October 2009 Archives

Chapter 62:

Dora and Michael took a train from London to Dover. The authorities finally allowed them to cross the English Channel during the first few days of 1919. They took another train from Calais to Paris and were among the first tourists to arrive in the City of Light after the end of the Great War.

They were pushed into a boarding house near St. Gervais. Dora was astounded to see the church there had been demolished by a single shell, fired from a huge German cannon nicknamed “the Paris Gun,” that had fallen on the church on Palm Sunday the previous April. The roof had collapsed. Over a hundred people had been killed. It reminded Dora of the seriousness of her mission, not that she needed reminding.

Dora insisted on standing outside the French Foreign Office at three o'clock in the afternoon of January 18 when the Peace Conference formally began. As bugles sounded, delegates streamed into the gilded and ornamental Salle de la Paix. She had Michael keep watch for anyone in Arab robes who looked Anglo-Saxon while Dora used her spattering of college French in a vain attempt to ask where “Lawrence of Arabia,” as the Colonel had by now been dubbed by the press, could be found.

The delegates were numerous and polyglot. Not only did two presidents attend, there were nine premiers, countless foreign ministers, emirs, maharajahs from India, emissaries from China, Japan, Siam, South Africa, Australia, and Poland, and from Czechoslovakia, and Yugo-Slavia, new countries carved from the now defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire that no one had ever heard of before.

“I think I see President and Mrs. Wilson,” Michael pointed the First Couple out to her. “It's shocking, I'll have to admit. But there they are getting out of that black limousine.”

Dora had to agree. It was strange enough to be a tourist on the Continent in times like this. But a sitting President of the United States on European soil was another thing all together!

“It's never happened before,” Michael's eyes looked as if they might pop out of his head. “Imagine, traveling beyond the boundaries of the United States while holding office! What if a crisis were to occur back home? How would he communicate? Just by cable?” he shook his head. “President Wilson would be cut off. No wonder Congress threatened to impeach him before he left the country.”

“We're not looking for Wilson!” Dora stomped her foot in frustration. The French seemed overenthusiastic to greet the American President. Huge banners strung from one building to the next blared:

VIVE WILSON!

“Did anyone give you a clue as to the whereabouts of the elusive Colonel Lawrence?” Michael pressed.

She shook her head “no”. “All I've been able to gather is that an American producer named Lowell Thomas is staging a multi-media play about the Colonel called With Lawrence in Arabia. It opens this August in London. Only a few theater people were able to tell me that much.”

Dora and Michael returned day after day, sometimes with umbrellas, sometimes without. They stood vigil twice daily, once in the morning to see the conference convene and once in the afternoon to see it break up. They watched as the delegates filed out and were driven in limousines back to their hotels, residences, or embassies.

Eventually they were able to pick out the major players at the Peace Conference --- Prime Minister David Lloyd George, the French leader, Georges Clemenceau, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy aside from Wilson and his second wife, Edith. There was no trace of an Anglo-Saxon in Arab robes.

“Maybe he chickened out,” Michael suggested. “After all, how many men would show up among dignitaries dressed like a film actor in white robes?” he snorted.

“I don't think the Colonel is the type to chicken out,” Dora insisted.

On the very last day of the conference she noticed a party of men standing on the steps in front of the French Foreign Office. They were posing for a camera shot in three rows. In the first row by himself stood an Arab man of dark complexion in black ceremonial robes. He wore a white cloth headdress with two runners that fell loosely down the front. In his sash was a sword. His hands were folded, and he looked solemn.

In the second row from left to right Dora noticed another Arab man wearing Western dress. A black wool coat was buttoned over his suit. He wore a headdress. Next to him stood another Arab in military attire. Then came an Anglo officer. Next to him stood a man in an odd outfit that her eyes at first passed over. He was flanked by still another Arab in military attire.

In the third row all by himself stood a young black man in a plain costume wearing a white headdress.

Her eyes returned to the man in the odd outfit in the second row. When she examined him closely, he was not only fair-complexioned but blond. His eyes were startlingly blue. He was dressed in an Arabian military uniform of a Sharifian officer inspired by the British. At the same time he wore an Arabian headdress of a dark color, a kaffiyeh head cloth, that came far down past his shoulders. While the others frowned or looked poker-faced, he was the only one smiling. His smile was all his own. Everyone else's face was blank by comparison. His was full of character. His very posture radiated confidence and purpose.

This had to be the “blond shereef” that Edward had described in so many of his letters. It couldn't be anyone else except the man she'd been waiting months to meet --- Colonel T. E. Lawrence. It was hard to take her eyes off him. The man exuded a magnetic power, a certain sort of charisma.

After the picture session ended, Dora darted right over to him. But he had disappeared. “Was that Lawrence of Arabia?” she asked everyone she could see. The black man and the one in the front in the imperial robes, the one they told her was Emir Feisal, son of King Hussein, had disappeared as quickly as Lawrence. She couldn't ask either of them where Lawrence was hiding.

Dora was ready to give up when someone touched her on the arm. “Madam, he will see you in this room over here away from the crowds,” one of the Arabs whispered to her in an accented voice.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Michael hesitated, looking suspiciously from the Arab to Dora and back.

“The shereef will see the lady alone,” the Arab pointedly informed the American gentleman.

Chapter 61:

After a long voyage, escorted at first by the U.S. Navy and then by the British Admiralty once they reached the War Zone, as they had not been in 1915, they reached Ware House in late March 1918. Lady Ware met them at the carriage entrance. She stood there alone, majestic in solid black with a veil over her face.

“What happened?” Dora leaped out of the car and raced up to the woman who was to have been her mother-in-law. All she could think of was that Lady Ware had heard about Edward, and it wasn't good news.

Grim-faced and without a word, Lady Ware led them to the family graveyard on the hill next to the house. She looked down at the newest stone there. The epitaph read:

Sir Adolphus Ware 1860-1918

May he rest in peace

Lady Ware stood over the gravestone and said, “He got your cable from the ship saying you were coming at the same time the letter arrived from the War Office telling us Edward had gone missing in Arabia. He came out here into the garden and blew his brains out.”

Dora burst into tears. Michael put his arm around her shoulders. “But why?” Dora pleaded.

“I suppose he despaired of ever finding Edward alive,” Lady Ware snapped bitterly. “We're losing the war anyway. The Germans are winning. He probably thought what's left to live for?”

“We're here to look for Edward,” Dora assured her. “We'll write or cable you about whatever we find.”

Lady Ware gave Dora a startled look as they drifted back into the main part of the garden. They were standing beside what had once been the pond full of carp. Dora remembered Edward joking back in May 1915 that his mother feared the British Army was going to eat her prize carp. Now the fish were all gone --- along with the gardeners. The topiaries were overgrown. Weeds had sprung up everywhere, including between the stepping stones. Not even the lawns were mown.

Dora and Mr. Byrne didn't stay for high tea, if there was to be a high tea today. Lucy was nowhere to be found. They drove the rest of the way to London and found lodgings at a hotel.

They needed to travel to the Continent to make their way to the Middle East. When they applied to the Admiralty, the clerk looked them up and down, “Americans! You think you can do anything, don't you? Just because we're all bled white and there are a million of you advancing on us this summer to join the war . . . well, we'll see what you're really made of.”

“Yes, I guess we will, won't we?” Mr. Byrne replied.

They went back to the office every week to see if the situation had changed and they would be allowed to proceed onward to the Continent and then to the Middle East. Every week the situation only got worse. They kept up with the news in The Times. It was all they could do.

Of course there were no references to Edward or any mention of his disappearance. She looked for his obituary in vain. For that matter, there were absolutely no reports about Colonel Lawrence himself.

The same situation continued all spring and into the summer. American troops continued to arrive in France. There was much cheering in London. As far as Dora was concerned, it was just a big distraction.

They were still in London on November 11, 1918. They woke up early to the chiming of bells throughout the city. The Great War was over. There would be no more fighting. With difficulty Dora found out that Prince Feisal, the son of King Hussein of Mecca, had entered Damascus in triumph with Lawrence during the fall of 1918.

Dora finally decided that Lawrence himself was the man she had to talk to. “Ask the War Department how I can speak to Colonel Lawrence,” Dora told Michael one day.

“I suppose I knew it would come to this,” Michael sighed.

He got through by his usual channels. By now he had a nodding acquaintance with just about everybody at the War Office. He returned from the phone with the news, “Lawrence will be escorting his Arab friends to the Paris Peace Conference starting in January.”

“January?”

He nodded. “Wilson's coming from Washington. Everyone has to wait for the President of the United States to arrive.”

Chapter 60:

For endless minutes Dora sat gaping at the letter. When she looked up she realized that the last possible trolley had long since come and gone. She stared down at the empty tracks and saw a vast desert in front of her instead ---- one that stretched off to the horizon and beyond, one that engulfed everything in it.

Edward was gone . . . He'd vanished . . . She had feared that something like that would happen. That was why she had rushed out of her house. She wanted to snatch him away from all the nasty cloak and dagger stuff in the wasteland he was fighting in. She was too late.

Dora clutched her fist and wished herself back in the past. She would give anything, even years off her life, to make this six months ago. If she'd left Pittsburgh then, she might have prevented this. She glanced at the satchel by her side. She'd been filled with such purpose only an hour ago. She hadn't cared what obstacles she would encounter. Right this minute, in light of this letter, it looked like her plans had turned to dust.

“There she is!”

Dora heard that all too familiar voice, full of hysteria and tears. She saw her mother racing toward her across the parking lot with her handkerchief in one hand. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. Behind her mother came her father. He was tromping along like those Turkish and German soldiers must have been as they entered Petra --- full of confidence and purpose. Hanging back near her parents' car stood Viola, still clutching the door. She glanced at Dora, then looked away with guilt in her eyes.

Her mother grabbed Dora in her arms and hugged her, crying and protesting that she was running away from home.

“Dad,” she stepped away from her mother, “this letter. You've got to read it. It's Edward. He's disappeared. Colonel Lawrence says --- “

“Damn it! I can't always have this fiance of yours destroying our family life. Dora, what nonsense it this? Look how upset you've made your mother.”

Edward had written that it was October 21 when he'd woken up to the sound of a German airplane overhead, an airplane that had dropped bombs all around him. Now it was already March, 1918. Anything could have happened during the interval --- anything at all. The newspapers got the news faster by telegraph. But they never wrote about Lawrence of Arabia or his troops. Their dispatches were mostly about the Western Front in France. She wondered if they would report if Colonel Lawrence himself had been killed. For all she knew, his whole force could have been annihilated.

“Dad,” she attempted to impress her urgency on him, “we've got to do something NOW.”

“Viola told us that you let yourself down from your bedroom by a bed sheet. I've never heard of anything more ridiculous in my life. Then she says --- “

“Dad,” Dora tried to make him understand, “none of that matters now. You've got to get on the phone and --- “

“Get back in the car!” He grabbed her handbag, confiscated her car keys, and handed them to Viola. Viola turned them over to Frank. Frank was to drive Dora's car back to the house behind Mr. Benley's Model T.

Dora tried to reason with him from the backseat while he drove home in a silent fury with her mother sitting in the front passenger seat dabbing her eyes and weeping. “Cable the Wares. Sir Adolphus and Lady Ware may have better connections at the British War Office. They could probably get an investigation launched.”

“Stop babbling!” her father pounded the steering wheel with his clenched fist. His knuckles had turned white.

“Please promise me that you'll at least send a cable to Edward's parents tonight,” she begged.

Every time Dora spoke, her mother cried more loudly. Her father clammed up more.

“And, Dad, you have other business connections in Britain,” Dora gripped the back of her father's seat as she leaned over his shoulder. “You could contact them. They might be willing to hire a detective who --- “

“Detective?” her father scoffed. “Do you think this is a grade school romp? This is a world war! Private detectives don't tromp across battlefields to find someone no matter how much you pay them.”

They were getting close to home. They turned off Bethel Church Road into the long gravel drive that led up to the main house. Dora had to fight back her tears. “If you won't help me, I'll have to carry on by myself.” She stuffed the purse under her arm and grabbed hold of her satchel. She thrust open the back door and started to get out.

“Winthrop, Dora's running away again!” her mother screamed at the top of her lungs.

Arms closed around Dora's waist. “What's happening?” said a familiar voice.

“Oh, Michael,” Dora turned in his arms, “you've got to help me.” She grabbed hold of his lapels and shook them. “It's Edward. He's vanished.”

Her father scowled as he left the driver's seat and trudged around towards the rear of the car. “I found her at the trolley station with this damned letter in her hand.” He showed the letter to Michael.

“Mr. and Mrs. Benley, I think I can handle this. You folks go about your business,” Michael took Dora by the arm and led her over to his car, which was stopped to one side of the gravel driveway. He put Edward's letter into his lapel pocket.

“We were headed downtown,” her father growled.

“Enjoy yourselves. Dora won't run away from me. I promise you.”

Mrs. Benley dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief. “We always trust you, Mr. Byrne.”

Michael shut the car door behind Dora. He climbed into the driver's seat himself. He started the car, but he just sat there until Mr. Benley's Model T disappeared down the gravel drive. Michael turned his car around in a perfect three-point turn. He headed back out to the main road.

“We're not going back to the main house, are we?” Dora read Michael's mind.

He reached into his suit pocket and handed her two tickets.

She looked at them dumbfounded. “Why, these are two stateroom tickets on a troop transport headed for Liverpool!”

“My bag's been packed for weeks,” he looked behind him into the backseat. “And a troop transport's the best I can do. All the old liners have been requisitioned for the war effort.”

“But --- “

“There won't be any peace until you have your opportunity to go find Edward,” Michael said. “I intend to help you.”

“What about my father?” she looked at Michael horrified. “He might fire you! Besides, he'll be after us.”

“I've handled that, too,” Michael assured Dora. “I handed Viola a note to give to your parents that ought to take care of everything.”

Chapter 59:

A trolley was stopping next to Dora. The front door opened. The driver looked at her. She could wait for the next one. She waved the man on and continued reading:

Had Lawrence been hit? About half an hour later I saw his men retreating back to Petra by twos and threes, in as small groups as possible while keeping to the hills, ravines, and desert dune grass cover. They surfaced about where I was hiding with the women.

“What's happened?” I confronted the first group.

“Sh-h-h-h-h!” they kept on crawling along.

“Where is El Orens?” I asked the next group of what looked like stragglers.

They turned and pointed, then continued crawling along on their hands and knees as if this were great sport.

The next bunch didn't understand English. My Arabic was poor, and in such a tight situation I forgot the few words I knew. I kept on making hand signals at them, pointing backward, and saying again and again with a question in my voice, “El Orens? El Orens? El Orens?”

One of the Bedouins merely waved, then burst into speech when a woman ran up to him. She hugged him. A baby crawled into his arms. They all kissed each other.

Perhaps Lawrence hadn't been able to recover from the direct hit on one of his best gun positions. After all, his specialty was hit and run guerrilla warfare, especially blowing up railroad tracks. Defending a citadel was hardly his kind of thing.

This retreat kept going on for the better part of an hour. Soon it seemed that Lawrence's whole army was here, falling back to what they thought was the protection of the high rock walls of the ancient city of Petra.

I heard a horrific sound. It was the tramp of boots. Lawrence's men wore boots, but they didn't march in formation. I could tell these boots were doing just that, with practiced discipline. I crept forward to see if I could discern anything from the next boulder.

Not only did I hear the tramp of boots marching in formation. I heard shouts that sounded like orders in a very harsh, nasty voice, amplified by a horn. When I listened closely I realized they were speaking German. It was a tongue with which I was familiar from my Oxford days. My father spoke it fluently from tromping around as an amateur archaeologist.

I shouldn't be so surprised that the Germans were marching on Petra. After all, a German airplane had been dropping bombs. The Germans were the chief allies of the Turks. That would make it all the more difficult to fight them. The Turks might be supplied by the Germans. But the Germans were almost as well-equipped as the British.

Turkish voices mingled with the Germans. Where was Lawrence? Was I left to fight the Battle of Petra all alone and unaided? I was the only other Englishman present. The Arabs would expect me to act as second in command as I'd done when Lawrence had been kidnapped by the Turks.

I motioned to the Bedouins to move behind the rocks with their guns. A few waved back at me. Others picked up their belongings and did as I said, though very reluctantly. Most seemed to be occupied in climbing to the highest rocks to catch a view of the advancing troops.

“Don't you realize the Turks and Germans are coming?” I advanced upon a group of Bedouins lazying around on the ground and drinking coffee. Their rifles lay beside them instead of clutched tensely in their hands the way I would expect. One poured a cup of hot coffee and handed it to me. The steam lazily wafted upward toward the sky. The man said something I couldn't understand.

“Did El Orens give you any orders?” I pressed.

They smiled at me and kept on chatting. One threw his head back and laughed at what sounded like a joke from his friend.

“Orders?” I repeated. “Do you have orders?”

One nodded and laughed. I didn't know if he was answering my question or chatting with his comrade. I wasn't sure if he understood what I was saying.

I hastened over to where the women were congregated. To my shock, some of them were busy changing diapers, or at least what passed for diapers among the Bedouins. Others were chatting while boiling something over a fire. Steam curled upward past our hiding place out into the open.

“Put out that fire!” I ordered, rushing up to the women.

They looked at me blankly.

I tried to stomp out the flames with my boots. I picked up a nearby pail of water and hurled it at the conflagration. That created even more smoke. I coughed, trying to disperse it by waving my hands and arms about. Finally I accomplished my aim. The fire was now only smoldering.

All the women were still gaping at me as if they didn't understand. A few shook their heads and whispered to their friends.

“You can't light a cooking fire when the enemy is almost upon us. Do you want to let them know exactly where you are so they can come and get you? I'm sure you've seen how the Turks treat Bedouin women.” I winced to remember the corpses I'd seen lying along the roads of various desert towns where we had come too late to save them.

The sounds of the advancing Germans and Turks were by now so loud it seemed like they were marching practically right beneath us into Petra. I took as many rounds of ammunition with me as I could carry. Climbing up through a rocky shaft, I reached a perch right above the tunnel that formed a narrow entrance into Petra. I was so well-concealed that, while I could see everyone below me, none could see me. Even if I leaned over the top of the rocky perch to get better aim or a better view, I would remain well hidden in the shadows.

It wasn't just a regiment or two. It looked like the whole Turkish Army along with more Germans than I could count all advancing into Petra. One German enlisted man joked to another, “Lawrence of Arabia is finally beaten. I'm going to get a photo of him surrendering to us on my new camera. My mother sent it to me for my birthday in one of her packages from home.”

The soldier then proceeded to hold up his camera and brag. Three of his friends laughed and cheered.

“This camera's a folding Kodak from America. My mother bought it right before the British blockade. I'm one of the last soldiers in Germany to get one,” he continued to brag in his cocky fashion.

“Why don't you make this Lawrence of Arabia autograph your photo of him?” another friend called back.

“I'll do that,” he promised and held his camera proudly above his head.

“This famous El Orens, or whatever the Arabs call him, may be good at sneaking around the desert blowing up railroads. When you engage him in a real battle, he turns tail and runs back into Petra. He's probably hiding in a hole in the ground. We might have to excavate the ruins to find him.”

The whole troop guffawed.

“By now he's probably turned into a mummy. We'll have to yank all the bandages off.”

Again they all chortled.

There must have been at least a thousand of the enemy troop in the narrow, rocky gorge leading into Petra. The gorge was so narrow the troops started to back up. They had to slow down to nearly a crawl. Then they stopped all together as if waiting in a long line. No doubt they'd been forced to squeeze through the narrowest point in single file, which was not very good military formation.

Suddenly a rocket flew up into the air overhead. It exploded into many colored fragments. The still and silent rocks on every side of me exploded into gunfire. I had thought all the Bedouins were lying around smoking and chatting with the women. I 'd no idea that others with guns had concealed themselves around me. The gunfire rained down upon the heads of the Germans and Turks.

The enemy at first didn't know what was happening. They looked up and saw nothing but rocks.

The women around me pushed boulders down through the crevices between the rocks. Others emptied slops pans or kettles of hot oil on top of the enemy soldiers. The ladies shrieked and ululated like banshees to make it all the more horrifying. They alone could be heard above the guns.

The enemy troops below scattered. Bedouins were throwing bombs from above and from the left and right. Arabs had descended down to the level of the road to stop up all the exits from the tunnel itself.

After the massacre had gone on for who knew how long, as the sun declined behind the mountains, a second rocket burst into flames in the sky. Lawrence himself rose up from behind a rock not too far away --- the first I had seen of him since yesterday --- and called, “Rise! Sons of the Prophet!”

With a deafening cheer, the Bedouins sprang up from behind the rocks and boulders all around me. They leaped up and down in place, throwing rocks up into the air. Then they tossed their guns. A few of the young men picked up women and threw them back and forth while the ladies chortled. Others held up babies and infants in one hand and rifles in the other.

“Pursue! Bring me prisoners!” Lawrence commanded in Arabic.

