Close Shot. Tafas is eating a fist full of rancid mutton fat. Lawrence is eating thin arrowroot biscuits which he extracts from their package and eats as neatly as if he were in a vicarage…Tafas looks at Lawrence with a complex of emotions. He takes up his fat and has a brilliant idea. He hands it over eagerly. He laughs deprecatively at the mutton. Lawrence thrusts out his hand and takes a piece and puts it in his mouth, watched anxiously by Tafas. There is no comedy, and from the steely concentration of his face we see that the flesh is indeed mortified.
-Robert Bolt, Lawrence of Arabia filmscript
Bolt’s shot directions make me wonder how British explorer Leo Tregenza might have acted if his Ma’aza guide Salama Mir’i had done to him what in the opening scene Tafas did to Lawrence, offer to share with him bedouin food instead of the individual rations he ate apart. Salama told me this story fifty years after he’d led Tregenza up the wadis of Egypt’s Red Sea Mountains to the Roman quarry of Mons Porphyrites, Tregenza eating tinned bully beef while Salama and I ate bread baked on coals and slathered with ghee in those same mountains.