Jackson Bentley: What is it, Major Lawrence, that attracts you personally to the desert? Lawrence: It’s clean. Bentley: Well now, that’s a very illuminating answer.
-screenplay by Robert Bolt
I wished it had been cleaner. Sometimes the dirt, Nile River Valley dirt, dry and airborne, blew straight into our faces for days at a time. The sand swirled down at our feet but we were mounted up where the dust blew. It’s clean, said Lawrence, but he still rinsed his feet at the Howaytat wells before taking tea, and his face after crossing the Anvil of the Sun was a sight. I remember splashing myself from time to time before we reached Khileiyu but never really getting it all off. When KhairAllah said, Sleep when you get to Cairo, he didn’t have to say what was obvious, But first take a bath.