The men leaped down from the rocks. Kissing the women and children, they mounted their camels and galloped down the dusty road away from Petra. They chased the few German and Turkish soldiers who had managed to escape the trap that Lawrence had obviously set for them.

“Go all the way to the nearest towns and cities!” Lawrence urged them. “Don't come back without your weight in booty!”

I raced up to Lawrence. “Why didn't you tell me what was going on?” I asked. “I sent messengers, but I never received any answers.”

He shrugged. “We didn't want our strategy to leak out. The boys could be captured and tortured for information.”

“But --- “

He clapped his hand down on my shoulder. “Besides, you were to manage the women and those in your sector in case we didn't make it.”

“But they were just lounging around. They didn't obey my orders. They acted like they knew about the big surprise all along.”

Lawrence chuckled. “You can't beat any Arab for wiliness. They're the trickiest creatures alive. Guess it comes with the territory.” He looked about him at the pinkish-red ridges of rock. I guess he was referring to the desert itself.

There was much celebrating late into the night as the men on camels straggled back with both prisoners and plunder. Apparently they'd captured an entire Turkish transport, a field-hospital, and taken hundreds of captives. It was all because of Lawrence's genius for surprise.

As I sit here late at night after the Battle of Petra, as it will no doubt come to be known, I am writing you this overly long letter. Once again the whole camp is lighted with torches where the ruins of the old altars still stand. The men are excitedly chatting around the bonfires as the Bedouin women roast calf and lamb over spits such as the ancients would do. The aroma is floating in on a night breeze. It wafts around my nostrils. I thank a Bedouin woman with a toddler on her hip for bringing me a plate which I am now enjoying as I write to you. I think you will be able to discern the grease stains that my fingers make on the paper.

Now down to business --- our business. I have a plan that I concocted out of the depths of despair in which I last wrote you. I no more want to break off our engagement than you do, my love. You haunt my dreams as you do my waking hours. Life without you would be a long death sentence without joy of any kind. So I have confronted my father with my idea in a letter. He agrees with me. He's just sent me the money in pounds sterling --- in cash. I have left a note for Osama who still hangs about our camp like a wily snake. I've told him to meet me tonight at the Tomb of King Abdullah of Petra. Perhaps Mohamed will be there, too. Since I can't get Lawrence to budge, I've taken it upon myself to try to bribe the brigands.

I want them to stop pursuing you and me. I want to see if I can settle this issue in a civilized fashion. This will be a better ending to the story of King Abdullah and his Holy of Holies than any other I can think of. Remember, this is a hefty bribe. And they can't get all of it until they show me evidence of having complied with my terms. My father had to mortgage half his estate to manage it. But it will be worth it if it means that we can meet again and at last be married as we had so long ago planned.

Pray for me, my angel! I am doing this for you, Dora, for us --- because I love you.

Your husband in all but the law,

Edward

Dear Miss Benley:

Edward disappeared two nights ago from our encampment at Petra. Within hours the boy he paid to mail the letter to you brought it to me. He suspected that Edward was up to something. I'm sure you'll forgive me the liberty I took of perusing what he has written to you for clues about his disappearance. I was appalled to read that he went to the Tomb of King Abdullah to meet with two unprincipled wretches who go by the names of Osama and Mohamed. Naturally we followed Edward right away. But when we arrived, we were too late. Edward was not there. There were no signs of anyone having been there. We have mounted a search of the surrounding countryside in vain. There is no ransom note or news from the caravans of his capture. Perhaps when Osama and Mohamed didn't show up that night, he decided to go somewhere else to meet them. I have gone through channels to contact the thieves themselves. So far there has been only silence.

British officers don't tend to disappear without word in the Arabian desert. I'm sure we'll hear something soon.

Sincerely yours,

Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence

Chapter 58:

Dearest Dora:

Lawrence called me to him one morning. “Lieutenant, we need more soldiers.”

“What!” I countered. “You always claim you like to lead small forces. They're more agile and swift. You can hit and run quickly.”

He waved away my objections. “That's when we're doing the attacking. In Petra we will be defending our position. The more soldiers the better.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Go recruit some Arab youths. I've turned some young men away over the past months just because I thought they were too young. Now we need them.”

Next morning Petra was swarming with adolescent boys. Lawrence took each of them aside and taught them how to play messenger. He wanted them to ferry notes back and forth from where he planned to be on the North Ridge to each of his units stationed at a different position in or near the ancient city.

Still Lawrence wasn't satisfied. “We still don't have enough soldiers. We need live bodies to man the approach to the city, you know, the one through the narrow gorge. Get the women.”

I stood there gaping at him, “Sir?”

“The Arab women.”

Was he joking? I'd been fighting in the Arabian Desert for many months. I had yet to encounter a woman in uniform. “Colonel, the Arab women are the last on earth I could imagine as Amazons.”

“The women are fierce. Sometimes the men abandon certain prisoners to the women to make sure they are tortured thoroughly before they die.”

I informed the soldiers with some diffidence that Lawrence demanded they recruit their wives and mothers as soldiers. Much to my amazement, they came back in no time with a battalion of barefoot women wearing long blue cotton robes, gold bracelets, and rings in their ears and noses. Under the leadership of Sheik Khalil's wife, they practiced climbing the rocks that overlooked the gorge. Lawrence gave them guns, and they didn't shy away from those either.

Later that night, while the torches burned in the ancient altars and men gathered around campfires to boast what they would do to the Turks, the women sewed, wove, and made butter with churns. As the women worked, they sang. There was a strange noise, like a cry in the night. It was taken up here and there and repeated again and again.

“What on earth is that?” I asked. “It sounds like a jackal howling, but it isn't. It hardly sounds human.”

Lawrence smiled. “Didn't I warn you that Arab men hand over their prisoners to be tortured?”

“That's the women?” I could feel the hair standing up on my head.

“They're ululating. It's a special word just to describe the incredible sound they make. They do that before battles when they fear great calamities.” He showed me what they did with their tongues, lips, and vocal cords. He couldn't make quite the same eerie sound. He wasn't female. And he was only one man.

I was to manage the sheik's wife and all the ladies who'd decided to respond to Lawrence's call for troops. I was also to be in charge of sending boys with reports about the advance of the enemy to Lawrence on the North Ridge as well as to sub-commanders in all the other positions around town and out of it.

I sent one of the boys at my disposal to report to me if he could find anyone who shouldn't be in our encampment or whose name he didn't know. I gave him a piaster for his trouble.

As I waited, the night grew very quiet and still despite the incessant chatter of women only several yards away. The women blended into the nearly constant hooting sound of the desert owls and squawks of the birds of prey, who waited longingly for their next corpse.

I sent a second boy after the first and bade him hurry up. As I continued to wait --- I couldn't move out of this position near the Siq --- my eyes blinked shut. I fought to keep them open. They shut again and again. It had been before midnight when I'd sent the second messenger. Now it must be near dawn. Not only had Venus disappeared from the sky, the waning moon was setting.

The women had fallen silent. That was a sure sign it must be almost dawn on this morning of October 21, 1917. I tried to make out the time on my new watch, which I 'd picked up from a bazaar. There wasn't sufficient illumination.

Just the first purple rays of dawn appeared, I could hear a distinct buzz. It grew louder. It made me reach instinctively for my binoculars and train them up into the sky.

Out here in the desert I could be one of Richard the Lion-Hearted's knights ready to fight Saladin in the Third Crusade. Or I could be back in ancient times riding as one of the legionaries in the army of the Roman Emperor. Only our guns themselves anchored us at least in the fourteenth century. Very little, except a can of food from the British provisions office, anchored us in the early twentieth. For many weeks in a row we lived off the land and went without modern conveniences --- even so much as a fork.

Now I saw an airplane and a German one at that bearing the insignia of Kaiser Wilhelm. It was flying low over Petra. I threw a rock against a stone column. A boy immediately leaped into my presence, rubbing his eyes as he also had been asleep.

“Go at once. Tell Lawrence that the Germans are attacking by air,” I slipped a piaster into his hand.

He darted off faster than I could speak, climbing rocks with the agility of a mountain goat and slipping through rock carved tunnels with the swiftness of a jackal.

I waited several minutes, never taking my eyes off that airplane. It appeared overhead and then disappeared into the gloom. It never strayed so far that I lost track of the low buzz and hum in the still, early morning air. The plane, when it reappeared, was lower in the sky. It looked like an Albatros, a new German model introduced in 1917. It had a double wingspan, one wing lower than the cockpit and one above it doubling as a kind of roof. The plane was painted bright red with black Iron Crosses outlined in white on the wings. The propeller in front was going around and around. It looked very much like one of the planes piloted by the infamous Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, on the Western Front. The pilot was wearing the requisite dark flying suit, head gear, and goggles. No doubt he was waiting until he could see us as well as I could see him.

I threw another rock against the same pillar. Another young boy sprang up seemingly out of nowhere. “Go wake the women,” I directed him. “Tell them to take cover under the rocks in the pre-arranged place. Remind them to bring their guns and ammunition.”

As the sky gradually grew brighter, the plane flew lower, dropping an illuminating torch to better see what was on the ground. I thought about taking cover myself. The plane could strafe us at any moment. Being in the desert, there wasn't lots of natural cover.

We were next to the King Solomon Mountains. These were “sky islands”, tall, pointy, sculpturesque ridges of rock that rose straight up from the desert floor at a much lower elevation, making them seem all the taller. Right now the sun was trapped to the east right behind one of these enormous ridges. That's why only a small amount of light was able to escape from behind the mountain. The sky was getting lighter by the most infinitesimal, gradual degrees. As soon as the sun rose high enough, which could be any minute now (if I could only catch a glimpse of my watch), then it would burst out all at once. It would go from being dim to practically blinding you with its sudden brightness. I'd spent enough time in this treacherous desert to figure this out. Naturally that would be when the plane would attack.

I gathered up my few belongings and crawled along the ground, keeping to the darkest shadows. I paused whenever I could, for the only things that moved in a desert besides those tumbleweeds propelled by the wind were living beings. That was what the German pilot was patiently looking for.

Crawling on my belly, I found the ladies. The women were squabbling. One wanted this place on the rock. Another wanted that. Their babies squalled, too. The Turks would capture me amidst an army of wrangling women. They looked ready to fire their guns at each other to judge by the tones of their shrill voices, the way they screamed and wept, and the way they flung their arms about. Still I had no choice but to stay with them near the rocky caves and tunnels.

The dawn broke almost at once. I heard Lawrence's gun go off five miles away right outside the town of Petra. Where I was now positioned I had a pretty good view. Lawrence had only two mountain guns and two machine guns. One of the machine guns exploded into action, shooting fire toward the sky. It just missed the plane.

The plane banked sharply and came back again, dropping a bomb not far from Lawrence's position. It hit one of Arab machine guns dead on. The men manning it vanished in an instant. When the smoke cleared, nothing remained except charred rubble.

The plane dropped bomb after bomb. I could hear them landing much closer to me. I climbed out of a deep crevice in the rock long enough to peek up over the ridgetop. A bomb hit a temple. Several columns toppled. A cloud of dust rose into the sky. The Turks and Germans thought we were all stationed in the hills outside Petra. That's where the aircraft kept on returning. That's where the battle raged.

About six hours later all the Colonel's guns went silent.

Chapter 57:

Viola brought a luncheon tray up to her room. “Sorry, Dora, it's your father's orders,” Viola arranged the big meal of the day on top of her writing desk. She laid out the china and silver ware. She'd brought a white linen tablecloth that her mother always insisted upon complete with a matching napkin. She poured water with ice cubes from a cut glass pitcher.

“That's all right, Viola,” Dora tried to keep her composure. She was biding her time, waiting for the right moment. She had her bag packed and hidden underneath the bed.

“Make sure you eat the cookies. You're mother sent them. She'll be offended if you don't gobble them up.”

Dora smiled.

“Sorry, but Mr. Benley told me I had to lock the door. I'm sure you'll understand,” Viola turned the key in the lock as she left the room.

Dora hurriedly ate a few things. She wasn't very hungry. Then she went back to packing Edward's letters to take with her in her handbag.

“Do you want to go with us downtown to the Duquesne Club?” her mother knocked.

“No, I'd rather stay here by myself.”

“Viola's going to stay on late until we get back,” her father barked at her. “Remember, I don't want any shenanigans.”

She listened for their footsteps going down the stairs and out the front door. She went to her window and watched them on the driveway. Winthrop climbed into the driver's seat of the Model T Ford. Her mother got into the passenger side. Mrs. Benley looked up at Dora's bedroom. Dora waved down at her. Her mother waved back. Her father didn't cast her a glance, which made her feel a pang. She kept the smile plastered to her face until they'd rounded the bend and were gone up the drive that led out to the main road.

She looked at her clock. She forced herself to wait ten minutes to make sure that her parents weren't coming back to fetch something they'd left behind. She sat down at her desk and got out a pen. Quickly she scribbled a note:

Dear Mom and Dad:

Sorry you don't approve of my expedition to find Edward. I hope you'll understand that I had to go anyway. I will contact you by cable as soon as I reach Europe.

Yours truly,

Dora

P.S. Don't blame Viola. She didn't have any part in my escape. And tell Michael I couldn't help it. He'll understand.

With that she turned on the water in the bathroom full force to make noise so Viola wouldn't hear her. She tied a bed sheet to her bedpost and pushed her bed against the window. She threaded the sheet over the windowsill and let it hang down. She made sure it would support her weight. She pushed her travel bag out the window first. It landed on a patch of thick green myrtle vines that cushioned its fall. Next she let her handbag drop. She'd put on the most comfortable pair of shoes she owned. She climbed slowly and quietly out the window. There was about eight feet to jump, the same as between the listing deck of the Lusitania and the water line with its waiting lifeboat. She jumped down holding onto the sheet. She found herself dangling in the air kicking her legs. She let herself drop the rest of the way.

She picked up her satchel and carried it up to the work shed behind the house, the same place where she'd last seen Ali. Her bag was heavy, but she didn't dare let it drag on the ground.

“Dora, what am I going to tell your parents!” Viola emerged from the back door of the house as Dora climbed into her father's spare car. The big Italian lady in the dark blue dress was wringing her hands.

“Go back inside, Viola, and pretend you didn't see me leave. I wrote a note. I explained you didn't know anything about it.”

Viola nodded, worried.

“Turn off the water in my bathroom. You know how my father always yells at us for leaving it on. For God's sake, take the sheet down,” she pointed to the sheet hanging from her windowsill.

Viola followed the direction she was pointing. Her eyes widened in horror as she realized that Dora had let herself down that way. She looked from the sheet to Dora and back again, scandalized.

Dora started the motor. She knew Viola well enough to be certain she would go directly inside and agonize for a few moments. Then she would pick up the telephone and call her parents at the club. Dora had to be well away from here before that happened.

Dora hadn't had much time to plan her trip. She'd only decided to leave earlier that day. Most of her time had been occupied arguing with her mother and father. The rest had been spent packing her satchel and plotting her escape from the house. She had some money with her. She had Edward's letters. She had her passport. But she'd have to visit the bank before she left. That would slow her down.

She parked the car near a trolley stop. She was headed to downtown Pittsburgh to catch the train, the first leg of a long, long journey. She would stop at Mellon Bank where her family did business to get a few drafts that she could cash in Europe.

No sooner had she parked than a mail truck drove up behind her. “Hey, Miss Benley, I've got another one of those letters from your English lord,” Chuck came right up to her car door. “Been searching all over for you. You weren't back at the house the way you usually are.”

“Th --- thank you,” she stuttered. This was the one thing she hadn't planned for.

“At least I think it's from him,” the mailman handed it to her. “It's from the British War Office like usual. But the handwriting on the address isn't the same.”

Dora looked at the mailman blankly, then glanced down at the envelope. Edward always addressed his letters to her in a cursive that looked very elegant and was full of loops. She'd read so many of his letters she'd grown used to it. This handwriting she'd never seen before. It looked odd, eccentric, hard to describe.

She didn't want to open it in front of the mailman. “Here, Chuck,” she handed him a tip. “Thanks! It looks like a long one.”

“Bed time reading!” Chuck waved as he leaped back into his truck.

She crossed the parking lot. What if the worst had happened and it was already too late? What if someone else had written informing her that Edward had been killed? She reached out to grip the railing as she seated herself on a bench to wait for one of the new “yellow trolleys”. They were painted orange but had started to fade to yellow despite being introduced only a couple of years before in 1915.

Should she read the letter now? Or should she wait until she boarded the trolley and walked down the sloping floor to take one of the rattan seats near an open window with a shaded light bulb perfect for reading? Dora couldn't stand it. She tore open the envelope.

Edward's handwriting leaped out at her just as if he hadn't ever written her that letter breaking off their engagement. She soon forgot her doubts as she was drawn into his narrative. She missed her trolley as it lumbered past unheard and unseen.

Chapter 56:

When Dora woke up the next morning, the first thing she did was write a letter to Edward:

My dearest darling:

The Ku Klux Klan killed Ali in my driveway last night. Before he died, I talked to him in the shed at some length. Ali claimed that he was going to come after me, you, and Colonel Lawrence --- all of us! --- for five generations. He said his brothers and his whole family were sworn to do this. He admitted that he was Prince Ali. Mohamed and Osama work for him. He said his father was Ib'n Saud, the iconoclast.

I pleaded with you before to come home. Now I'm telling you to desert. Leave Lawrence's camp at night. Go to the first British settlement and tell them your story. They must believe you. It's up to your Colonel Lawrence if he wants to be chased around by a band of cutthroats and murderers. I don't want you to be part of that company.

I am packing my bags today. You may think I'm mad. I probably am by now. I have no idea how I'm going to find you. Your Arab friends don't sound too friendly to American women. I'm sure that British military regulations prohibit civilian women in the battle zones.

When I get to the nearest friendly city I can find, I will write to you. Maybe you can come to me.

I hope I will find you before this letter does.

Dora

Dora took the letter to the post office herself. If there were no war, she would be married by now. She would almost certainly have children. She would have gotten on with her life. Now everything was stalled. The whole world was listening to distant gunfire. She had read that the shops in London shook when canons fired in France. She imagined she could hear Arabian guns on this side of the Atlantic, too.

Dora spent the rest of the day packing her satchel. She threw in everything she had. Her mother entered the room. “What on earth are you trying to do, Dora?”

She bit her lip. “I'm sailing to Europe. I want to find Edward.”

“How could you have forgotten the Lusitania?” her mother gaped at her.

“The Lusitania? Yes, yes! I remember,” Dora said mechanically, grabbing for a girdle.

Her mother took her by the shoulders and turned her around to face her. Her forehead was more lined than Dora remembered. “You say you remember the Lusitania. We were on it, honey. We almost lost our lives. That's the main reason we've gone to war.”

“Edward's more important than any ship.” Dora was so absorbed in her own thoughts she went on pulling slips and corsets out of her highboy and afternoon dresses out of her closet.

“Winthrop!” her mother pounded out of the room, her high-heeled shoes clomping along the wooden floor. “Come here and talk some sense into your daughter. She's going to Arabia to find Edward.”

Dora had to steel herself. She'd figured getting out of the house might be harder than sailing the Atlantic. She was almost twenty-four. She had the right to go where she wanted. They couldn't stop her.

She heard her father's footsteps pounding up the stairs to the second floor of the house followed by her mother's lighter steps. She could count the footsteps approaching her room down the hallway. She knew that it would take fifteen. She remembered from when she was a little girl.

A shadow fell on her. “I absolutely forbid it!” her father stated flatly as if she were one of his employees and not his daughter. “I would never sail across the Atlantic again even after this interminable war ends. I wouldn't trust one of those Huns not to have a grudge against the United States. All it takes is one submarine commander with one stray torpedo. Hundreds of people will be dead floating in the water. From now on if business calls me to Europe, I'll send a subordinate.”

“That's you, Dad. I'm different,” Dora managed to get out.

“You're still my daughter. The chances that Lord Edward will come back safe and sound from this war, I would judge to be about ninety-five to five against.”

She gasped at his cold-blooded statistics.

“Then you'll have to marry some nice, red-blooded American with a sense of responsibility like Michael. Soon there won't be any other young men left. Europe's bleeding itself white. The population will decline by half.”

“That's why I've got to go, Dad. I don't want Edward to be just another casualty.”

“If his number's up, his number's up,” her father stated matter-of-factly.

Her parents wouldn't understand. She could see that now. Her attempts to confide in them were worse than useless. Winthrop and Etta May Benley were from a different century, the nineteenth. This was the twentieth, the new century. Things were different now. They were all mixed up.

“Edward's breeding won't let him get out of there before it's too late,” Dora pressed down the clothes in her traveling trunk decisively. “I want to find him and talk some sense into him. I can't do it from six thousand miles away.”

“Haven't you heard that American women aren't welcome in Arab countries?”

She nodded. “Yes, I know. I may have to . . . “ She caught herself. She was about to blurt out “disguise myself in native dress”. But that would outrage her parents even more. Her father in particular would be irate about her running around in an abaya with only her eyes showing. Her mother might think it was irreligious.

