the city from the unprotected desert, and
to do that, he led his men on an
audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up
from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian
desert, and then back down toward
Aqaba. This was in summer, through
some of the most inhospitable land in the
Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a
side trip to the outskirts of Damascus in
order to mislead the Turks about his
intentions. “This year the valley seemed
creeping with horned vipers and puff-
adders, cobras and black snakes,”
Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of
Wisdom about one stage in the journey:
We could not lightly draw water after