortar. Abdulla brayed it; with the dring-drang, dring-drang pestle strokes of village Nejd, two equal pairs of legato beats...

...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), when there came a volley from the shadowy dunes east of us and one of the Ageyl toppled forward into the centre of the firelit circle with a screech.

This is one of the fascinating parts of your work, Mr Lawrence. You take the time to describe the moments of peace and the beautiful landscapes, grasslands, herds of camels and the soldiers in their daily routines, and at the same time you do not sugar coat the reality of the war you were fighting.

Even sitting down to coffee could be a deadly affair.

Mohammed, with his massive foot thrust a wave of sand over the fire and in the quick blinding darkness we rolled behind bands of tamarisk and scattered to get rifles, while our outlying pickets began to return fire, aiming hurriedly towards the flashes, we had unlimited ammunition, and did not stint to show it.

Gradually the enemy slackened, astonished perhaps at our preparedness. Finally his fire stopped, and we held our own, listening for a rush or for attack from a new quarter. For half an hour we lay still; and silent, but for the groans and at last the death struggle of the man hit with the first volley. Then we were impatient of waiting longer. Zaal went out to report what was happening to the enemy. After another half-hour he called to us that no one was left within reach. They had ridden away: about twenty of them, in his trained opinion.

My coffee last night was served with crushed ice and blended to a thick and sweet foam, which I sipped calmly as the sun set and I sat writing at my desk. My ten year old son played on the floor nearby, building a Kraken monster from Lego and showing me with dramatic glee how its tentacles could wrap around the hull and mast of a sailing ship. A friend of mine, a calligrapher and student of linguistics at the local university, came for dinner and we spent out evening talking about music and language. My son told us a story he had made up about a wizard who accidentally created a monster who consumed the powers of other magical beings and artifacts in order to grow stronger. The beast had the power to alter reality, or in my son's actual words: To make air where once there was only water, or to make fruit where once there was only a desert.

Just as you, Mr Lawrence, have an influence on me and on my writing, so I have raised my son to appreciate the dramatic arts and to create magic with his words.

Book 4, Letter 2, Part 1 of 4 To T E Lawrence, on the Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Dear Mr Lawrence,

I am very nervous as I begin this letter, deeply aware of the literary pedestal upon which history has placed you, deservedly, as an author of great merit and a man possessed of both wisdom and courage. I received a copy of your book, The seven pillars of wisdom from my father and I began reading it during a period in which he lay in a hospital bed suffering from a terrible stomach ailment. He nearly died. I read a few sections to him, the first of which I will quote here:

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.

I have read this passage to friends at the dinner table, I have quoted it in letters to my many living correspondents, I even read it out to the men at the barber shop, so taken was I with this passage and so eager was I to share with any who might listen this powerful statement of purpose so meaningfully placed within the introduction to your book.

But there is more than inspiring philosophy and poetic turns of phrase in your book, which is a remarkable account of your personal experiences of the Arab revolt. I half expected it to be a history of the war much like other histories: an accounting of the movements of armies and the deployment of arms, the counting of the dead and the cruel manipulations of political back room dealings. Instead I find that you have written a deeply personal, and heartbreakingly beautiful account of a people and a landscape that no longer exists in my world. Not truly.

In these pages the history is not of the Arab movement, but of me in it. It is a narrative of daily life, mean happenings, little people. Here are no lessons for the world, no disclosures to shock peoples. It is filled with trivial things, partly that no one mistake for history the bones from which some day a man may make history, and partly for the pleasure it gave me to recall the fellowship of the revolt.

Your humility is startling, and equal only to your audacity. Not only in your actions themselves which are a tale of courage and genius, but in your recounting of their minute details and the exquisite beauty of the landscape and the culture you so wholeheartedly devoted yourself to understanding. I will not write a letter to you expressing my admiration of every part of your book, (my letter might become a facsimile of every page) but, as I am a musician, I will begin by highlighting those few peculiar mentions you have made of the music and poetry of the Arabs you rode, and fought with.

From Chapter IX

In the evening Abdulla came to dine with Colonel Wilson. We received him in the courtyard on the house steps. Behind him were his brilliant household servants and slaves and behind them a pale crew of emaciated, bearded men with woe-begone faces, wearing tatters of military uniform, and carrying tarnished brass instruments of music. Abdulla waved his hand towards the and crowed with delight, 'My Band'. We sat them on benches in the forecourt an, and Wilson send them cigarettes, while we went up to the dining room, where the shuttered balcony was opened right out, hungrily, for a sea breeze. As we sat down, the band, under the guns and swords of Abdulla's retainers, began, each instrument apart, to play heartbroken Turkish airs. Our ears ached with noise, but Abdulla beamed.

...We got tired of Turkish music, and asked for German. Aziz stepped out on the balcony and called down to the bandsmen in Turkish to play us something foreign. The struck shakily into 'Deutchland uber Alles' just as the Sherif came to his telephone in Mecca to listen to the music of our feast. We asked for more German music; and they played 'Eine feste Burg'. Then in the midst they died away into a flabby discord of drums. The parchment had stretched in the damp air of Judda. They cried for fire; and Wilson's servants and Abdulla's bodyguard brought them piles of straw and packing cases. They warmed the drums, turning them round and round before the blaze, and then broke into what they said was the Hymn of Hate, though no one could recognise a European progression in it at all. Sayed Ali tuned to Abdulla and said, 'It is a death march'. Abdulla's eyes widened; but Storrs who spoke in quickl to the rescue turned the moment to laughter; and we sent out rewards with the leavings of the feast to the sorrowful musicians, who could take no pleasure in our praises, but begged to be sent home.

This rather grimy description of worn out military musicians is tempered somewhat by the more lively tale of the soldiers around their campfires, making music for themselves.

From Chapter XXXIX

Each evening round the fires they had music, not the monotonous open throated roaring of the tribes, nor the exciting harmony of the Ageyl, but the falsetto quarter tones and trills of urban Syria. Malaud had musicians in his unit; and bashful soldiers were brought up each evening to play guitars and sing café songs of Damascus or the love verses of their villages. In Abdulla's tent, where I was lodged, distance, the ripple of the fragrant outpouring of water, and the tree leaves softened the music, so that it became dully pleasant to the ear.

...Nesib and his friends had a swaying rhythm in which they would chant these songs, putting all hope and passion into the words, their pale Damascus faces moon-large in the firelight, sweating. The soldier camp would grow dead silent till the last stanza ended, and then from every man would come a sighing, longing echo of the last note.