“You may have to what?” her father growled.

“I may have to . . . well . . . take up residence in Italy and communicate with Edward from there,” she stated what she thought might be minimally acceptable to her father. “I may have to hire a messenger to take letters back and forth to him.”

“You'll do what!” he exploded. “Italy's at war, especially northern Italy up in the mountains. There are all sorts of troops stationed there. Do you think you can waltz through in your Easter bonnet and your new frock?”

“Dad, really!”Dora said. “I don't intend to go anywhere near the fighting. Besides, civilians aren't involved.”

“Civilians aren't involved, and you're a survivor of the Lusitania! I'm ashamed of you,” he tapped his foot. “My daughter ought to have more common sense.”

Her mother nodded in agreement.

“If that young man you're engaged to had any brains he'd come over here. He'd have my blessing then.”

“But, Dad, Edward's from an old English family. You know that.”

“Not many old English families left. They killed each other off in this damned infernal war,” he growled. “One duke gets assassinated over here. This country has to have revenge on that one. That country declares war. Somebody else has a treaty to defend them. Some other country has a treaty to defend his opponent.” He shook his head. “They lose five hundred thousand men here and another five hundred thousand over there. Pretty soon no one will be left --- only us to do the clean up work.” He cursed under his breath.

“England has an empire. Edward thinks it's his duty to defend it. He was raised on that kind of thinking.”

“Damn the empire! If I had a son, and I don't, I wouldn't sacrifice him in the name of any damned British Empire. I certainly don't intend to sacrifice my daughter to it.”

“I agree with you one hundred per cent, Dad. I don't want to sacrifice my future husband to the British Empire either.”

“So you're not going to give up this lunacy?”

“I can't keep my sanity if I stay here and read Edward's letters.”

“Then we'll burn his letters. I've been wanting to do that for a long time.”

“Sorry, Dad,” she turned back to her traveling trunk.

Her mother burst into tears anew. “Come on, Etta May,” Winthrop said. “Let's leave Dora alone.”

Winthrop stomped out of the room in the same manner that he strode around the house --- like the king of the manor. He slammed the door behind him. She heard him lock it.

Chapter 55:

Ali's feverish eyes focused on Dora's. With one hand he grasped his other arm, which was tied up with a strip of cloth. He'd been wounded.

“What --- what are you doing here?” Dora backed away so quickly that she ran into the wall of the shed. A watering can and garden tools fell to the floor with a clatter.

“You win --- for now,” he glared at her with hatred in his eyes.

“Win? What do you mean win?”

“You and your friends have stolen the Holy of Holies,” he said. “And you've gotten away with it.”

Dora remembered Edward's letter. Otherwise she wouldn't have understood what Ali was talking about.

“No one meant to steal it,” she persuaded him. “When that humidor arrived in the mail at Bryn Mawr, I was in a rush to get to the train station. I didn't open up the package. It was supposed to be a gift for my father's birthday. I didn't know what it was. I only knew that you were eyeballing me in the crowd on the Cunard Pier.”

“Your Colonel Lawrence stole it on purpose,” Ali eyed her still.

Dora didn't know how to defend the Colonel. “Lawrence's motives are his own. He won't share them with anybody, not even Edward despite all his loyalty.”

“Then you must all suffer equally --- his friends and family alike. That is the law and the way of the Prophet.”

Dora stomped her foot. “Edward was tricked. His father and Leonard Woolley sent him to Lawrence with the humidor you're seeking, the real one,” the truth spilled out of her as she tried to appeal to Ali, “because they couldn't handle the humidor and whatever it represented anymore. I overheard Sir Adolphus and Woolley agonizing about it one night at Ware House. They said it was Lawrence's idea to begin with. They wanted to get rid of it and give it back to him.”

“Make Lawrence give it back to me then!” Ali tried to move forward, but the pain in his arm prevented him. He clutched it and winced.

“I --- I can't make Lawrence do anything,” Dora wanted to weep, “and neither can Edward. Edward has tried. He's written me about it. Lawrence won't listen. The Colonel's hell bent on playing his game of cat and mouse with you Arabs to the last.”

“You will die!” he hissed. “So will Sir Adolphus! So will Leonard Woolley! And so will Edward and Colonel Lawrence himself,” he vowed. “No one can profane the Prophet and get away with it.” His eyes were dilated, making her wonder how long he'd been holed up in the shed.

“Wait here!” She raced back to the house. She grabbed Edward's last letter. She also stopped in the kitchen to get a drink of water for Ali as well as grab some tapioca pudding that Viola had made and forgotten to put away. She hurried back to the shed to find Ali still slumped in the same position.

She knelt next to him. She held his head and let him sip the water. She fed him tapioca with her own hand.

“Won't you please show me mercy,” she begged with tears in her eyes. “I'll call an ambulance. I'll have them take you to the hospital. I'll even pay for it. I won't tell anyone who you are. Please look at this letter!” she thrust it in front of Ali's eyes. “Edward explains everything here. You can read it for yourself. He says that he was surprised to find Mohamed and Osama in King Abdullah's tomb. He fell into the tomb only because he was chased there. Please call off your killers. Please spare my Edward if you will do nothing else. You are Prince Ali, aren't you?”

He looked at her and nodded.

“Then will you please do as I ask?”

“It's too late even if I wanted to,” he sighed. “Mohamed and Osama have instructions from me and my father to kill Edward and Lawrence on sight and at the first opportunity. I could not take those orders back without bringing disgrace upon my name and my whole line.”

“Then I could speak to your father? What's his name?”

“My father is Ib'n Saud, the rightful Shereef of Mecca. Hussein parades around with my father's title,” he scoffed.

That name struck a stab of fear in her. She dropped the pages of the letter. They fell to the floor of the shed. She remembered from Edward's letter that Ib'n Saud was the iconoclast who loved to destroy all buildings and monuments, the one Lawrence said was uncivilized. Dora despaired of being able to reason with someone like that.

“Besides,” Ali managed to summon a laugh, “it's not just me, it's my younger brothers --- and they are legion. We're all sworn to avenge the honor of our good name and the mandates of the Prophet Muhammad. Either that or we will die trying to do so. And we are sworn to do this for the next five generations.”

“Five generations?” she scrambled to her feet. “Why?”

“Even if we get back the Holy of Holies, you must all be punished. We must set an example so other heathens will never again offend against us.”

“I've never heard anything so horrible.”

“Such is the law of the desert. Such is the jihad, the holy war everlasting. It is indiscriminate who it will kill. Even my sister Asalah died because of it --- at my hand.”

If he could murder his own sister over some Holy of Holies, it was hopeless. He would never listen to her. He would never have pity on anyone.

“Such is the whirlwind that this Lawrence of yours has unleashed!”

Dora turned to leave, but didn't make it farther than the door to the shed. She heard a noise in the distance getting closer. To her astonishment her driveway was being invaded by a group of nameless men in white, loosely fitting robes with pointed white hats and masks. They were carrying what looked like white crosses in one hand and flaming torches in the other. A big, burly man carried an even larger cross, which he planted standing up in the soft earth of the driveway. Another set it aflame.

“Who are you? What are you doing?” Dora ran to meet them, noticing that her father's guard was slumped against a tree.

One shouted, “We caught a dark-skinned thief hanging around here the other night. He was stealing food from the garden. We shot him, but he got away.”

The cross was flaming high. She backed away. Now she understood what was happening. These were the men who'd shot Ali. “No --- no one is here,” she lied.

Ali attempted to flee out the door.

“There he is!” shouted one of the leaders. A hooded man took out his rifle. He aimed and fired. “Allah Akbar!” Ali cried. “Allah Akbar!” He slumped to the ground. His eyes were staring up at the sky, at nothing. He was dead.

Dora screamed and burst into tears. She stood for she didn't know how long weeping.

“Dora, what on earth are you doing outside at this hour?” her father in his night robe and slippers made his way up the driveway. Her mother was peering down from her bedroom window. Her light was on. She was holding the telephone.

Dora ran to her father. He caught her in his arms. “Look!” she pointed down at Ali's body. “There he is. He's the man who's been chasing me ever since the Lusitania.”

The men in white robes had fled. They'd left only their burning white cross at the head of the driveway illuminating the scene.

“What the hell . . . “ her father looked up at the cross. “What was the Ku Klux Klan doing here?”
“The what?” Dora was confused. She hadn't been keeping up with local events. She'd been too preoccupied with Edward.

“Never mind!” he knelt down next to the lifeless body of Ali. “So this is the man who tried to kill you on the streetcar?”

She nodded. She could see her mother dialing the police from her bedroom window. Mr. Byrne arrived before anybody else. He lived down the gravel drive two houses away. Michael hadn't bothered to get dressed. He was making his way in his slippers and robe. He gagged when he saw the flaming cross. He sidestepped his way around it and flew to Dora's side.

“What's happened here?” he slipped his arm around Dora's waist.

“Ali's dead!”

Michael Byrne stooped down to get a better view. “Well, so he is!”

“Is this the man you saw on the Lusitania?” her father asked.

Michael nodded, “Yes, the one who stabbed me when I discovered him with the fuses down in the engine room on May 2, 1915. He's been my nemesis and Dora's ever since. I can hardly believe it. But what's that thing doing there?” he turned toward the flaming cross. Its dark, flickering shadows reflected on his face.

“The Ku Klux Klan shot Ali,” Dora explained. “He was hiding in our shed. I came out to get a shovel to plant the roses. I couldn't sleep after Edward's letter, and I discovered him there. He was already wounded in the arm and delirious. What he said didn't make a lot of sense. Then the Klan showed up again and shot Ali dead.”

Just then a Bethel Borough police car drove up.

“There's been a murder,” her father approached the officer. “A Klan killing.”

“Where's the victim?” the officer asked.

Her father pointed at the ground while Mr. Byrne led Dora back to the house where her mother was waiting at the door.

Dora heard the officer say, “Don't these foreigners know to keep out? They've caused enough trouble. My cousin just got killed in France. Imagine that! He couldn't find the battlefield on a map. Now his bones are part of a giant mass grave.”

Viola and Frank, who lived behind the Benleys' house, had heard the commotion. They hiked over in their nightclothes to prepare lots of hot coffee with cream and sugar. Mr. Byrne sat up with Dora the rest of the night until she finally fell asleep in his arms from pure exhaustion.

Chapter 54:

Dora glanced around the living room bleary-eyed to see the dawn streaming through the window. The embers were now extinguished in the fireplace. The painting of her father still presided over the mantel.

“Dora, my goodness, are you still up? Didn't you ever go to bed?” Viola rushed into the room.

Dora merely gaped at the cleaning lady.

“Mrs. Benley, Mr. Benley, Dora was up all night!” Viola rushed up the stairs.

Mrs. Benley hurried downstairs in her night robe, “For goodness sakes, Dora, you'll make yourself ill if you don't get any sleep.”

Dora looked at her mother blankly.

Her father came trudging down the stairs. He took the brass poker in his hands and stirred the ashes in the fireplace. He cursed and lighted the fire again. “Don't you have any sense, girl? You don't sit here on a cold March morning without the fireplace lighted! Or is your brain in a deep freeze over this British lord of yours?” he looked down at the voluminous pages of Edward's letter that Dora had allowed to fall to the floor at her feet.

Her parents both stared at her, expecting some sort of reaction. They got none. Dora spooked Viola, who paled as she knelt beside her young mistress. She picked up all the pages and tried to arrange them in some sort of order.

“I'll put Mr. Edward's letter on the table for you while I fix breakfast,” Viola assured her. She backed out of the room without taking her eyes off Dora for one second. The cleaning lady practically tripped over the door jamb heading into the kitchen.

“Winthrop, I don't like the way Dora's acting. It's not like her. Usually she chatters away about these letters, or she fumes, or breaks into tears. I --- I don't remember her just sitting there staring into space.”

Her father had retrieved his newspaper from the doorstep. Viola had been too distracted to place it on the table for him. He was already annoyed as he glanced toward his daughter. “Women!” he spat and headed into the dining room for his morning coffee.

Mrs. Benley hesitated in the living room watching her daughter for a few more moments. “Dora, won't you speak to me?” she pleaded. Then she scurried into the kitchen. “Viola, we'd better call Mr. Byrne. Only he knows how to deal with Dora when she gets like this.”

The aroma of sausage and freshly scrambled eggs with butter assaulted Dora's nostrils. It wrapped itself subtly around her. She ignored them like alien substances that had nothing to do with her. She rose from her chair. She made no attempt to fetch Edward's letter from the dining room table. She glided across the floor like a sleepwalker, staring straight ahead as she ascended the stairs.

“Viola, where has Dora gone?” her mother scurried back into the living room. She ran into the foyer in time to see her daughter disappearing into the upstairs hallway. She gaped after her, not knowing what to do.

Dora shut the bedroom door behind her. She slumped down on her bed and sat there looking through her window, whose curtains had never been drawn last night because she'd never slept here. Soon she didn't see the window. She didn't even see her bedroom. Instead she saw a fair-complexioned man with blond hair, blue eyes, and an intense stare approaching her. He looked vibrantly alive, almost radiant, as if his skin itself were glittering. He was wearing the white silken robes of the Sharif of Mecca with a belt and a Bedouin's headdress. A sword was fastened to the belt. He held a rifle. He was pointing it at her ready to shoot. He vanished. She kept on staring ahead just the same. It didn't matter if she saw him or not. He was always there like some ghostly presence.

Br-r-r-r-r-r-ring!

She glanced at the phone and let it ring. Then it was silent once more.

Br-r-r-r-r-r-ring!

It started up again, then was silent.

Soon it was afternoon. It was too late to go to bed. She went out to the garden where yesterday's snow was melting in an early spring thaw. She strolled around the walkways deep in thought. She didn't eat dinner with anyone else, even though Michael came over. She avoided his company. Her mother, father, and Mr. Byrne peered out the window at her, no doubt discussing her and her actions.

Edward had a picture of her in Mr. Byrne's suit that he'd taken in Queenstown the day after the Lusitania sank. She had no photo of him. After all these months --- no, years! --- it was hard to remember what he looked like exactly. She recalled the redhead and the orange freckles, the pale complexion. Other than that, it was impossible to be sure of his eye color. Sometimes she imagined Edward with blue eyes, sometimes gray, at other times green. Sometimes he had a pug nose, at other times an aquiline one. And the shape of his chin . . . well, that was a total mystery. All she had was a “Crusader's ring” to remind her of her fiance. Yet somehow the bond that joined them was forged with iron and steel. He had his teeth in her and wouldn't let go.

Dora remembered the bare rooted tea rosebushes that she'd bought the other day. They were soaking in pails of standing water in the garage, taking up water in their roots before getting planted. It was late and getting dark out. Michael had gone home reluctantly after attempting to talk to her with no success. Her parents were upstairs in the anteroom to their bedroom reading. She decided to start planting the roses. Usually that was Frank's job. But what did it matter?

Dora had never been fond of yard work until recently. Since being confined to her house and grounds, there was little else to do. It was a short stroll up the gravel drive to the shed above the garden. In the distance she noticed the night guard. Once he'd paced off in the other direction, she opened the door and reached for the spade.

She couldn't quite put her hand on it. So she flicked on the overhead light. On the far side of the shed sat a man slouched against the wall next to the bags of soil and manure. She recognized his face in an instant, though she hadn't glimpsed it in many months.

Chapter 53:

Dora heard the clock strike three. She barely glanced at it as she continued to read, resolved to stay up as long as it took:

At dinner the men roasted game on a spit over a blazing fire. Jackals howled in the distance. A cool night wind gusted around Petra, making everyone draw nearer to the flames. “We've got to secure the port of Akaba,” Lawrence stated flatly. “It's the most important city on the west coast of Arabia. It's been that way for thousands of years.”

“Why are we in Petra to begin with?” I couldn't help but keep watch on the dark distance beyond the campfires. I couldn't shake my terrible feeling of foreboding.

“We have to hold Petra to hold Akaba,” Lawrence said with finality. “Petra is the high place in the region. You have to own the high ground.”

The Arabs amused themselves firing rounds of ammunition into the still night sky. Lawrence always supplied them with fifty to one hundred rounds each day. Much of it was wasted in this fashion. Others smoked much cherished cigarettes, or “gaspers”, which made them cough and laugh all the more. Still others toyed with wrist-watches, field glasses, and other trinkets which they would pass around among themselves. Lawrence never ran short of amusements. He kept two or three camels busy carrying “toys” of such kinds at all times.

Lawrence was off the next morning for Akaba, where a Turkish garrison was housed. “How are you going to break into an armed city? We don't have that many men?” I protested, riding next to the Colonel.

He grinned. “Remember, not only Alexander the Great but the Roman legions march with us.”

The Arabs who overheard us chuckled like Sidi Lawrence. So I would have to trust him. He didn't like to confide in anybody. He kept everything to himself --- all too much, I think, if I am to judge by my encounter in that tomb in Petra.

First we came to Gueirra, a Turkish post in King Solomon Mountains. What I remember from the map was that this was twenty-five miles from Akaba. I braced myself for the worst. As soon as we drew near, out streamed the Turks with their hands up. The Arabs cheered and rode up to collect their weapons. Lawrence grinned broadly at me. He dared to wink.

“What the devil?” I asked, dumbfounded as we rode into the outpost unopposed.

“Sidi Lawrence, his reputation goes before him. It makes a loud noise,” one of the Bedouins banged two pots together to illustrate his point.

No sooner did Lawrence station a few Bedouins to hold the fort, than he was off toward Akaba. “Don't we get to stop for lunch?” I asked.

“Not if you want the advantage of surprise.”

Soon we'd ascended into the mountains and were squeezing ourselves single file through an extremely narrow pass called the Wadi Ithm. “What are we doing this for?” I asked.

“No one will expect it.”

“Yes, and no one will know where to come looking for us when we starve or get lost.” I had an intense feel of what this would be like after my night spent alone in the underground chamber.

Soon we were coming down out of the pass directly into the Kethura, another Turkish outpost, the only land approach to Akaba. Lawrence and his Bedouins, mounted on racing camels and Arab stallions, charged the Turkish garrison. He sent the Turks running at the same time that other Arabs appeared out of nowhere to join us and swell our numbers. The whole desert was in revolt, having heard of our success. “It's the Shereefian army!” one Bedouin declared. Another echoed him and another and another down the line. Of course what they meant was that Lawrence was the “Shereef” and we were the “Shereefians”, or his subjects.

“I suppose we will make camp here?” I suggested to the Colonel.

“Hardly,” he replied, “we have to make one more call. Akaba.”

“Today?” I couldn't believe it.

“We have to be ready to make our appearance right on time,” he said ambiguously.

I had no choice but to follow or be left in the middle of nowhere in the blazing sun with no supplies and mostly captured Turks for company. Lawrence was insane to head straight up over still another mountain pass in the King Solomon Mountains. We had to scale an old Roman wall with camels in tow. Lawrence directed us over the lowest part of it. That was one of the advantages to having an archaeologist guiding us. That night we got almost as far as the descent into Akaba where Lawrence was forced to make camp.

I woke up in the middle of the night. The campfires were glowing orange embers. A shadowy figure hovered over me. “Is that you, Colonel?” The man fled. He scaled the mountainside looming above us on silent, cat-like feet.

I fired into the dark. Arabs sprang up and joined me. They loved nothing better than to fire round after round of ammunition at any owl, lizard, or snake, let alone at an escaping villain. Soon the night air was filled with bullets. It sounded as if we were fighting a battle. Lawrence appeared at my elbow. “Shooting practice? I didn't think you were the type, Lieutenant.”

“Anybody would be the type if they awoke and found a stranger standing over him. It was probably that Osama I was telling you about.”

He shrugged and yawned. “We've got bigger bad guys to deal with.”

Next morning I examined the hillside for a body. Whoever it had been, had managed to escape without a trace. Not even the low brush had snagged a thread of his robe as he'd crept past.

“Can't wait to find yourself a Turk?”

I turned to behold a man wearing a kuffiyeh of white silk and gold embroidery. It was held in place over his head by an agal, consisting of two black woolen cords decorated with silver and gold thread. Over his shoulders was thrown a black camel-hair robe, or abba. Underneath all he wore a pure white robe coming down to his feet. He tied the robe in place around his waist with a gold-brocaded belt. In the belt was fastened a curved sword. Only Princes of Mecca were allowed to wear such fine attire.

After my initial surprise I noticed that the apparition out of the desert with the sun shining behind him was scarcely more than five foot three and talking in a familiar tone of voice. “You've put on that costume?” I asked, dumbfounded. It wasn't the one he wore everyday. It looked newly laundered, not the least bit dusty or dirty.

“Certainly! I want to give the Turks a scare,” Lawrence admitted, every bit the showman.

“I see . . . “ No wonder everybody called him Sidi Lawrence, the blond shereef, the uncrowned King of Arabia!

“Come!” the Colonel beckoned me to follow him.

