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Again, Asher's quotation is careless. Lawrence wrote: "I met a camel caravan swinging down the
spice market'. Asher adds to this a clumsy and redundant
"coming": 'I met a camel caravan coming
swinging down the spice market'. He also omits two of Lawrence's commas in the
second part of the extract, giving us: "and I stopped the line and bought
the bells and walked back to the hotel'.
Beneath the two extracts, Asher delivers a self-righteous
classroom homily:
"The animals were either mules or camels, and at least one of the accounts
is untrue: it is hardly likely that Lawrence could have forgotten in the
space of a month what kind of animals they were. One might ask, 'What
does
it matter if they were mules or camels?' and this is precisely the
point:
whether they were mules or camels is supremely unimportant, and there is no
conceivable motive for lying. One can only conclude that either Lawrence
enjoyed misleading others, or he had a very uncommon conception of the
truth." (p. 34)
In this last sentence, Asher employs a time-honoured
rhetorical trick that is designed to pull wool over his readers' eyes. The
trick is to set out a situation and then claim that there is only one possible
deduction. In this way, alternative deductions are set aside without any
consideration whatsoever.
Here, Asher claims that Lawrence had "no conceivable motive for lying",
whereas there are in fact two interpretations which would put the change from "mules" to
"camels" in a different light. These deserve proper consideration.
The first is this: Lawrence's letter to Flecker of 18
February was written from his hotel in Aleppo on the afternoon or evening
of the day that he bought the bells. At that stage, he had not had the
opportunity to make any enquiries about them.
By contrast, the two letters describing them as camel bells were written a month later,
by which time many local people had seen and commented upon them.
What if Lawrence had learned or concluded, during that month,
that the bells were too big for a mule and were properly camel bells? That
would leave him to make a pedantic explanation in his light-hearted letters to
his family and Leeds. It would have been simpler to "silently
correct" the mules to camels. This explanation seems quite probable. The
bells were so big that they had to be slung under the belly of the mule
(presumably from the saddle harness). They must have almost touched the ground. They are not only long but quite
fat, as you can see from the c.1913 photograph of the front of the
archaeologists' house at Carchemish that appears in Lawrence of Arabia, The
Authorised Biography (the bells are seen hanging on a gantry to the right of
the gateway).
Whatever these bells were designed for, it was surely not anything so
small as a mule. Of course, they may not have been designed for an animal at
all, but for some other purpose; but on the basis of size they seem much more
appropriate to a camel than a mule. Locals looking at them would probably have
reached that conclusion, whether or not they had actually seen such bells used
on camels. Next page
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