T. E. Lawrence to his family

Jerablus

July 29, 1911

I am sending in a man from here to Biredjik tomorrow, so I will send a line to you. From Biredjik I went up to Rum Kala'at: from there to Nizib, and thence to Tell Bashar and Jerablus. You will find most of these places in the map in my Thesis, if that sorely battered book is now in peace. I have seen nothing very new, nothing very good: the castle of Rum Kala'at yielded some new points, mostly Arab: it had a most enormous moat a perfectly appalling thing:... It cut off a mountain from a mountain along a col like the coupée at Sark. I am very well, and en route now for Aleppo. I got a letter from you here which Thompson sent up three weeks ago from Tell el Hamra. I am probably going now to stop wandering in Ramadan. I dare hardly ask for food from a Mohammedan house, and Christians are not common enough. I have had the pleasant experience since a week of being the best Arabic scholar in all the villages I entered. In every single one, except Rum Kala'at, someone knew a little Arabic but I knew more than all: the people were all Turks and Kurds; a few Armenians and Yezidis, Rum Kala'at was my Northern point.

This is nearly all I can write: the man is waiting anxiously - his own business, and I cannot delay him. I have the luxury of clean clothes, and am overhauling my stores. Thompson gave me free run of all the spare stores of the expedition, and as a result I am fitted out like the Swiss Family: only I have no embroidery silk or sugar mill.

L.
 

Note. Lawrence wrote this while recovering from serious illness, after returning from his 1911 tramp. The handwriting is shaky.