Everyone had risen early. Bedouins were showing off their best outfits, donning baubles, whether captured or not. Others had decorated themselves with their wife's jewelry. Many had spent the wee hours polishing their knives and pistols. They wanted to resemble riders from Arabia's fabled past.

Lawrence took his place in the lead. “Let's follow the footsteps of Moses toward the Promised Land!” As the men cheered, he wove his way down out of the narrow pass through the mountains. It was still so early that he managed to hurry past the Turkish artillerymen --- waking up and rubbing their eyes in the dawn light --- posted on the outer perimeters of Akaba. They must have thought of Lawrence as an apparition from their dreams.

Lawrence charged right into the main square of Akaba that morning of July 6, 1917. It was surrounded by mud huts, narrow streets, and bazaar stalls with merchants hawking their wares. No one took any notice of Lawrence and his desert hordes until they had gone quite some distance.

Finally a German officer stepped out of a building and gaped at him with a monocle. He hurried right up to Lawrence and saluted him. “Who are these men of yours?” he asked. He could tell quite naturally that Lawrence, dressed in such a costume and with such a sense of “presence” about him, must be the leader.

“They are the army of King Hussein, the Grand Shereef of Mecca, and his son, Prince Feisal,” Lawrence answered at once.

“Who?” the German officer asked as if he came from another world, which he did.

“King Hussein is Emir of Mecca, as I said,” Lawrence repeated.

“What does that make me?” the German was perplexed as he scratched his head.

“Our prisoner,” Lawrence grinned.

“Are you taking me to Mecca or somewhere else?” he asked.

“Egypt.”

“Do they have provisions there? We don't have many left here,” he confessed, wriggling his nose at the flea-bitten, fly-infested bazaars across the street.

Lawrence assured the man, “The British military supplies them with treats from all the way across the Atlantic, straight from America.”

“The Land of Milk and Honey!” the German sighed, doing everything besides licking his tongue.

“Lead the German prisoner away!” Lawrence gave the order.

His men complied and shackled the man, who only smiled as if quite content to drink a bottle of Coke with the aura of America about it instead of staying in Akaba.

Lawrence wended his way back to Petra, leaving men behind to hold the fort. The Bedouins surged out of Petra to greet and congratulate us. For the nomads have channels of communication all their own. News travels as fast as it does in Europe, though in different ways. Since Lawrence had unified almost all the Arabs under one banner, nearly everyone he saw now was on our side.

“After you took Akaba, why would the Turks bother to follow us here?” I asked.

“Revenge,” he explained. “Even if the Turks won't fight, the Germans will make them.”

Lawrence let the Bedouins rest for several days in Petra, cooking over campfires, telling tales around them, and exercising their camels and stallions around town. He let them brag.

He left very abruptly early one evening for a raid on a chalk mountain fifteen miles northeast of Petra. We approached the old Crusader Castle known as Shobek up a steep hill while Lawrence discoursed about Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem, an occupant of the castle. He'd done an undergraduate thesis on the subject of Crusader Castles while at Oxford.

The whole way was winding and precipitous. I wondered that Lawrence dared to do this at nightfall. We might lose our footing. It was still guarded by the Turks. Wouldn't we be spotted and captured? Eyes peered out at us through the desert trees and bushes. Someone was moving through the brush on either side of us. I rode up ahead to alert Lawrence. “We're being watched. Shouldn't we turn around?”

“Patience, Lieutenant,” he waved me off. He seemed unimpressed, thinking himself the Messiah of the Arabs and being assured that no one could harm one hair on his head --- not the Turks or the Germans, or even Mohamed, Osama, and the unseen Prince Ali.

Suddenly a bunch of men rushed out at us. I said my prayers and thought of you, Dora. Not a shot was fired. No alarm was raised. The men either leaped on other men's camels or provided their own. They blended in with our party.

Lawrence turned his camel around and shot back down the mountainside. I followed, not wanting to stay behind in such a place. Lawrence did not cease galloping when we reached the bottom of the hill. The riders continued charged across miles of desert, stopping only to water their camels once.

We arrived back at Petra long before dawn. The men acted like they didn't need any sleep. They broke into song and merriment.

“What did we accomplish by this raid anyway?” I confronted the Colonel.

“Wonderful things!” he proclaimed.

“Who are these strange men who returned with us?”

“If you weren't so preoccupied with spooks, with thinking we're being ambushed by secret assassins, you might have paid attention. They're Syrians.”

“But they came from the Turkish stronghold!”

“They were being held there as slave labor. We liberated them. Better yet, they've joined us. I've doubled my forces, for they are Arab patriots, too.”

“Some of them might be spies.”

“You might be a spy for all I know, Lieutenant.”

“So might anyone, for that matter,” I replied. “But someone's been following us all the same as I warned you.”

“I don't have time for such spooks and frights, if you'll remember what I told you!” he dismissed me. “I've got business to attend to.”

The next day a raiding party of Arabs, including the liberated Syrians, attacked the same chalk mountain. They destroyed three hundred rails of a side line of the Damascus-Medina Railway near Aneiza. No sooner did they accomplish their objective than Lawrence called them back to Petra to prepare for battle.

“They will attack us here next,” he proclaimed. “When they lose here, they will have lost Akaba for good. If they can't recapture the city, they can kiss Holy Arabia good-bye. They might as well sign an armistice with the Allies.”

I shouldn't be astonished at his daring or his broad, sweeping vision. I lived with it every day. I lived with the danger that sprang from it as well.

Lawrence set up his headquarters at the Temple of Isis, which he kept ablaze at night with a bonfire. Other bonfires answered it from all the high places. The whole deserted ruin of a city took on an eerie atmosphere with the leaping flames from the altars as well as the campfires that the Arabs built. At sunset it looked oddest when the flares competed with the last, dying rays of the sun reflecting off the roseate stone.

. “Here,” Lawrence offered, “have a cigar.” He held out my father's elaborately carved, wooden humidor. It had materialized out of nowhere.

“Lawrence, how do you expect me to take a cigar from that thing when it's caused so much trouble!”

He lighted up himself and blew smoke in my direction.

“Mohamed says he kept on looking in that humidor and couldn't find something associated with that ancient King of Petra, Abdullah. He says you know where it's hidden. Do you?”

Lawrence held up his hands. “Can't I even enjoy a smoke without you spewing your Gothic fantasies?”
“Mohamed claimed --- “

Lawrence sighed and turned the humidor upside down. He poured out the few remaining cigars. He showed me the empty box. “What could possibly be hidden inside here besides cigars? Isn't that what a humidor's for?”

I leaned forward. “I caught you red-handed that night, you know!” I hissed. “You were copying down inscriptions with cryptic characters. You burned them and --- “

He closed the humidor with a bang and stuffed it into a pack behind him. “Lieutenant,” he turned his eyes on me, “neither you nor I ever saw such inscriptions or characters. I never copied them down. You never approached my tent to ask me about them. It was all one of your ghoulish dreams, do we understand each other?”

“Yes, Colonel,” I realized for the first time how determined he was to keep up his front at all costs, even at the cost of human lives, “I believe we do.” I rose.

“Now won't you have a smoke --- on my terms?” he leaned back in his chair and took a draw on his cigar.

For the first time I saw him for what he really was. Beyond the white flowing robes and the desert attire, T.E. Lawrence had the instincts of a poker player, like a gambler in your Western films. He could keep a straight face no matter what the odds. He wanted to bluff, outplay his enemies, and win the wager in the end. He had the endurance of a bull and nerves that couldn't be shaken.

“No,” I turned, “I'm going to write my fiancée. I'm going to tell her my days are numbered.”

Yours,

Edward

P.S. I worry that Prince Ali is Ali the gardener who once worked at Ware House and has disappeared. He could be the saboteur you've told me about, the one who helped sink the Lusitania and vandalized your room at Ware House. If he's tried to murder you, it must be because my father and Leonard Woolley sent you that birthday package that went down to the bottom of the Irish Sea with the ship.

I don't know why my father would have done such a thing, but I saw him with my own eyes run into Asalah's burning house in London to rescue the humidor. At the time I accepted his explanation. He associated it with his mistress. Now that I've seen the bones of King Abdullah and heard what Mohamed and Osama had to say, I wonder if there wasn't a lot more to it.

Lawrence, my father, and Leonard Woolley seem to be engaged in a conspiracy. Lawrence is the kingpin. It has something to do with that now long ago dig at Carchemish when Ali and Asalah came home to England with my father. I wonder if my father, Lawrence, and Woolley didn't make a side excursion to Petra. Lawrence brags to the men that he was here before in his student days. I wonder if the three of them didn't descend into the tomb of King Abdullah and find something they shouldn't have.

Exactly what did they find? I'd like to know before I'm murdered for it.

What I can do, though, and must do with great reluctance, is to break off our engagement. It's the only way to protect you. That man you used to go around with, Michael Byrne, is a far safer person for you to marry.

You needn't write me anymore. In fact, I forbid it! The less you have to do with me the better. Let me carry my own doom to the grave. Remember the short, happy time we spent together.

Until eternity unites us in a better world,

Edward

P.S.S. During the few brief weeks of our courtship I never felt the way I do now. I was just beginning to love you. Yet since I've been with Colonel Lawrence, you've grown on me day by day. The photo I took of you standing there in that suit in Queenstown, Ireland sits on my makeshift nightstand. I talk to you every night. You reach out to me, and I am quiet in my heart if only for a few hours. I remember the feel of your hands on my cheeks. I pretend that you put your hand in mine, and I kiss it. Then I can sleep.

Why do I say this now? I want you to know I'm not breaking off our engagement because I don't love you but because I do. I really, really do!

Good-bye,

Edward

Chapter 52:

Dora heard the clock chime once more. She looked up to see it was 2:00 A.M. She couldn't go to sleep yet. She had to finish the letter:

“Edward, for heaven's sake, is that you?” came a familiar voice.

At the opening to the chamber shone the face of Colonel Lawrence, part in shadow, part in the sun, highlighting his long, pointed nose and his high cheekbones. A lock of his wavy blond hair peeked out from underneath his headdress. His clear blue eyes sparkled with mirth. “Edward, what are you doing down there? Practicing some Near Eastern burial ritual?”

“Lawrence!” I shouted. “I wondered whether I'd see you again in this life.”

“We've been wasting time looking for you,” the Colonel declared, “ever since one of the men saw you wandering away from our ranks yesterday. He went after you, but you vanished. What on earth could you have had in mind?”

Two Bedouins tied a rope around a pillar near the opening and shinnied down to the bottom of the burial chamber. They gave me a drink from their skins. I grasped onto the rope and climbed up.

“Hamid says he called you. You didn't answer,” Lawrence gave me a crust of unleavened bread. “He went back and got Abdul. They both chased you about the city. You ran away. About dusk they came back and reported to me. I couldn't credit it. I sent the night patrol to hunt for you. When they couldn't find you, I ordered the whole troop to come search for you this morning. Here we are,” Lawrence volunteered with a sweep of his arm.

“Lawrence, it couldn't have been Abdul and Hamid. It had to be . . . “ I pulled Lawrence aside and spoke in a low a whisper. “Mohamed and Osama --- he's the thief I saw about camp --- were after me. They were down there in the burial chamber,” I pointed toward the tomb, “burning scrolls that they pulled out of a crevice in the wall. They said they were working for some prince. I --- “

Lawrence threw back his head and laughed. “Really, Lieutenant, has the sun gotten to your brain? It's bad enough with the men imagining mummies, ghosts, and goblins. Now you come up with ancient burial chambers, geniis, and buried princes with hordes of gold.” He slapped me on the back as if it were a joke and sauntered off.

I 'd heard the wastrels talk and had watched them closely. Mohamed had administered a parting kick to my buttocks, which I could still feel. I was lucky to be alive, and here Lawrence was making light of it. I was expected to mount the camel that Hamid offered me. I followed along in stunned silence.

“Edward!” Lawrence called from the back of his camel as our dromedaries carefully picked their way around the stone monuments. “You should have become a crime novelist like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or an adventure writer like Haggard. When we're gathered around the fire one night, huddling to keep warm, I'll call on you to entertain us.”

I'd no choice but to follow Lawrence and his army wherever they were going. Exactly where, I hadn't the presence of mind to wonder. Only when the camel next to me spat rather nastily, another spat back at him, and some of the spittle landed on me was I alerted to look around. We were ascending. I realized that we were beyond the city gates and had been so for many minutes.

Lawrence turned to one of the Bedouins and said something rapidly in Arabic. I'd learned enough to survive. But I was rather slow, and I couldn't translate dialogue spoken at that speed.

Suddenly the Bedouins dismounted. They let their camels pasture on stubble growing nearby. Some went to fill their water skins at a springs pouring between the rocks. Others took the opportunity to chew on the unleavened bread or nuts they carried with them.

Not knowing what else to do, I tied my camel up --- just in time. Lawrence was off up the mountain slope. Bedouins scrambled up behind him, leaving only me to gape after them. I wished I had a walking stick with me. Some of the older Bedouins had brought theirs. I had to struggle along as best I could.

Lawrence didn't seem to be troubled by such problems. The Bedouins, like goats, could climb anything, the more rugged the better. They'd grown up in the desert. They'd skipped up and down steps like this as boys.

Only when we'd climbed a mile or more did Lawrence disappear within a great gray stone facade. It must have been one hundred and fifty feet high and many feet long. How had anyone built something like this so far above the city? Daring to look behind me at the way we'd come, I judged it to be at least a thousand feet above the town.

“What on earth is this?” I exclaimed.

“El Deir,” one Bedouin explained.

“What!”

“The Co-ve-nant,” another Bedouin tried to pronounce the word carefully, repeating something that Lawrence had taught him. “High place.”

I craned my neck to see to the very top of the building. I could make out what looked like a giant Greek urn. Carved in it was that face of an ugly woman with bulging eyes and snake-like hair writhing around her head. I thought, What is Medusa doing here? She gaped straight down at me. That must be part of the effect the sculptor had been trying to create.

I thought, Maybe the ancients were used to such heights. They didn't fear them. Nowadays, at least among white men, what a place of foreboding!

All somebody had to do was take a fraction of a wrong step in any direction. Down he would plummet, falling thousands of feet to his death, crushed by rock long before he reached the bottom of the slope.

From behind the big urn with the Medusa head, someone peeked out. His cloak left only a black and seemingly empty space where the face should be. A cold hand clutched my stomach and closed in a tight fist. Was that Mohamed? Was that Osama? It had to be one or the other.

Lawrence appeared at the entrance to the magnificent building. “What are you up to, Lieutenant?” He started down the pathway with the grace and swiftness of a mountain lion.

From behind the Medusa something flashed in the sun and edged outward. It glinted and glowed, pointed downward at an angle. Its barrel was aimed toward Lawrence. It kept moving ever so slightly as he strode toward me all unawares.

“Lawrence, watch out!” I jabbed my finger in the air in the direction of the Medusa. “Get down!”

Lawrence fell and rolled almost at the same moment that the shot went off. I fired back while dashing toward him, forgetting my own safety on the rocks. I hunkered down as close to the ground as possible. At the same time several Bedouins converged on El Orens. They tackled him in their anxiousness to be the first to aid him.

“Don't worry about me,” Lawrence held his arm and winced, “somebody misfired, that's all.” He took a cloth and bandaged his own arm. One of the Bedouins helped the shereef.

“Lawrence!” I crouched next to him and whispered into his ear. “What did I tell you? They're after you. I heard them say that they wanted to kill both you and me. They've been hired as assassins by some Prince Ali.”

The Bedouins took off in the direction of the shot. Staircases around the building led straight up. I followed the Arabs in their race up to the very top. The staircase dead ended at the face of the mountain. The peak rose high above me. Nearer to me, carved into that solid rock face, stood a flat platform a little over the height of my chest. Above that was a domed-shaped kind of roof that was charred and blackened. It was just like the ancient altar in the town of Petra. This must also be a sacrificial altar high in the mountains surrounding the city. Worshipers once brought animals here to sacrifice and take the omens.

A bullet came whizzing straight for me. I ducked. Someone had been waiting to catch me alone, or perhaps they'd mistaken me for Lawrence. I fired in the same direction.

“There he is!” A group of Bedouins appeared from around the corner. They swarmed about and escorted me down the steps back to where Lawrence was standing. They were chattering a mile a minute like parakeets. I could make out little of what they were saying.

The Colonel held up his hands for silence. “So, Lieutenant, it was you all along.”

“Me all along --- what?” I asked.

He thumped me in the chest. “You were the one shooting. I told the men that's what I saw. They were to come and get you before you hurt somebody else.”

“I fired back at the gunman up there if that's what you mean. I did it while you fell to the ground,” I defended myself against I didn't know what charge. “You must have seen that.”

“Yes, but they tell me there's no one up there,” he glanced over his shoulder at the building and the urn with the Medusa design.

“But --- but what about the bullet that hit you?”

He put his hand on my arm. “You have a happy trigger finger.”

“You mean --- you mean you think I fired that bullet as well?”

“I don't hold it against you,” he wrapped his arm around my shoulders and led me to a vantage point overlooking the area. “Hunting down the Turks takes its toll on everybody after awhile.”

“Colonel, surely you can't imagine that --- “

“Hush!”
“I was coming back down the stairs and wondering where to turn . . . “

Lawrence nodded, half paying attention to what I was saying, “You're always getting lost, aren't you? It seems to be an affliction of yours lately. We all need some rest. After this coming battle, perhaps we can get it. The Turks are massing on Petra. We have to defend it.”

“Oh?”

Again he smiled. “Lieutenant, look down below.”

I stared down where he was pointing.

“This is the best vantage point around Petra. That's why I came up here. I want to study the layout of the land. The best defense of the city is from where we entered it. You can see the Siq from here.”

So he was dismissing not only me but the threat on his life!

“Remember that camera of yours, Lieutenant?”

I gaped at him. This was hardly the time to bring up my camera!

“Take a photo of the city below us.”

“Colonel?”

“That's an order, Lieutenant.”

I groped for the equipment in my pack. As I got out my folding camera, he leaned closer to me as if peering through the lens. “Lieutenant, even if that were true that assassins were hunting me down, I was brought here to help the Arabs achieve their independence from the Turks. God didn't intend for me to come here in vain. If I were you, I'd think the same way.”

He was back to his Messiah philosophy! “Lawrence, the Messiah himself was assassinated, if you want to call it that. He was crucified. They have something much worse in mind for me and you.”

He guffawed as if I'd made a joke, patted me on the back, and strutted off to talk to somebody else. He walked as if his arm had not been bandaged, as if a little assassination attempt now and then meant nothing to Lawrence of Arabia.

Chapter 51:

Dora paused only long enough to glance at the clock. It was one A.M. She continued to read:

My handhold was slipping. I attempted to find a crevice in the rock for the toe of my boot so I could give myself a boost upward. When I put my weight on it, my boot slipped. I plummeted onto a dusty floor and rolled.

I got up and measured the room. It was about twenty paces one direction and twenty paces the other. There were no furnishings of any kind nor anything hanging on the lower walls. I failed to detect the presence of another living being.

I got out the last of my rations for dinner. I swilled the last of my water. If this was to be my tomb, so be it. The light soon died in the hole above me through which I had plummeted. Night came on. It didn't take long for me to fall into a deep, profound slumber.

Suddenly a bright light shone above me. I'd slept the whole night through and well past dawn. Instead of the sizzling bacon and kidney pie whose aromas wafted my direction every morning during the summer while I was home on holiday from Oxford, there was only dust to make me sneeze. Instead of lying on a soft mattress covered with my grandmother's heirloom blanket, I lay flat on my back in the dust on the cold, hard ground. With a groan it came back to me at once --- where I was and why.

I uncapped my water skin and turned it upside down. A few drops landed on my tongue. They served to torment me about what I didn't have rather than to relieve my burning throat and parched mouth. I lacked so much as a bit of hard, unleavened bread to gnaw on.

I figured today was it --- do or die. Without water it would be certain death to climb up into the sunlight and start running all over the place. I resolved to stay where I was and wait for Lawrence to find me. Without him and the Bedouins, I was a dead man.

I tried to look on the bright side, if there was a bright side about dying of thirst. At least here it was shady. The walls were thick enough that it would remain cool throughout the day --- if I lived that long. I'd never tried to go without water before. I didn't know how long one could last. I'd heard stories, which I didn't like to think about now.

It was hard to sit still and do nothing except wait, counting the minutes and seconds. I could hear my gold pocket watch ticking, though I couldn't read its face in the dark. My hand would slip around it and feel its pulse, like my own heartbeat, measuring out the time for me to live. I was willing to trade the watch for a long quaff of chilled water from a well. The gold timepiece, presented to my great-great-great grandfather by Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo, was worth nothing here.

The sunlight above me had changed its angle, illuminating more of the chamber. I was astonished to see an engraving on the wall above me of a camel caravan making its way through a landscape that looked very much like the Great Arabian Desert. It was easy to recognize the outlines of the rugged, red sandstone jagged cliffs and mountains.

Where had I seen a wall mural like this before? I remembered trekking through the mountains. We'd come upon some etchings in the rocks. That had led to a cave where we'd had lunch. The Bedouins had not wanted to join us. They'd said it was taboo. The cave had been elaborately painted with murals. There had been recognizable donkeys and horses, also pictures of fires and weird-looking demons and spirits.

Lawrence had said the cave spooked the Bedouins because it was a burial chamber. Could this be another of a much later time period, albeit a more expensive and well-built one? Could that be why it was so empty? Why it was under the surface of the street?

I heard voices. Two men were lowering themselves down into the chamber. It was too late for me to escape, even if there had been way to do so. I hunkered back against the wall in the shadows and lay perfectly still. I closed my eyes and peered at the men through cat-like slits.

A shaft of sunlight thrust its way down to the floor. It had a strange, three-dimensional quality that resembled the finger of God pointing down accusingly at the interlopers, who by now had reached the floor. The middle of the tomb was illuminated, sweeping away the dark shadows.

Along the opposite wall lay a corpse, a shriveled up mummy with leather for skin. He still wore rings and traces of finery, persevered by the dry desert air. He lay stretched out on a bier with his hands folded over his chest. He was looking straight up at the ceiling in tattered shreds of cloth that had survived the centuries.

The two men crept past the corpse, kicking him to one side irreverently. One of them spat at him. “You!” he cursed. “You caused all these evils! If it weren't for you, we wouldn't be trekking across the desert hunting down Sidi Lawrence.”

Why, it was Mohamed, the merchant, the one who'd led the party of Bedouins after the Turkish column some days ago, the one who had never returned!

“Abdullah was a rich man in his day,” said his companion, whom I immediately recognized as the rascal whom I'd chased out of my tent on innumerable occasions. “He thought he was doing something important to put the Holy of Holies in his tomb.” He shook his head.

“Author of all the plagues of Egypt!” Mohamed exploded and threw an empty tin can at the corpse. It grazed the mummy's bony nose, breaking it off.

“He's dead. He can't hear us,” sighed the thief. “He's probably sitting in Paradise right now surrounded by Virgins. If you could eat grapes, figs, and dates, would you listen to such as us?”

“Allah cast him into hell,” Mohamed swore. “Abdullah should have known better than to steal such a Holy of Holies out of the mosque and put it here for troublemakers to get their grimy hands on.”

“Ah! You mean El Orens!” said the thief.

“Who the hell else should I mean?” Mohammed's dark eyes flashed. “As it was, Abdullah defaced the Holy of Holies beyond all recognition. He defied the Prophet's wishes and the express decrees of his lawful successors.”

“Let's get to work. We don't want El Orens to beat us to it again.”

“What about him?” Mohamed spied me lying there in the shadows playing dead, hardly daring to breathe. He pointed right at me. His eyes consumed me.

The thief cast me a glance and then waved in dismissal. “The fall into the chamber killed him. He broke his neck.”

“I'll make sure he's dead!” Mohamed drew his knife and started across the chamber toward me.

His fellow in crime grabbed him. “Remember what Prince Ali told us? We would be paid only if we destroyed the last traces of the ancient desecration and brought him evidence of it.”

“He also wanted El Orens dead. We have failed,” Mohamed sighed, putting his knife away.

“Prince Ali told us that the Holy of Holies was more important,” he caught onto the edge of Mohamed's robe. “Besides, the British officer dropped his gold watch over there. We can take that to Prince Ali to prove that one's dead.”

“Yes, my Osama!” Mohamed rubbed his hands together, giving the thief a name at last. “Or we can sell it in a bazaar for ten times what it's worth,” he picked up my heirloom gold pocket watch, “for it looks like it's made of solid gold.” He fingered it with experienced hands, slavering over it.

Osama took out a large wooden box from a crevice in the wall above the corpse. I wondered if it was the coffin of a child. When Mohamed threw it open, I saw scrolls resembling those I'd once seen in the British Museum --- the thick paper made from papyrus plants along the Nile which was the first cloth upon which anything was written in the ancient world. They were covered with mysterious characters. They reminded me of the letters I'd seen Lawrence copying down in his tent that night, the inscriptions which he then proceeded to burn. These were finer still and looked very valuable. Lawrence would love to get his hands on them. To my horror, Mohamed and Osama no sooner dragged them out of the wooden box, than they hacked them to pieces.

“Let's build a fire!” Mohamed squatted down. They'd brought charcoal and matches. They lighted the fire and hurled the papyri into it, letting the smoke drift up through the opening. I had to keep myself from coughing or sneezing. I didn't want to tip them off I was still alive.

“Here, I have part of Abdullah's scroll with me!” Mohamed held the paper above his head and waved it in the air. “We will send it to Prince Ali so he can see it came from the tomb of this long ago King Abdullah of Petra --- the heretic who escaped from Mecca to this obscure place in the desert.”

“How will Prince Ali know it's the right scroll?”

“See?” Mohamed showed Osama. “It is marked with the king's official seal. Abdullah retained it even when he fled Mecca in the seventh century to escape Muhammad's successors. And he took these scrolls with him, heretic as they are, to far away Petra that had long ago seen its glory days. He thought he was clever to bury them in his tomb.”

“It's like he foresaw the coming of Sidi Lawrence,” Osama said.

“No one could imagine a villain like him,” Mohamed declared. “And after we kill him, no one will ever exist like him again.”

“But we can't kill Lawrence until we steal what he's hidden from us,” Osama sighed.

“That wily desert fox is playing a game of cat and mouse with me. I take the humidor. But nothing's in it. He's hidden the loot somewhere else. He knows I'm looking for it, but he plays on and on.”

“That's Sidi Lawrence for you. He's not like other white men. He's far too clever.”

Mohamed shot a look upward, exclaiming, “Put out the fire. I hear footsteps.”

Osama threw himself at the rope and quickly climbed to the top. Mohamed lingered only a moment to give me a swift kick in the buttocks. Then he, too, disappeared.

Chapter 50:

It was past Christmas and into the new year, 1918, before the postman rang her doorbell in the snow and excitedly presented Dora with Edward's next letter. It was late in the afternoon. A blizzard had delayed the mail.

After she poked the fire once, Dora sat down in front of the fireplace in the living room. A large oil painting of her father presided over the mantel. Viola brought her dinner there. The fire flickered and went out. Frank came to restart it.

My dearest darling:

Mohamed, the merchant, who only now and then grudgingly visits our camp, was spitting into the sand and grumbling about how he'd been cheated by Sidi Lawrence in the matter of the cigars.

“I hope that column of Turkish soldiers I saw about a quarter of a mile from your camp destroys you,” he proclaimed.

“What?” objected Lawrence. “The Turks don't usually travel in such large groups. They are too afraid of me.”

The Arabs laughed over coffee and unleavened bread baked over ashes, which they consume by the pound beside the campfire every morning.

Mohamed shrugged and opened a tin of beef, obtained during our last contact with the British Army and shipped all the way from Chicago. He carefully inserted his knife into it, repeating the customary phrase, “In the name of Allah the Merciful and the Compassionate!”

When he'd gobbled his fill, he said, “Whoever wants to come with me, we'll see what's going on with those Turks. I'm supposed to meet a caravan coming from that direction.”

He'd spent the night at our encampment, selling his wares. He had only empty camels to ride back into the desert. Several men volunteered to ride with the trader. They promised to come back within the hour.

Mohamed declared as he prepared to leave, “I'm finished with you, Lawrence, you and your cheapskate band of Bedouin warriors. Unless you agree to pay for your ten free cigars, I won't come back.”

“Good riddance!” said Lawrence.

The Bedouins gave an enormous war cry and charged out over the desert.

We kept ourselves busy pacing about, tending to this and that. Everyone could not help but look over his shoulder toward the far horizon in the direction Mohamed had led Lawrence's men.

As the minutes ticked by and no one returned, the situation grew more and more tense. The men kept on nervously glancing toward the horizon and then at Lawrence. He was occupied reading letters from Leonard Woolley as well as Sir Arthur Evans's latest news from Crete. Lawrence, without seeming to pay any attention, was watching carefully out of the corner of his eye. He suddenly leaped up and said, “Let's go after them!”

The Arabs cheered. They never could sit still for long, always wanting to be up and about. They couldn't understand how Lawrence managed to sit there and read.

Lawrence mounted his camel. Within five minutes everyone was after him charging away in the direction of the unseen Turkish column.

“El Orens!” one man rode up to him. “Is that the Turkish column over there, the one Mohamed was talking about?”

Lawrence was eagle-eyed, but even he had limits. This was too far away. It must have been five to ten miles. At that distance something seeming to move could be anything from a column of Turkish soldiers, to a group of traveling camels, to a dust storm, to a mirage.

Lawrence decided instantly, waving a letter about that he'd been perusing, “Turks are moving into that area. We need to beat them to it and push them out. Even if it's not the Turkish column, we're headed the right way.”

We traveled not by good old British miles but by watering-holes. We would make camp when we reached the next one and the next. As many days as it took, they would be called our “first water”, our “second water”, and our “third water”. Before reaching our “first water” that evening, Lawrence sent swift camel riders off to reconnoiter and find out where the other men were. They came back and reported that they could not find a trace of the missing men. Lawrence concluded that they'd wandered too close to the Turkish lines. They'd been captured, along with Mohamed, and taken prisoners. This was all the more reason why we should hurry and catch up with the column.

By the time we made camp for the night at our “first water”, the column had vanished in the distance. Lawrence relaxed by the camp fire. He got out a book as well as the humidor of cigars that my father had given him. He had been rationing them out so they would last. He allowed himself one only every few weeks.

I got out a rasher of bacon and started sizzling it over the fire. I'd taken it out of a can I'd found among my supplies in my pack. Perhaps I'd overlooked it. It wasn't like fresh bacon, but I figured it would taste better than any other kind because we were down to unleavened bread and coffee supplemented by what we could shoot.

I didn't think the other men were paying much attention. They were having a wild time singing, playing games, and shooting off their guns into the night sky. Even Lawrence couldn't prevent them from acting like a bunch of school boys.

When they smelled what I was doing, they dropped their guns aghast and backed away. They pointed at the flames and shouted, “That's unclean!”

“My nostrils!” another pinched his nose tightly with his fingers.

“Yuck!”

They made such a fuss about it that I threw the bacon to the jackals, who weren't so picky. Had some trickster planted it to create a scene? I had the same uneasy sense I'd had for months that somebody in the shadows was trailing Lawrence and trying to create as much trouble as possible --- that is, if they didn't plan to do away with the Colonel.

That night I worried that the Turkish soldiers were going to hear us and descend upon us en masse. When the men weren't shouting about “unclean bacon”, they were firing their rifles off into the night until almost dawn. I went from man to man and motioned them to be quiet. Lawrence slept, which turned out to be the wiser course.

At dawn we trekked to the northwest. Great walls of sheer rock rose up before us made of red and white sandstone. The sun glinting off them blinded me. I searched for soldiers concealed behind the rocky plinths. Lawrence rode up to me, “About twenty miles to the north is the valley of the Dead Sea. This is where Moses was supposed to have been when he made the water gush from the rock. Don't you recognize the peaks ahead of us?” .

I shook my head “no”.

“They are the sacred mountains of Edom. We've got to penetrate them.”

“We're going to climb up there?”

“We're following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and the Roman legions of Titus. The Crusaders were here, too,” his eyes shone.

That was Lawrence for you! He could be blind to everything going on around him because he thought he was trotting along in the footsteps of the Caesars of the first century A.D. He'd gotten himself captured once. Next he could be assassinated. We could all be mown down. That was all right by him as long as Titus would approve.

“Lawrence, over there in the far distance,” I pointed, “do you see something moving?”

Lawrence considered. “It must be a mirage. We never get any closer. It's always there.”

“You don't think it's that Turkish column?” I puzzled.

He waved it away. “If there ever was a Turkish column and it's not some trick to draw us on!”

I looked at him in surprise, “You mean Mohamed is a spy, a plant? He tricked us?”

He looked at me with that enigmatic smile as if he'd suspected Mohamed all along.

When we descended from the high plateau into what appeared to be a valley, the walls of stone rose on each side. The valley must have been ten to twelve miles wide. As we progressed, it narrowed rapidly. The Arabs balked. Their camels whined and stopped. Only Lawrence rode on ahead. “Come along!” he shouted. “I came through here as a student and then as an archaeological assistant in my Carchemish days.”

One objected, “Sidi Lawrence, we can't go this way. It's cursed.”

“Cursed by whom? The Turks?” the Colonel tried to rouse them.

“No! No!” the objector retreated several steps. “The spirits of the Pharaohs haunt the place.”

The other Bedouins nodded.

“There's a secret treasure buried here,” one Bedouin paled. “Whoever finds it, the mummy will come after him.”

I didn't see any pharaohs or mummies. I saw only towering sandstone cliffs that were starting to take on a reddish hue as it grew later and later in the afternoon.

“I already dug up that treasure when I was excavating with Leonard Woolley and Sir Adolphus,” Lawrence confided in them. “We sent a great horde of gold coins and statuary to the British Museum.”

The men's eyes grew bigger as they listened to Sidi Lawrence in awe.

“I met an officer who was connected to the Middle Eastern Department of the British Army. That led to my being here today. All the good things I have wrought sprang from your pharaohs and curses.”

They whispered low to each other. Slowly one after the other started to follow Lawrence, who rode at the head of the column. I galloped up next to Lawrence. “Is that what really happened? Where did you find all this loot?”

He smiled. “It could have happened.” He winked at me. “As far as what started these tall tales among the men, you will soon see.”

The passage we were following grew narrower until we could ride only one man abreast in single file. We were funneled right through the rock wall in front of us, a pathway everyone called the Siq. To judge by the face expressions of the Bedouins in line behind me, most of those men would follow Sidi Lawrence into the jaws of Hell itself.

The Siq was by now only twelve feet wide. Sheer rock walls rose up on either side. They were not smooth but very rough and worn away by winds, freezes, and sporadic rain storms through the centuries. The rock walls were marked by rivulets that resembled the fingers of a giant's hand. Down the channels escaped the rain from the monsoon season.

Finally the reddish, striated rocks closed in on top of us, darkening our way and making it seem cave-like. Only a narrow slit remained above us so that we could peek at the blue sky over our heads.

When the Bedouins saw lizards darting about among the rocks, when snakes appeared suddenly in front of their camels, startling them, one man after the other got out his handgun. They shot at the reptiles. They couldn't really hit one, but they thought it great sport to try.

I whipped around with my pistol firmly clutched in my hand. The sound I'd heard was only that of the camels brushing against a wall of pink oleander blooms and small fig trees. They grew near the base of a crashing brook cascading down from the top of the ridge.

Bedouins threw themselves to their knees and refilled their skins in the brook. One never missed such an opportunity in the desert. Lawrence wisely let them splash themselves and water their camels. He got out a book that he always carried with him on campaign.

I nervously shifted my weight from side to side of my dromedary. “Lawrence, do you think we ought to linger about so long in this narrow gorge?”

He shrugged, “Alexander sent Demetrius with an army to conquer this place. His troops lingered in this gorge. He didn't conquer anything. We don't intend to conquer much either --- just chase the Turks away.”

I never could get anything sensible out of him. “Why would Alexander want to conquer a pile of rocks?”

“This is the gateway to Petra, of course,” he laughed.

“Petra?” I exclaimed. “Never heard of it.”

“The ancient kingdom of the Nabataeans. Before Alexander.”

When the afternoon siesta ended and he gave the order to march onward in single file, I saw the shadow of a man above us reflected on the rock wall in the glinting afternoon sun. The unknown, unseen man had something clutched in his hand --- no doubt a pistol. His shadow lingered there for only a second, so that I couldn't be sure I really saw him.

It wasn't long before the Siq ended and we ran smack into a temple right in the middle of nowhere. The Bedouins stopped and whispered to each other, pointing superstitiously at the thing. Lawrence rode up to the temple in delight.

“Look at these columns, pediments, and friezes. Look at the ornate, Corinthian style,” Lawrence loved to play school teacher when he wasn't playing general.

I kept a sharp eye out for the intruder while commenting, “It's hard to make out the design. Is that erosion?”

Lawrence shook his head. “It's the work of the Wahabbis,” he frowned in distaste.

“The who?”

“They're a vagabond sect of the Sunni branch of the Moslem religion. They hang about in the farthest reaches of the Arabian Desert with a man who claims the rights we are fighting for in the name of Prince Feisal and his father, King Hussein.”

“What man is this?” I was surprised. “I haven't heard anything about him.”

“All he can do is perform spiteful, petty acts of destruction.”

“It looks like the temple has been defaced. What does that have to do with Islam?” I pressed.

“Ib'n Saud and his Wahabbis think that you can't make a graven image of anything, let alone of nude men and women clad in togas and pallas, even if they were pagans. In fact, they don't like buildings of any kind. They are iconoclasts. They frequently knock them down as soon as they see them if given a free hand.”

“Very uncivilized!” I shuddered, amazed that there might be other menaces in the Middle East besides the Ottoman Turks.

“It seems to be some prejudice of theirs that harkens back to their days as nomads wandering in Arabia Petraea, the Roman province that encompassed all the Arabian Desert, even the part far away from the coast, which the Romans called Arabia Felix, or Arabia the Beautiful. Technically Arabia Petraea was the rocky part, the wasteland. In fact, that's what the name means literally in Latin --- Arabia the Rocky.”

“It certainly is that!” I looked around at the desert rock formations.

“These Wahabbis count the plinths or rocks around here as holy,” Lawrence explained. “They think no building should overshadow them. If they find one that does, they topple it. They prefer tents.”

“They sound like a bunch of cave men.”

“They have a favorite rock called the Black Stone that they keep hidden in the Kabba in Mecca. You know, the site of the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj?”

I nodded.

“They think that the cloth-covered Kabba is about the right size for a dwelling. It's wrong to have anything bigger or more substantial. They don't believe in grave markers, let alone mausoleums or tombs.”

“Savages!” I agreed. “At least the Moslems we're dealing with are more intelligent.”

“That's why I picked out King Hussein and Prince Feisal to work with. They are enlightened. They want the Arabs to unite under one flag and one government under the supervision of the British. It goes without saying that they want to live in buildings.” He wriggled his nose. “Besides, do we have time to worry about a few vandals when we have the Ottoman Turks to fight? We must concentrate on defeating the once mighty empire that rode up to the gates of Vienna and knocked twice.”

He toured the temple with distaste, scowling at the destruction the Wahabbis had wrought. “There's no future for the Arab world in this kind of behavior,” he sighed while viewing a satyr with his legs chiseled off. “I'm glad the Wahabbis are such a small sect. I hope they will soon have died off.”

“Who built this temple?” I changed the subject.

“Hadrian,” Lawrence brightened up. “He visited Petra in A.D. 131.”

He snorted when he saw how some recent visits by the iconoclasts had resulted in obscene words being carved next to the monuments. “Without a team of crack Italian sculptors, I can't do anything about the satyrs and Pans. I can do something about this, though.”

The archaeologist prevailed for a few minutes over the Colonel. He halted the march and had his men polish away the obscene words.

On the periphery of the temple and amphitheater I could make out a campfire that didn't look very old. In fact, it looked like someone had used it only the night before. That reinforced my fears that somebody was indeed following us. Picking up a stick, I poked at the ashes to see if I could uncover more clues. A piece of unleavened bread appeared, charred at the edges, the type all Bedouins favor as their trail food. Only a few hours ago someone had been nibbling at it. The teeth marks were easy to make out.

I thought, If someone spent last night in this temple, they were either coming from the opposite direction, or they got ahead of us. I remembered the shadowy Turkish column that seemed to always be on the horizon and which Lawrence figured was a desert mirage or a trick. I also recalled the shadowy form I'd seen above us in the narrow pass at the entrance to Petra Canyon. Were they about to jump us at any moment?

I stepped back to study the outlines of the ruined temple. I examined every standing column and a few that were lying on the ground. I stared down at the vast amphitheater with the steeply rising rows of seats overgrown by patches of wild desert grass. Something rustled through the reeds. At first they vibrated. Then they flattened themselves. I hid behind a column, trying not to topple it. I watched the movement closely. A giant lizard peeked its head out.

A hundred feet above our heads stood a Greek urn. Excitedly the Bedouins pointed and chattered away in their own language. That urn was called the Treasury. According to legend it had belonged to the Egyptian Pharaohs. Bedouins took aim and fired at it.

Lawrence continued on away from the temple, farther down the plain of the oval valley that seemed to be a mile and a half long and half a mile wide. We entered through the city gate that once must have housed more than one hundred thousand souls, carved from native rocks. We came upon the ruins of ancient fortresses, palaces, and tombs. We entered the Senate House carved from a hillside of red rock and found ourselves in the lower part of the city.

While wending our way through narrow, twisting alleys, I lingered whenever possible to listen for slight sounds. Once, I lingered too long. “Lawrence?” I thought I 'd heard the Colonel call me.

Lawrence was nowhere to be found. Neither were his Bedouin troops. I was lost.

Chapter 49:

Dora felt a moment of triumph. Edward was beginning to worry about her. She penned him a quick note, hoping it would make him jealous:

Dear Edward:

You are so preoccupied with your Colonel Lawrence that's it's incredible you remember that you have a fiancée. You may not have to worry about me much longer. Mr. Byrne keeps on pressing me to marry him. I am considering his proposal seriously. I have waited for you for almost two whole years! I'm not getting any younger, you know.

Maybe you should ask Colonel Lawrence if he has a sister. You could settle down with Lawrence and his sister and never have to worry about us Americans again.

Sincerely yours,

Dora

Br-r-r-r-r-ring!

“Hello?” Dora answered.

“It's me!” exclaimed Rita. “Guess what? I've just been cast as the star in a film about the Lusitania.”

Dora gasped, “Wonderful!”

“I need moral support. I was wondering if you and your family could come up to New York City. That's where it's being made. You could visit the studio and see what you think. The director says it's all right. I told him you were all survivors, too.”

Her mother phoned her father and Mr. Byrne at work. They at once bought train tickets. They were off the next day to the big city where they hadn't visited since June of 1915.

They entered the studio inside the Austrian liner, the Martha Washington, tied up in New York Harbor, where it had been interned at the beginning of the war. They were immediately confronted by a giant poster of Rita with her picture at the top featuring her beautiful, angular face, pointed nose, dimpled chin, and locks of black hair. Beneath that was the title:

LEST WE FORGET

Semen Classics

Presents

Beautiful Rita Jolivet

In an Eight-Act Special Production Deluxe

“No, we Lusitania survivors never will forget,” said a middle-aged man standing next to them. “With all the war talk in Washington, I don't think America will either.”

“I recognize you,” said Dora. His name was on the tip of her tongue.

“Charles Lauriat at your service,” he shook hands with Dora, Michael, and Mr. and Mrs. Benley.

“You're the Boston book seller, right?” Dora said. “I remember meeting you.”

“You were traveling with your parents.”

“You wrote a book.”

“Yes, The Lusitania's Last Voyage. Published in 1915.”

She remembered that an illustration of the Lusitania with its four prominent smoke stacks was the book's frontispiece. The book related the harrowing narrative of Lauriat's escape from the ship and its immediate aftermath.

At first she couldn't place the next survivor. Then she remembered meeting him at Vanderbilt's party the first night at sea. “You're the one with the roll of hundred dollar bills!” she burst out.

George Kessler, the Champagne King laughed. “I'd give up all those hundred dollar bills gladly if everyone who attended Vanderbilt's last big bash could be alive right now.”

Other Lusitania survivors were milling about the set, including some Dora hadn't met aboard or had only glimpsed at a distance. What was chilling were the passengers who were not present such as Vanderbilt, Hubbard, and Frohman. Dora learned for the first time that the honeymoon couple she'd met the night of Vanderbilt's big party, Lesley and Stuart Mason, had not been among the survivors. It made her shake all over, though it was two years later.

They got to watch Rita, all made up, being filmed in scene after scene. In one sequence she was falling overboard, which Dora had actually witnessed her doing in real life. An actor playing Frohman stood beside her on the reconstructed deck making his famous final statement from his Peter Pan play, “Why should we fear death? It's the most beautiful adventure life presents to us.”

There was the fictional plot, too. Rita was captured by the Germans. She was sentenced to the firing squad as a spy. She insisted that she did not want a blindfold. She escaped and looked for her estranged fiance, who had broken up with her, thinking she was a German sympathizer. In the end she proved her loyalty by strangling the villain, a Prussian baron, with his own bed sheet.

“I can't wait to see it at the Nickelodeon Theater across from Kaufmann's,” said Mrs. Benley.

“The part about the sinking was really chilling,” Mr. Byrne insisted. “I keep on expecting Ali to show up at any moment with his fuses.”

They visited the Hudson River. A crew was filming a group of hundreds of extras who'd been hired to flounder about in the water and pretend that the ship was sinking. The production crew had built an expensive replica, smaller of course, of the doomed Lusitania, complete with the requisite four smoke stacks.

The visit brought back all sorts of memories for the little group of survivors. That night they were up late discussing them at their hotel. Someone had gotten copies of a new book that had come out, entitled As the Lusitania Went Down. On the cover were pictured a bride and groom in full wedding regalia. They were standing on top of the sinking ship. In the background was pictured a lifeboat. They even sang a popular ditty about the subject:

The sun was sparkling brightly

upon the ocean foam

The Lusitania speeding fast,

was very nearly home.

Then came the blow so sudden

that pierced the vessel's heart.

But while the crowd surged o'er the deck

A young man stood apart . . .

They didn't get to bed until very late. Somewhere in the middle of the night Dora heard a scream coming from across the hall. She leaped out of bed, put on her robe, and raced over to Rita's room. She knocked on the door. “Rita, it's Dora. Let me in.”

Rita flung open the door and threw herself into Dora's arms. “I was on the ship again,” Rita sobbed. “That green water was coming for me. I even lost my boots.”

Dora hugged her friend.

“I don't know how many times I've lost that same pair of boots!” Rita sniffled. “Maybe one million. I'll never get over it.”

“Your movie's well named, Lest We Forget. I don't think we survivors can ever forget,” Dora agreed with tears in her eyes. “I've had nightmares, too.”

The next morning Dora was awakened by shouting down on the street in New York City. “Read all about it!” the paper boy cried.

Dora groaned. She thought, Read about what now? Mr. Byrne knocked on her door. She answered groggily. He shoved the newspaper into her hands. She stared at the bold headline of the New York Times:

PRESIDENT CALLS FOR WAR DECLARATION, STRONGER NAVY, NEW ARMY OF 500,000 MEN, FULL CO-OPERATION WITH GERMANY'S FOES

Below that was the text of the President's address from the previous day when he'd spoken before Congress. At the bottom of the page it read: The War Resolution Now Before Congress.

“We're in. Wilson's done it. He's declared war.”

Dora gasped. “Not us, too!”

He nodded grimly.

Her father came charging into her room next. “I'll have Wilson impeached. I'm going to start getting signatures today. I'll send them to my congressman and senators.”

Dora thought, So your war has spread to us, too, Edward. I hope you're happy. I'm sure it will make your Colonel Lawrence do an Irish jig for joy. Maybe he'll get another fit of the giggles.

Her father exclaimed, “It's enough to make you want to move to the Alaska Territory!”

They were in New York for the whole day. Part of it they spent in the studio. That evening after dinner they went to the movies. Rita wanted to see the just-released big hit movie entitled, Mystery of the Double-Cross. It had been out almost a month already. It drew standing room only crowds. The Benleys, Michael, and Rita were lucky to get the last seats in the entire theater.

“It's supposed to be better than Intolerance. And it makes Civilization pale by comparison,” Rita assured them, naming hit movies of 1916.

“Not another war picture!” Mr. Benley groaned. “The less people talk about that war over there, the better.” He got out some work papers he'd sneaked along in his pocket.

“Ah, Mr. Benley, wait until you see the opening sequence!” Rita clucked. “Even you'll be impressed.”

Mr. Benley didn't look at the screen once while they showed newsreels of the Great War in Europe with the notice that had become customary:

President Wilson has asked Americans to preserve absolute neutrality during the war abroad. Please refrain from partisan applause in viewing this picture, thereby complying with the President's request . . .

“Traitor!” Mr. Benley grumbled. “He's gone back on his word.”

He didn't look at the screen again while the notice flashed up on the screen:

Just a minute please while the operator changes a reel.

As soon as the movie started, Dora noticed that her father couldn't take his eyes off it. An elegant matron strolled up to the rail of her cruise ship holding her two little dogs and looked out at the ocean. The lady immediately sighted a submarine surfacing. She screamed and pointed at it, alerting the other passengers.

The word spread on the Boat Deck like a wildfire as the matron ran crying and weeping into the restaurant. Everyone rose from his seat and fled out onto the deck in a mad mayhem to save their lives. It turned out to be an American submarine in the movie, but in real life everybody knew what had happened.

“Well, Mr. Benley, what do you think?” Rita asked when the movie ended.

“Warmongering!” he shook his head. “I say the sinking of the Lusitania is the best reason NOT to go to war. It's the best reason of all not to have any contacts with Germany or Europe. We don't want to get pulled down to their level.”

The next morning when they were at Grand Central Station buying tickets back to Pittsburgh, a newsboy was hawking papers. Another outrageous headline appeared in The New York Times:

SENATE, 82 TO 6, ADOPTS WAR DECLARATION;

ITS OPPONENTS SCORED; HOUSE ACTS TODAY;

BERLIN FEARS OUR INFLUENCE ON RUSSIA

Charles Lauriat stood beside them buying his ticket back to Boston. “I think war was fore-ordained as soon as the torpedo struck the Lusitania. Wilson hesitated for two years. Now he's being pushed into it against his will.”

“Against all our wills,” concluded Mr. Byrne. He glanced at a newspaper for sale, being hawked by another paperboy. It was called Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Newspaper: The War in Pictures. Everyone seemed to be buying it. They were devouring it all around where the Benleys and Michael were standing.

The next day Dora, Mr. Byrne, and the rest of her family boarded the train back to Pittsburgh. The paperboy on the platform was waving the newspaper over his head. Mr. Benley handed some change out the window and grabbed one:

HOUSE AT 3:12 A.M., VOTES FOR WAR, 373 TO 50;

$3,000,000,000 ASKED FOR ARMY OF 1,000,000

NATION'S GIGANTIC RESOURCES MOBILIZED

“That's it,” said Mr. Byrne. “It's history.”

Crowds were reading the headlines on the platform. Some erupted into cheers. Others were grumbling to each other, looking stone-faced, or saying nothing, huddled next to a recruitment poster that blared: REMEMBER THE LUSITANIA.

“Oh, Michael!” Dora whispered solemnly. “I'm glad you're thirty-four. You're too old to be conscripted.”

It reminded her all the more poignantly of Edward. America was just getting into the war. Edward had been in the thick of it for two whole years. Who knew how much longer it would last?

Chapter 48:

The next morning, April 2, Dora almost mailed the letter. At the last minute, before pacing up the driveway still again, she threw it into the wastebasket. It was useless to send it. Lawrence would simply ignore her. He seemed the cold-hearted, cold-blooded type.

When she got to the mailbox, there was another letter from Edward. She devoured it immediately:

Dear Dora:

Lawrence has been captured by the enemy. This is how it happened:

We'd been trying to set up explosives. The rest of us ran when we heard the train coming. Lawrence lingered, fiddling with the mess. We shouted at him to retreat, but he acted like he didn't hear us.

I had advised Lawrence that he should obtain the assistance of a British explosives expert. He wasn't an expert in munitions, though he acted like one. Sometimes the explosives went off prematurely and came near to killing someone. At other times they didn't go off at all.

He only stepped back from the tracks just in time as the train lumbered past at a sluggish speed. Lawrence condescended to stand behind a nearby sand dune. He dared to wave at the Turkish soldiers as they rode past in their lamb's-wool kalpaks, their red fez, and kabalaks. Apparently they didn't recognize El Orens, Destroyer of Railways, because they waved back. He wouldn't have stood a chance if they'd recognized him and remembered that El Orens commanded a reward of 100,000 Reichsmarks dead or alive.

“Lawrence!” I hissed.

Either he didn't hear my stage whisper, or he was ignoring me.

“Lawrence!” I practically shouted.

He continued to wave at the train as if daring the Turks to shoot.

Something moved behind a taller dune some distance away. Something silver colored was poking out slightly. Now it was poking out more.

“Lawrence!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Get down! There's --- “

A shot rang out. Lawrence fell to the ground. He must have been struck!

The sniper disappeared behind the distant dune. As a party of Arabs pursued him, I raced toward Lawrence, keeping low to the ground. I saw your worried face, Dora. I remained as alert as possible, seeing danger behind every clump of dune grass.

Someone up ahead laughed wickedly. Assassins must have fallen upon Lawrence, not just one culprit. I got out my gun and held it tightly. I might not get more than a second or two to react.

Imagine my surprise when I found Lawrence rolling on the ground holding his belly, laughing until tears appeared at the corners of his eyes. He pounded his clenched fist on the ground as if he couldn't stand it and laughed anew.

“Lawrence!” I stepped forward, scandalized. “What on earth . . . “

“I'm sorry, Lieutenant,” he finally sighed. “Don't you see? They might as well not have wasted their bullets. They can't kill me,” he boasted.

“Of course they can,” I snapped. “They will, too, if you just keep on rolling around on the ground. The tragedy of the matter is that, even if you don't care, I do. So does my fiancée. I'll probably be killed along with you.”

A smile irradiated his face, as he sat up, clasped his knees, and breathed in the desert air deeply that so agreed with him. He suddenly looked very serious, showing how his emotions could shift on a dime. “I was borne for this,” he went on looking off into space. “I was always fascinated with Near Eastern archaeology and languages. That's why I excavated at Carchemish with Leonard Woolley. I thought it was because I was going to be an archaeologist myself. But no! They needed me here. God sent me to them.”

Had the sun gotten to his brain? He sounded more like an Old Testament prophet than a British Military Officer! He looked more like one too, with that pale complexion, those intense blue eyes, and the ruddy cheeks, his uncut hair blowing out from underneath his headdress.

“Those men on the train didn't shoot you only because they didn't recognize you, not because of any divine mandate.”

He turned those burning eyes on me. I fell back a couple of paces. I didn't believe in ghosts or the supernatural, at least not since I've been about eight. But I swear --- maybe it was a trick of the light --- I saw two fires flaming in them. They spooked me.

“Don't you know it wasn't those Turks on the train who shot at me?”

“It was a sharpshooter behind a sand dune over there,” I pointed.

“That proves my point,” Lawrence nodded. “Whoever he was knew me for what I am. He couldn't kill me no mater how hard he tried.”

“We were shooting at him after he fired. He had to flee if he valued his life. It wasn't any divine protection, it was the British Army!” I insisted.

“If he hated me that much, he would have made sure that his bullet was well-aimed,” Lawrence exclaimed with absolute conviction. “He would have put everything he had into it. Some Power deflected that bullet, and that's what scared him away,” he proclaimed.

“Look here, Lawrence, if you don't come with me now, I'm going to call for help. We'll carry you away if you won't use your two legs. No God will help you then.”

Lawrence smiled. He laughed. His laugh became a chortle. “No, Lieutenant, no Edward,” he said, using my Christian name in a way he usually didn't, “I won't cause you all that trouble. Far be it from God to defy the British Army.” He chuckled some more. His mood shifted slightly. He strode beside me back to the lines. On a whim on the way back Lawrence, being very full of himself, said, “All right, men, I spy a Turkish unit over there. Let's put the fear of Allah into them!”

A cheer went up. The motley crew of Arabs under Prince Feisal and some other petty tribal chiefs loved nothing better than to plunder and pillage. They followed Lawrence's example to button their mouths the closer and closer they approached the enemy (after all, this was to be a surprise attack). You could tell it was unnatural for them. They were bursting to make as much noise as possible. They sneaked up on the Turks as best they could, then charged. They scared the unprepared fellows so badly that they dropped everything and ran. These Turks weren't in uniform. Most were preparing food over open fires, and they hardly knew what had hit them. Many were taken prisoner.

Lawrence couldn't prevent the Arabs from seizing what pleased them. It is in their natures, this sort of child-like behavior. Worse, Lawrence's Arabs will fight with each other if they find some trinket they both wanted to possess. Instead of planning military strategy, Lawrence has to spend precious time refereeing the fights that break out.

Two men pulled at a woman's necklace strung with emeralds. They were each yanking in opposite directions. The strand of gold links gave way. The emeralds spewed out all over the ground. The two rapscallions threw themselves to their knees trying to gather up the greater number of precious stones. When they got too close and knocked elbows by mistake, they shoved, kicked, and spat. One would think they were Turk and Arab instead of two Arabs on the same side and brothers at that. Customs in this country are strange --- as far from what Englishmen and Americans would expect as you could get.

Lawrence came upon these two men. They were at fisticuffs. He shoved them apart and took them to task.

One of them pointed at this brother and proclaimed, “He has the Evil Eye! He was bewitching me so he could steal my emeralds.”

The other brother shook his head vehemently, “No, he has the Evil Eye! He was putting a spell on me.”

Lawrence cried, “Silence! You both know I am famous for curing cases of the Evil Eye, aren't you?” he said with the sternness that Arabs all respect.

They nodded. Their eyes grew bigger. They had all seen El Orens in action.

“First you and then you!” he pointed at one brother and then the other.

They both shook their heads “no” and started to back up away from him.

“Return to your former self or die!” Lawrence was dramatic in his role.

Both brothers fell to their knees and pleaded with Lawrence not to kill them. Naturally he had no such intention, but the simple-minded folk had no inkling of that. Lawrence made them line up in order.

The first brother squatted down on the sand in front of Lawrence, who assumed a Buddha-like position reserved for sorcerers and magicians. The Colonel managed to look severe and unapproachable. Lawrence made sure that his lips turned downward. He crossed his arms. The first brother quaked. He made a whimpering sound like a dog, but he didn't dare move when El Orens fixed him with his famous stare. All men must blink, but some don't have to as much as others. Lawrence was one of the few gifted with the talent. So he was able to level a steady gaze directly into the poor man's eyes.

“Mercy, Great El Orens!” the first brother bowed down in front of him, throwing himself to the ground and groveling.

“Rise!” Lawrence commanded. “You are cured. You no longer have the Evil Eye.”

The man was eager to crawl away to a safe distance. Lawrence summoned the other brother, who shook his head and begged for mercy. Lawrence would have no mercy on him either.

My gaze roved a little beyond our camp. I was startled to see another pair of dark eyes hiding behind a gray plinth not far from us. I stood stock still. It could be an animal such as a goat or a bird of prey. When it didn't move after many minutes, the silence interrupted only by the moans from the second brother whom Lawrence was now fixing with his maniacal stare, I inched slowly to the left. I paused, then moved again. I was approaching the shady side of the plinth where something was hiding. I gripped my rifle tightly.

Something bright flashed near the plinth. I remembered the sharpshooter who'd fired at Lawrence a couple of hours before, the reason for Lawrence's collapse into mirth and megalomania.. He must be back.

Lawrence posing as a Buddha was a perfect target. Evidently this man, whoever he was, didn't care anything for Lawrence's fabled abilities against the Evil Eye. He was biding his time, figuring he had only one more chance.

I thought, This assassin is really determined. He's willing to risk his life to kill Lawrence . . . Even the Turks can't pay that much money . . .

I was edging closer to another outcrop of rock. I was almost there. I prayed he wouldn't move in the moments it would take to cover the last few steps. I didn't see him glancing in my direction. I congratulated myself for staying out of his range of vision. My hand shook as I quietly loaded my SMLE rifle. I tried to steady my hand as I rested the rifle on the top of a rock. I peered through the sights.

Now I could see clearly that the intruder was disguised in Arab clothing from head to foot. His face was concealed completely under a hood. I saw only an empty black gap of material where his visage should have been. The tip of his rifle glinted.

I deduced that I couldn't shoot him from my position. He was too well-concealed. All I could hope to accomplish was to warn the infiltrator that he'd been spotted and scare him away. I hesitated, waiting for him to present a better target.

“You have been cured!” Lawrence announced back in camp. “You will no longer suffer from the Evil Eye.” The second brother backed away on hands and knees, bowing his head to El Orens.

An old woman, a laundress who worked for the rag-tag troops, stealthily approached the little group. She was staring at Lawrence fixedly, gazing into Sidi Lawrence's eyes as intensely as he'd been gazing into the brothers' eyes. She shook her head, “You have horrible eyes like bits of sky shining through the eye-holes of a skull lying in the desert.”

“Do I indeed?” Lawrence was amused as he answered in the local vernacular.

She nodded. “I've never seen anything like it, eyes of such power in a man so young! Was your father a Gin or an evil spirit?”

“No, but I could have acquired that power when I was in Carchemish with Leonard Woolley, a man of great powers . . . “

You could tell she was hanging on Lawrence's every word. She leaned closer until she threatened to fall into his lap as he sat there cross-legged on the ground.

“Carchemish was located on the West Bank of the Euphrates, south of Turkey, up on an acropolis. The site had been occupied for several thousand years. Around 605 B.C. the Babylonian army of Nebuchadnezzar II defeated the army of Pharaoh Necho II of Egypt there. To commemorate the victory, great stelae were carved in gray granite.”

“Yes, I can see it . . . “ the lady nodded eagerly as if it were being carved before her that very day.

“Leonard Woolley and I dug up a great stele depicting an officers' procession. The men were carrying spears and long, carved wooden bows that they had proudly strung. I rather liked the find. As I cleaned it, I kept on staring at it intently,” Lawrence spun his always incredible, exotic tale.

I wished he wouldn't be so long-winded at the expense of his own safety. I wanted to warn him that an assassin lurked nearby. But I dared not speak. I hardly dared to breathe.

“The Hittite officer nearest to me, wearing a long, short-sleeved tunic down to his ankles, met my eye,” Lawrence continued. “I couldn't look away.”

“Yes, the man in the stele was an evil spirit. You got the power from him,” the woman understood in her own terms, as Lawrence had no doubt intended. “That's why you must never go near a burial site,” she spoke fearfully. “They will try to lure you into the grave if they can. Either that, or you will become evil like them.”

The intruder behind the plinth stirred. I couldn't tell what he was doing for sure. But he must have moved his rifle, if only a fraction of an inch. The sun was so blinding that anything metallic acted like a mirror. If you were watching closely, it was like a signal.

Should I shoot now? I stooped down and got my hand around a rock without once taking my eyes off the sharpshooter behind the plinth. Hoping my aim was true, I threw the rock toward where I knew the Colonel was positioned. I hoped it would either strike Lawrence in the back or at least fall near him to give him warning.

I heard the rock fall with a distinct thud. I could not spare a glance that direction right now to judge its location. It didn't sound as if it had struck a person. The lady didn't remark on it. She and Lawrence went on talking as if oblivious of my deed. The rock must have fallen wide of its mark.

The sharpshooter's gun glinted in the sun once more. I thought, I can't wait any longer. If I do, he'll shoot Lawrence right in front of my eyes.

“They were sinners indeed to make the graven images to begin with. The Prophet forbids it. You associated with idolaters and heathens,” the old crone accused the Colonel, talking of the Islamic religion that censures making images of people for artistic purposes.

“I'll agree the Babylonians and the Egyptians didn't come to a good end. I'll agree they tended to be idolaters. They did worship calf's heads, snakes, half-dog/half-human gods,” Lawrence expostulated. “One of the reliefs next to the soldier's relief was of an ancient Babylonian King and his son, the Prince.”

The old woman shuddered. “Avoid that at all costs! Ancient kings and princes were like devils.” She made the hand sign to ward off the Evil Eye.

My hand had been poised on the trigger for so long that my fingers throbbed. The old lady's voice whined in my ear like a never-ending nightmare that I couldn't wake from. When I heard what I thought was a clicking sound emanating from behind that plinth, I fired. I managed to fire again in rapid succession before the explosive power of my gun knocked me backward.

The old lady shrieked and fled.

There was a shout from the camp. It was Lawrence's voice. “Who goes there?” Lawrence darted out into the desert beyond the plinth faster than I could react.

“No!” I shouted. “No! Get back, Colonel!” I had myself wedged into a crevice between two rocks. It took some time to extricate myself so I didn't break my neck. By then, Lawrence had disappeared. “Law ---” I ceased calling out. I didn't want to make my position known as I didn't know where the gunman was hiding. He could be anywhere and everywhere. For all I knew, he could have friends and compatriots.

I crept along as close to the ground as possible, as we had been taught to do, hugging the cliffs and rock outcrops. I didn't see moving shadows, and I spotted birds, who wouldn't be perched there if some interloper was hiding in the same place. I heard nothing but the sounds of the desert --- the call of the dove, the munching of a herd of camels chewing on grassy stubble emerging from the reddish soil. I didn't want to venture too far. Lawrence might be in trouble. I should head back to the camp and round up the Bedouins to help me.

They roused themselves from their midday nap at once at the slightest suggestion that El Orens might be in danger. They threw themselves onto their camels half-dressed. Others were clearly drunk. That didn't stop them. We rode out into the desert in the direction I'd last seen Lawrence. We charged around the perimeter of the camp. The Arabs searched the washes and the rocky outcrops. They climbed anywhere that anyone could insert himself. They came back empty-handed.

The Arabs suddenly looked to me to make the decisions. Since I hadn't a clue where he'd gone, I decided to split up. Splitting up is terrible for a military force under battle conditions. But we were reconnoitering and spying, if you will. Only by splitting up could we cover more territory. I was getting the scary idea that Lawrence had fallen into enemy hands after foolishly wandering out into the desert by himself.

Of course with Lawrence one could never be sure. He might be up to something that none of us could guess. No doubt he would make himself known in his own good time. Still it was my duty to assume he'd been kidnapped.

“Capturing El Orens the Destroyer of Railways would be a big deal,” I assured the men in halting Arabic. “I don't think they'll execute him right away. They would want to get the maximum publicity value out of it. We need to be all ears to find out who took him and where. Above all, we want to know how we can free him.”

They nodded.

I appointed an Arab for each group who would serve as a liaison. They would bring any news about what they'd found to me once every three days. None of the watering holes or towns in the desert were farther apart than that. Then I would give new orders to each liaison to take back to the group.

I commanded the largest search party. We headed toward the coast in the direction of Damascus. I figured that if the Turks had captured Lawrence that was where they would take him.

We came upon an old Roman ruin, for you know that Romans settled the coastal part of Syria --- as they settled all over the coast of the entire Mediterranean. It looked like an impressive theater with the pillars still standing, which must have been a rarity.

The men were weary. They wanted to eat. I agreed this was as good a place as any to make camp for the night. I took a stroll as the men prepared dinner over a fire. First I strode through the amphitheater where the seating was located. I climbed the steps to the back of the theater, where it grew considerably darker.

I heard footsteps. “Who goes there?” I called.

It couldn't have been one of my men. They'd been taught to answer promptly, or someone might shoot them by mistake. So I didn't say anything further. Instead I crept near the wall and waited with heart pounding for the next sound. The intruder's step was very light. He fled across the floor in the pitch black toward the exit at the back of the theater. A robed figure disappeared. In a few moments I tried to follow. By the time I reached the exit, no one was there.

That night I didn't fall asleep until very late and then I slept only fitfully, tossing and turning. I couldn't get comfortable on my cot no matter where I put my pillow. I was used to Lawrence giving the orders and was unaccustomed to command. I thought it was a nightmare when I heard someone whispering into my ear. I paid little attention --- that was until it became persistent like the buzz of a fly that won't go away no matter how I swatted at it. It grew louder, then was accompanied by a touch on my shoulder.

I looked up startled. At first I couldn't make out anything in the pitch black of the tent. Then I saw a shadow. I've never believed in apparitions since before I went away to school. Public school had drummed such nonsense out of me for good, I'd thought. I began to have a few doubts now until out of nowhere I heard a woman's voice.

“Oh, British officer, I know where your Sidi Lawrence is hiding,” she hissed.

Now that I was fully awake, I could make out more than a shadowy form. I could begin to make out the face of a young woman or at least the part of her face that could be seen beneath the hood and above the veil, which wasn't much. Mostly I was aware of her dark eyes and the tip of her pointed nose.

“Who are you?” I rose from my cot and brushed myself off.

“I work in Deraa. I saw your Sidi Lawrence. He handed me several coins, which is more than a month's wages for me and my family. He told me to come here and alert you. I am supposed to guide you back to town.”

“So that's where he's at!” I said. “Not Damascus, but Deraa?”

She nodded.

“How did he get there?”

“He was captured,” she kept her voice low, “and taken there forcibly. He's been flogged and is set to go to trial soon. That trial must never take place,” she shook her head as she whispered her story to me, “because then he will be executed.”

“We'll set out at once,” I grabbed for my pistol, my rifle, and all my things.

“Not so fast!” the lady put out her hand and touched my sleeve, then quickly withdrew it. “Wait here.” She departed the tent and came back right away. She handed me an armful of robes. “Sidi Lawrence says you and the men you choose must wear these when you come after him.”

I examined them in the half-light of the tent. I'd lighted my lantern. I was horrified to discover that they were once again women's dark-colored, formless abayas.

“What else did he tell you?” I said, almost afraid to ask.

“He said you were to come to the jail and bring lots of money with you.”

The last British pounds sterling we'd seen was many weeks ago. Most of the local money, the Turkish piasters Lawrence came by, were stolen in raids. It had been distributed to the men. Many had gambled it away. Others had whored it away in the small towns we'd visited. Some had lost it or had it stolen by brigands.

“He said to bring British pounds if you could find them. Otherwise bring piasters. He told me you would know where to get the loot.”

“I see. I'm to bring lots of money. Yet I must leave here and follow you right away.”

She nodded again. “He said you would know how to do that, too.”

Lawrence had more confidence in me than I had in myself. “Very well, just wait here.”

I blew a horn that I'd brought from Lawrence's tent. It was his way of assembling the troops at night or when they were otherwise occupied. Soon the men were stumbling over to my tent in the dark, falling over each other in their haste.

“How many of you still have some of your loot?” I asked.

They looked at me with blank stares. One eyed the other. No one was going to divulge such information.

“I'm going into Deraa myself tonight to rescue Colonel Lawrence. I've received information from a spy.”

They were all over me in a second, volunteering to accompany me. I could now see that the armful of robes was merely one robe. Lawrence had never intended any of the men to follow me.

“No, this is a mission that calls for only one man,” I insisted when I had quieted them down. They respected that. “Now you all sit out here and keep watch while I'm away. Don't go back into your tents,” I cautioned them, “at least until it gets light out.”

They nodded and sat down where they were. Some got out stacks of cards. Others got out dice, a game more native to their culture. Still others leaned elbow to elbow and sang ditties.

“Don't light fires unless you must,” I reminded them. “I'll be back as soon as I can.”

Since they were out of their tents, I sneaked into them. I was able to collect enough loot in this way to bring to Deraa. If you think this a questionable tactic, I'll remind you we were in the desert --- not in London or New York. I told myself that the “loot” really didn't belong to the Bedouins. They'd stolen it. So it was free for the taking. It was for the best of causes --- not as if I were taking it for myself.

I'd provided myself with two full canteens of water --- a necessity for any trip in the desert, even at night and at any time of the year. Watering holes were a matter of local knowledge only, not often shared with British officers. I made sure I had my pistol and rifle.

I quickly slipped into the woman's abaya, so I wouldn't have time to dwell on how distasteful that costume was to me. I took off, reminding myself that it was better to travel by night than by day in the desert. It was cooler, and I could travel undetected on my secret mission.

“Ps-s-s-s-s-st!”

I slowed my camel down and looked around. I was beginning to think better of it. What if it was a trick and somebody was ready to waylay or attack me? After all, Lawrence himself had been captured alone and unattended in the desert.

“Englishman!” came the sound of the same woman's voice that I'd heard earlier.

Out of the shadows slipped a woman in dark robes with a cavernous hood. She darted up to my camel in such a way so as not to spook the animal. “I am here to show you the way. I didn't want to let myself be seen in your camp.”

She couldn't possibly be a plant by the Turks. She'd brought me news of Lawrence. Besides, I'm not sure they knew about me. Even if they did, I doubt if I was important enough to capture.

She rode ahead on her own camel, which she'd concealed in the shadows up until now. I followed at a distance. She led me straight to Deraa in the wee hours. We both tied up our camels. I made sure mine was some distance back away from the walls, in a darkened corner which I judged would be shaded even during daylight hours. She slipped into the city by means of a back gate. I followed close behind.

She headed for the regiment that was garrisoned in the city. They had housed themselves in what looked like an ancient palace. No sooner had she opened the door into the darkened interior than she picked up a broom that was resting against the wall. She turned quickly and handed me one.

Now I could see the genius of her plan --- or rather Lawrence's plan. I was to pretend I was a cleaning lady robed from head to foot in a plain, black abaya. Here I really did have to trust the girl. I followed along where her broom led. She swept around a table of Turkish officers sharing beer. They shouted for more. She took their pitcher and raced off to refill it. She was back in a hurry.

After we'd cleaned in what looked like the mess hall of the barracks, we moved on to the next room where more Turkish officers were playing games of cards. Others had dice, just like my men back in the desert. Even if they were not Arabs, they were still followers of the same Mohammedan faith. They were not allowed to drink hard liquor, so they proved wastrels in every other respect.

We swept the floors. When no one was looking in our direction, the lady quietly opened the door leading to a narrow, darkened hallway. She motioned for me to follow. We tiptoed along, picking up the soles of our feet to make as little noise as possible.

Not long after that, with a glance to either side, she darted to the left. I followed her down what proved to be a stairway to the lower level. The only light was provided by sconces on the walls along either side of the passageway. I'd only my broom to feel my way along and to ascertain how far away the walls were.

Soon I became aware of shadowy figures behind bars along one side of the wall. They rattled their cages as we swept past, calling to us and asking for food or water.

“Ignore them!” she hissed.

We continued on down the interminable passageway in what I now knew was a prison. Since this building had once been a palace, it came equipped with one. Up ahead I heard a voice that sounded familiar. Oddly enough it wasn't pleading like all the others, asking for food and water. It seemed to be declaiming something. Closer still, I could begin to make out the words:

“O Man of Shuruppak, son of Ubar-Tutu,

Tear down this house, build a ship!

Give up possessions, seek thou life.

Forswear worldly goods and keep the soul alive!

Aboard the ship take thou the seed of all living things.

The ship that thou shalt build,

Her dimensions shall be to measure.

Equal shall be her width and her length.

Like the Apsu thou shalt call her.”

I understood, and I said to Ea, my lord:

“Behold, my lord, what thou hast thus ordered,

I will be honored to carry out . . .”

When I forced myself to really listen, I thought, It reminds me of Christ's College! We were reading that passage. In fact, my don asked us to write an essay about it. It sounds like Noah, but it isn't . . . Why, it's the Epic of Gilgamesh! It didn't take me long to figure out who would be declaiming ancient Near Eastern poetry in the bowels of a Turkish palace in a squalid jail cell. It could be no other than he.

“Lawrence!” I made my way to where he was housed. “I've found you at last!”

Lawrence said in his normal tone, “I was trying to get an inspiration. I kept on thinking that to escape here, I needed a flood of epic proportions. Like Gilgamesh I could build a boat and sail away to the sea. Instead the Sister Fates have sent you to me.” He held out his hand for the money he knew I would bring. At once he called, “Suleiman!”

A Turkish guard immediately looked around the dark corner.

“Come! Come! I have a little going away gift for you.”

Suleiman smiled as Lawrence, through the bars of his cell, poured the piasters into his greedy palms. Lawrence stopped halfway. “Now, Suleiman, if you want the rest --- and I know you do --- first let me out.”

He took out his keys and let Lawrence out. The young lady handed Lawrence another abaya. He slipped it over his head and hurriedly threw the bag of coins at Suleiman. He didn't glance back over his shoulder as we dashed out the nearest exit.

We slipped out of the city pretty much the same way we'd come with the aid of the young cleaning lady. She went as far as the walls. I located my camel. She let Lawrence have hers. Lawrence and I rode back to the encampment.

On the way, I couldn't restrain myself from commenting, “I was trying to warn you that a sharpshooter was lurking about our encampment. You didn't take my hints. Instead you went wandering out there all by yourself. No doubt you're lucky to be alive.”

“The sharpshooter can't harm me,” Lawrence stated flatly.

“Obviously he almost did. He arranged for you to be captured and dragged into Deraa.”

Lawrence shook his head. “A group of Turks caught me by chance. They're the ones who dragged me off and threw me into prison. That other one in the shadows wanted me dead. He wouldn't be satisfied with anything else.”

“Good heavens, Lawrence! If you knew that, why in God's name did you wander off into the desert and give him a chance to take aim at you?”I protested.

“I want to convince him to stop following me. It won't do him any good, you know. He has to realize that.”

How could anyone in Lawrence's position think like him? I suppose that's what had made T.E. Lawrence, the archaeologist and scholar, into the fabled figure El Orens, or “Lawrence of Arabia” as he is now being called by everyone here.

“Do you have any idea who he is, the assassin I mean?”

Lawrence considered carefully. “He could be any one of a number of thugs hired by the Turks to kill me. Then again he could be someone else I don't suspect. Still, that's not important. The important thing is to shake him, to act more bold than he does. That always discourages them.”

“Yes, Colonel, I'm --- I'm sure it does,” I took his measure.

When we got back to his tent he took out his humidor, which I hadn't seen since he got it back from Mohamed. He must have traded for new cigars in Deraa while in the prison. He lighted one and smoked it.

Hugs and kisses --- and lots of them, too!

Yours,

Edward

P.S. I'm beginning to worry about you, my love. You distract me when I'm tending to my duties. You make me want to quit and come home to you, though that would mean the death of both Lawrence and the Arab Nationalist Movement. You must realize that would be the death of me also. I could never live down the shame of it. Surely you can wait a little longer. The passion that binds us is not the sort of thing that can die that easily. I think it grows stronger with each passing day.

P.S.S. Last night the most peculiar thing happened. I was awakened late at night. I heard noises outside my tent and went to investigate. The same brigand dashed away into the distance. I went to Lawrence's tent, thinking to awaken the commander. Instead I found him poring over what looked like strange inscriptions laid out on his desk. The first thing that occurred to me was that it resembled some sort of secret code.

“Colonel, are you communicating with spies?” I sneaked up on him.

He grabbed the few papers that I'd barely gotten a chance to see. There were some other things there, too, that looked dark and shiny. He stuffed them into the top of the humidor and closed it. “Lieutenant!” he hissed, “you should be asleep.”

“The same man keeps sneaking around our camp at night. I just saw him.”

“I haven't seen anyone,” he dismissed me.

I returned to my cot, but kept my eyes fixed on his tent flap. Not too many minutes later I saw a flame. The fire was confined to an ashtray. It quickly burned down and flared up when Lawrence put another torn up or crumpled piece of paper on top of it. He was burning those papers I'd glimpsed. The same inscrutable marks teasingly flashed past my eyes.

The flame died, and I went to sleep. The next morning Lawrence's tent was empty. The humidor was sitting on the floor beside his cot, now totally empty. There was no trace of last night's papers or the strange, black, shiny strips of whatever. I turned the humidor upside down and tapped it. Nothing came out.

The box was not made of cheap pine wood as Mohamed had claimed. It was fashioned of the best solid mahogany --- heavy, substantial, hand-carved, and expensive. Holding it in my hands now --- and I hadn't held it since I gave it to him --- it didn't feel as heavy. It was somehow diminished.

“Lieutenant, what's keeping you!” came the call. I put the humidor back where I'd found it and dashed off. That night on the way back to my tent I glanced inside Lawrence's. The humidor was gone.

Chapter 47:

“Edward prefers this Colonel Lawrence to me,” Dora's fingers trembled with rage as she finished the letter. “Lawrence must be very fetching in his desert attire.” The part about her “little gift” hadn't mollified her in the least!

She ripped the letter to shreds and tossed it over her shoulder. She was sitting on a picnic cloth on the front lawn of her parent's house on April 1, 1917 during an exceptionally warm, early spring day in Pittsburgh. Pacing up the drive was the security guard that her father had hired.

Dora lay down on the cloth in front of Michael and placed her hands underneath her head. She stretched and kicked off her shoes, running her toes through the grass. On impulse, she plucked a daffodil growing next to a tree stump. She stuck it behind her ear without looking at Michael. “I suppose I shall have to marry you after all, Mr. Byrne. Edward has left me to you. He says you're both resourceful and loyal.” She sighed.

Mr. Byrne reached for the bowl of German potato salad that Viola had made and helped himself to another serving. He took a bite of his ham and mustard sandwich on rye.

“It's been almost two years since I've seen that bastard Edward. I'm going to end up an old maid. For heaven's sake, I was twenty then and now I'm twenty-two!”

Michael yanked her up into a sitting position. He took an empty plate, filled it with potato salad, and one of Viola's sandwiches. He thrust it at her.

“If you were serious, you'd take off that silly Crusader's ring from Harrods and send it back to Edward,” he spread more mustard on his sandwich. “You'd write to him and tell him you're breaking off the engagement and marrying me. You won't do that, now will you, Dora?” he eyed her knowingly.

“Oh, Mr. Byrne, one of the problems with you is that you know me too well! You spoil my fun!” she eyed him reproachfully as she took a tentative bite out of her sandwich.

She leaned back against the tree stump where her mother had planted pansies. While she ate, the redheaded imp named Edward played around the edges of her consciousness, tormenting her, evading her, making her feel as if she, too, were lost in a vast desert without an oasis to quench her thirst.

That night before bed she wrote a letter, not to Edward but to Colonel Lawrence himself. He must be at the same address, just a different name.

Dear Colonel:

You are a barbarous man to keep Edward from his family and fiancée. Lady Ware writes me all the time. She's distracted with worry and grief. I've been engaged to Edward for two years, and we're not married yet. Of what use is it to keep Edward by your side night and day? You yourself said you didn't want any more orders from headquarters. So why do you need a secretary? Release him! I'm sure you and your Bedouins will be very happy together.

Sincerely yours,

Dora Benley

Chapter 46:

The trolley incident occurred in the late fall of 1916. Dora was not to hear from her beloved Edward again until the early spring of 1917.

My dearest:

Lawrence got the idea to disguise himself as a woman. He insisted I do likewise. We sneaked from our encampment to Damascus, four hundred British miles from here, to see what they had in the way of troops and guns --- on a dare one day after breakfast. Feisal bet that no British officer would have the nerve. Lawrence replied he was on his way. We had little time to prepare. We were on our camels in less than fifteen minutes.

As soon as we were within the gates, I hissed low, “That looks like you!” I was pointing at a wall displaying Lawrence's picture. Beneath it was a notice in Arabic advertising that the Turkish authorities wanted Lawrence dead or alive. They called him “El Orens, Destroyer of Railways”. They offered 100,000 Reichsmarks as a reward. Lawrence got himself a cup of coffee and sat down underneath the sign, sipping it quite casually as if he did it every day.

I kept darting my gaze from side to side in fright. Turkish officers were walking the streets in droves. Surely they knew what the famous El Orens looked like with his rosy complexion and blond hair? Even wearing a woman's abaya, an occasional wisp of blond hair would inevitably escape.

“Have some coffee, Lieutenant,” he said in a normal tone. “Stop dancing and prancing around. You destroy my view, and I'm enjoying myself.”

“No! No! No!” my voice strangled in my throat in my effort to keep quiet. “You shouldn't have come here. Now that you've seen their fortifications outside the city gate, for heaven's sake, let's go!”

At the end of the alley I saw a pair of dark eyes staring right at us. A group of men were strutting past. I waited on tenterhooks until I was sure they were out of sight. I hissed in the Colonel's ear again, “Lawrence, someone recognizes us.”

“How do you know, Lieutenant?” he asked as if taking high tea on the verandah back home in England.

“He was staring right at me.”

“How do you know he doesn't find you fetching?” Lawrence winked with that wicked wit which is always in evidence when he's in a good mood. “I mean, he probably thinks you're a girl in that outfit.”

I could feel myself blushing to the roots of my hair.

Two Turkish officers rapidly paced down the street in our direction.

“Lawrence,” I leaned toward his ear, “let's go now! They're coming to get us.”

“Lieutenant, go buy yourself coffee,” he gave me a few Turkish coins. “Stop whining in my ear.”

The Turkish officers were almost upon us. If Lawrence refused to listen to reason, there was little I could do. I dashed into the nearest coffee shop and bought myself a mug of steaming hot, Turkish brew.

I took a sip. Then I took another and another. Soon I got up enough courage to look out the window. Sure enough, there sat Lawrence sipping his coffee as he had before. The Turkish officers were nowhere in sight.

Looking both ways, I rejoined Lawrence. “Where did they go?” I was afraid to ask.

He pointed straight ahead. They were pacing off in another direction.

“How much longer do we have to stay here?” I clenched and unclenched my fists underneath the abaya.

He got up from where he'd sat for the past hour or so. “Let's take a stroll,” he strode deeper into the city away from the gate.

“That's not what I had in mind,” I had no choice but to scurry after him.

The alleyways in Old Damascus grew narrower. Walls on opposite sides of the “street” almost touched. Sagging buildings leaned inward toward each other. Clotheslines were strung from window to window on the second and third stories. Down below in the middle of a blazing, sunny day it was dark and cool. Shadowy figures from above wearing identical abayas peered down at us with their faces covered and only their shifty eyes visible.

Suddenly something wet and smelly landed on top of my head. Lawrence turned toward me. “You're very popular among the Turks, aren't you?” He elbowed me and laughed.

Someone had dumped a bucket of slops on me. I didn't know what to do but continue to pace onward in the best British military tradition. Lawrence impulsively stopped at a street vendor's stand. He paid several piasters to buy a flask of Syrian beer. Moslems weren't supposed to drink alcohol, but this passed the test among the common people by long tradition. Without as much as a, “May I?” he dumped the contents of the flask over my head. At least the stench of beer was more bearable than slops. I considered myself lucky --- all in the line of duty, naturally.

I was continually troubled by those dark eyes that always sought me out and always seemed to be at the end of some impossibly shadowy alleyway. “Lawrence, I think someone's following us,” I warned.

“You're a schoolmarm,” he said. “You don't know how to have any fun with our enemy.”

When we couldn't go much farther and were about to turn around, we heard a giant explosion. The city walls near us caved in as if exploded by a bomb. Rubble and shards of rock went flying in every direction. Another explosion in the harbor fronting the south bank of the River Barada went off almost simultaneously. Before we had a chance to react, a load of viscous golden, gooey matter, which must have been packed in the hull of a ship, came streaming towards us. It smelled like something familiar, but I wasn't going to stand there and gape. Lawrence gawked a moment too long. A big wave of golden goo toppled him.

I ran and ran without looking over my shoulder. Women screamed behind me. Barrels toppled. They cracked and splintered on the pavement. Donkeys brayed. Camels hissed. One wad of goo took a side course and streamed on ahead of me way over to my left. An old man was picked up and carried for some distance yelling and screaming before someone rescued him.

When the wave finally subsided, when I didn't hear anymore barrels being knocked over or donkey carts overturned, when the screaming receded farther behind me, I slowed my pace. This whole area of the city was covered by a sweet-smelling, golden-colored goo. I stuck my finger in it and tasted it. Honey, of course! Only the emergency of the moment had prevented me from recognizing it right away. How had it gotten here? Had the explosions been an accident, or had they been deliberately planned? At once I remembered the man with the dark eyes wearing the cloak. Had we been recognized? Had someone tried to assassinate El Orens?

How should I proceed when the alleyway was covered with viscous sludge? I lowered my booted foot into it. It stuck in a nasty sort of way and made it very slippery to try to go forward. I tried the next street to the left. That one was filled with honey also. So I tried the one after that. I kept on going until I found one that was clean. I proceeded back up the alley until I got to the place where I remembered last seeing Lawrence.

“May I suggest you try this alley instead?” asked a voice. He looked a little the worse for the wear with honey all over his robe. He was no more dead than I was.

“Lawrence!” I hissed. “How did you manage --- “

“I saw an empty barrel. When the honey knocked me down I climbed into it and turned it upright. When the wave subsided, I stood up and walked away. Very simple.”

The amazing thing was how he could think on his feet. He didn't panic like the rest of us. He kept his head. That's probably the chief reason why he's so successful. “But, Lawrence, I think someone tried to assassinate you,” I told him seriously.

“Yes, we know you're an old woman, Lieutenant. You love to see conspiracies in everything.”

Somehow Lawrence found a Turkish laundry. Don't ask me how, but he managed to run through the place, shedding his old robes and taking on entirely new ones. When we left the city, his attire was sparkling black once more. He didn't show any sign of having been knocked over and almost drowned by a wave of honey.

When we got back to our position, the Arabs crowded around and begged El Orens to tell them about his adventures. He stayed up until almost dawn, spinning yarns about how he'd embarrassed the Turks by waltzing into Damascus unobserved. Everyone was in stitches about the honey incident. One of the sheiks listening to him that night turned to me and complimented the Colonel. He said, “El Orens is the greatest of the sheiks.”

I fell asleep in the wee hours. I opened my eyes to see the same cloaked figure that I'd chased out of my tent before. When the first ray of sunlight hit my cot, he vanished as if he'd been a specter and not a real man.

I wish it had been you instead, Dora! I wouldn't have chased you away.

Always,

Edward

P.S. I miss you, too --- and how! --- but I can't desert Colonel Lawrence. He can't take care of himself. I'm sure you can see that after my letter of today. Besides, his war against the Turks is the only successful military campaign the British are waging. My future wife will understand.

As far as your suspicions about Ali are concerned, you must be hallucinating. What reason could he possibly have for following you to America? It must be someone else. The war has created countless deserters, vagrants, and homeless people. I'm sure your father can take care of it. What about that Mr. Byrne fellow you used to associate with? Do you still see him? He seemed to be very resourceful as well as loyal.

Until we meet again, all my love and kisses --- and a lot more, too!

P.S.S. I got your little gift. Oh, how I cherish it! It's just what I had in mind. And I promise to keep your secret, too. I won't tell anybody else.

Chapter 45:

They escaped up a steep flight of wooden stairs that scaled the hillside. They hailed a cab as soon as they reached a road. Mr. Byrne rode with Dora all the way back to her house. While stopped at an intersection she retrieved the note she'd pulled off the front of the trolley.

“Look, Michael!” she handed it to him. It read, “Compliments of Colonel Lawrence.”

“Ali's saying that he made your streetcar jump the rails and crash the way Lawrence makes Turkish trains derail and crash --- or some such nonsense.”

“If he thinks I have any influence with Colonel Lawrence, he must be nuts! I can't write to Lawrence and tell him to give back the humidor.”

“I thought you told me Lawrence had traded it to a merchant called Mohamed for cigars.”

“Yes, but another letter came. Mohamed gave the humidor back to Lawrence. He complained that it was made of worthless pine wood.”

“I see,” said Mr. Byrne. “Another mysterious development.”

“What do you mean?” she asked him with big eyes.

“Simply this --- I think this Colonel Lawrence has something up his sleeve. He knows more than he lets on.”

“You mean what goes on in the Arabian Desert and Pittsburgh is somehow connected?”

“It's a world war, isn't it?” Mr. Byrne paid the cabbie.

The Benleys came running out to meet them. They'd heard about the trolley wreck by word of mouth and feared the worst. Mrs. Benley hustled Dora off to a hot bath. Mr. Benley and Mr. Byrne sipped coffee prepared in a hurry by Viola. They commiserated with each other at the table until the ladies joined them for dinner. Viola served a nice steaming roast beef with a few Italian spices and a dish of buttery mashed potatoes with gravy.

“Why does that man keep on following our daughter, Winthrop?” Mrs. Benley passed the gravy. “If you could get us off the Lusitania, you must be able to do something about it.”

Her parents had gone from being great skeptics about Dora's tales of her pursuer to firm believers. The evidence had grown too strong, and Mr. Byrne backed up everything that Dora said.

Mr. Benley wrote a cable and brought it to the table to read aloud:

Sir Adolphus:

My daughter, Dora Benley, has been attacked and nearly killed by a man named Ali. STOP According to Dora, your son, Edward, her fiance, told her that Ali came back with you from Carchemish. STOP He worked for you at your estate for about a year. STOP I assume he must no longer be there. STOP He has followed Dora to America and made her trolley jump off the tracks. STOP He set a tree on fire and crashed it into the trolley, killing several people. STOP The incident is being reported in The Pittsburgh Press. STOP What do you have to say about this? STOP

Please answer right away. STOP

Yours,

Winthrop Benley

Two days later Sir Adolphus replied by cable:

Dear Mr. Benley:

Indeed Ali is no longer with us. STOP He seems to have run off about the time Edward left for the Dardanelles and you went back to America. STOP I don't know why he would be pursuing your daughter, Dora. STOP. It makes as little sense to me as it makes to you. STOP

I am sorry I cannot help you further. STOP

Yours,

Sir Adolphus Ware of Rufford, Bart

“So he's going to play innocent!” Mr. Benley threw the letter down. It shows you how much you can trust any of those damned Europeans, even Englishmen!”

Dora had been confined to the house since the trolley incident, under a kind of virtual house arrest. Her only adventure was to pace up the gravel driveway toward the main road to get the mail and trudge back again to the house. The rest of the time she was closely supervised. Her father now took the further step of hiring a security guard to patrol the grounds at night. Mr. Benley didn't think Ali would be stupid enough to mount an attack on his daughter in her own house during daylight hours.

Dora wrote to Edward:

Dear Edward:

I've been attacked by Ali. He followed me to downtown Pittsburgh. He made the trolley car I was riding jump the tracks and then set it on fire. I do beg you to come home. I'm sure Lawrence can do without you. I can't.

Love,

Dora

Chapter 44:

It was already the middle of the afternoon when they emerged onto the street in front of the Kaufmann's Clock. They caught the first trolley out of town, the Shannon Drake line. Ali started to board, using the door in the middle of the trolley. Mr. Byrne complained to the trolley driver.

The driver paced back through the trolley, past businessmen in suits and women with shopping bags and little children. “Are you some troublemaker?” the man confronted Ali.

“I am here visiting friends,” he said in his accented voice.

“We don't allow Huns, spies, or foreign-types on our trolleys. Get it?”

“I am not German,” Ali stated flatly.

“No, but boy, you look like one of them sinister Turks.”

“I am certainly not a Turk!” Ali glowered at him.

“Pittsburgh Press says the Turks are the allies of the Huns. No friends of ours. Get out of here, or I'm going to call the police!”

The other passengers were eyeballing Ali. Some made dirty hand gestures. Others snickered. Two blast furnace workers from United States Steel rose. They approached Ali, picked him up, and muscled him out of the street car. He landed right in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

The crowd inside the trolley cheered as they took off.

“See what we Americans can accomplish if we work together?” Mr. Byrne smiled at Dora and patted her hand.

Dora looked behind her. Ali was boarding the trolley behind them unchallenged.

The trolleys slowly made their circle of the downtown area on their way to the bridge, the tunnel, and home. Once they left the city, the tracks narrowed. They headed over a tall, makeshift bridge over a roadway. Dora couldn't take her eyes off the streetcar behind them that was so close it was practically butting them.

Both streetcars stopped constantly to let passengers on and off. Sometimes the trolley halted before entering another track. They had to wait for a trolley coming in the opposite direction. In some sections the track bed wasn't wide enough to permit trolleys to go in two different directions at the same time.

On certain stretches they gained speed. They bounced and jounced along through the woods. She was thrown against Mr. Byrne. He was thrown against her. Branches smacked against the sides of the trolley. They slowed down. The trolley behind them slowed as well. She craned her neck. Ali leaped off. I wonder what he's doing that for . . .

They were stopped forever at that junction waiting for a trolley coming from the South Hills suburbs into town. Finally it passed. They edged their way onto the next intersecting track. No sooner had they gotten under way than Dora smelled something strange. The trolley bounced, then lurched sharply to the right. It ran off the track and crashed, wedging itself against a tree at an extreme angle. The tree sat at the edge of a cliff looking directly down onto a busy road more than a hundred feet below.

Ladies were screaming and crying. Mr. Byrne pulled Dora out of her seat. They made their way toward the front door of the car, where broken glass was lying everywhere. They climbed along the edge of the seats as if they had become the new floor. The trolley had developed a fatal list --- just like the Lusitania. “C'mon!” Mr. Byrne urged Dora as they shoved their way toward the front door. “If we can survive the wreck of the Lusitania, we can survive this!”

A lady screamed, “Fire!”A tall, flaming tree along the side of the tracks crashed down on top of the streetcar.

Mr. Byrne yanked Dora through the door at the last minute. She saw something that looked like a note sticking there. She grabbed and stuffed it into her purse without reading it. Behind them was mass chaos. Other passengers were smashing the windows open with canes and walking sticks. People crawled over others, fighting their way toward an exit. Mr. Byrne shoved Dora ahead as they ran up the tracks to escape the burning wreck. Fire totally engulfed the car.

Dora pointed up at the hillside overlooking the tracks. “He did it!” From behind another tree Ali was glaring down at them.

Chapter 43:

Dora had to get away. She decided to go shopping in downtown Pittsburgh. Frank drove her to the trolley stop. She was meeting Mr. Byrne for lunch.

On the trolley she was perusing the collected works of Elbert Hubbard, the madcap writer she'd met aboard the Lusitania. He'd handed her a polemic tract, “Who Lifted the Lid Off Hell?”, about how the Kaiser was going to resort to cannibalism next. She'd found the essay had been published by The Philistine in October, 1914. After the sinking of the Lusitania, Hubbard's followers had held a big memorial service for him. His body had never been found. She felt a strong affinity with all these passengers such as Hubbard whom she'd never met before the voyage, especially the Americans who hadn't known what to expect.

She soon switched to re-reading Charles Klein's The Lion and the Mouse. Dora felt more than a twinge of guilt. It hadn't been her fault that the saboteur, Ali, had tied her and Mr. Byrne up to a pillar in the engine room, next to one of his diabolical, chemical time-fuses. Still, if she had stayed close to Charles Klein the whole voyage as her parents had originally intended, he would still be here today. He would have exited the ship with her father and mother in that lifeboat.

Her real distraction, though Dora didn't like to admit it, was the book she'd started on the way to Bryn Mawr and never finished, The Wilderness of Zin by Leonard Woolley and T.E. Lawrence. She kept on trying to figure out what made this lunatic Lawrence tick. She needed to break the magnetic hold he had on Edward --- or her happiness was doomed.

She kept on coming back to the dedication to Chapter 1, entitled Our Route In The Desert, which was a quote from an old English ballad, The Nut-Brown Maid:

If ye go thyder, ye must consider,

When ye have lust to dine,

There shall no meat be for to gete

Neither bere, ale, ne wine,

Ne shetes clean, to lie between.

Was this some sort of male thing, this wilderness experience, this living close to nature? She'd always been interested in ancient history and archaeology, but she supposed that was because she could admire polished finds in a museum and didn't have to go trudging through the wilderness to get them.

As she skimmed through the notes at the end, discovering lots of classical Greek inscriptions, she wondered about the nature of T.E. Lawrence's mind. If he was scholarly --- and hadn't Edward said he reminded him more of a professor than a general? --- what was he doing riding around with a bunch of Bedouins? How many languages could one fellow know? So far it was seven and counting. Besides his mother tongue, there was Middle English, Ancient Hittite, Greek, Latin, modern Arabic, and now Ancient Arabic, too, if Edward's last letter was to be believed.

A sudden bounce knocked the book out of her hands. She held on to the back of the seat in front of her. The trolley car jounced along the track at a fairly slow pace, jostling her from side to side, winding in and out of a woodsy area on a hill elevated above the road level.

It was then she felt eyes on her, burning a hole through her skin. Across the aisle sat a man wearing an ordinary business suit. He favored a big hat with a wide brim to conceal his face. Those were the same dark eyes that she'd seen at Bryn Mawr, in Denbigh Hall's shower room. The corners of Ali's mouth turned upward into a menacing grin before he went back to reading a copy of The Pittsburgh Press.

Smoke from the steel plants along the Monongahela River was blowing toward the downtown that day. Dora covered her nose with a handkerchief as she got off at Kaufmann's and disappeared inside the store. She headed for the hat department. Her mother had suggested she start building up her wardrobe while she waited to get married. Her trousseau would then be ready at a moment's notice.

She picked up the first hat she came to, a garden or travel chapeau style. It was made of straw, edged with brown velvet and dotted with cream foulard trim. The ribbon on top was tied on one side. The sales clerk pushed a mirror in front of her so she could appreciate the effect. When she peered into the glass, she saw Ali behind her.

Dora paid for her purchase in cash. The sales clerk wrapped it up in a fancy bag with the Kaufmann's logo and handed it to her. Ali edged closer.

She dashed down the aisle, weaving in and out of crowds of shoppers. “Oh, excuse me!” She leaped onto the escalator and began running up the moving stairs. Two fat ladies got on behind her. Ali forced his way past the fat ladies, taking two steps at a time.

Dora jumped off at the top. She fled toward the entrance to the Tic Toc Restaurant.. The clean-shaven Mr. Byrne stood waiting for her in his conservative suit, holding his hat and umbrella.

“Dora! For heaven's sake, what's happened now?”

She pointed behind her, jabbing her finger at a crowd of strangers. “Ali! He's following me.”

Her father might scoff at her. The other shoppers in the crowd might think she was eccentric. Michael Byrne always believed her. He shoved Dora behind him and stalked out into the crowded restaurant lobby to look around.

He returned to her side. Taking her arm, he led her over to the table by the window. He pulled out her chair and made sure that anyone trying to reach Dora would have to run into him first.

“Is this the first time you've seen the miscreant here in Pittsburgh?” Mr. Byrne pressed.

“The last time I saw him was at Bryn Mawr. I thought I was safe here in Pittsburgh,” she nervously tapped her fingernails on top of the table.

“I'll make sure of it,” he scanned the room for any sign of the intruder.

“Have you decided what you want?” a waiter stopped beside their table.

“Two specials,” Mr. Byrne ordered for both of them.

“Would you like a glass of wine with --- “

Mr. Byrne scowled like a good Methodist, “Coffee.”

The coffee gave Dora something to do with her hands. She sipped it with lots of sugar and cream, waiting for Ali's next move. She could hear the ticking of Mr. Byrne's watch.

The specials turned out to be two enormous cheeseburgers on toasted buns accompanied by steaming hot bowls of chicken noodle soup. Neither of them touched their food. They just sat there.

“Is there something wrong?” the waiter returned in a few moments.

“Oh, no, no!” Mr. Byrne said. “It's just fine.” He handed Dora the bottle of Heinz ketchup and a jar of Heinz pickles left on the table for them.

“If this Colonel Lawrence is so great a desert fighter, why can't he keep the Bedouins where they belong in Arabia? What are some of them doing running around Pittsburgh?” Michael squeezed more ketchup on his cheeseburger.

“Michael,” she hissed, “Ali's just gotten seated.”

Michael summoned the waiter to his side and whispered something into his ear.

The waiter went to talk to the manager of the restaurant. The manager headed for Ali's table. “I'm afraid, sir, that the restaurant located just down the street would be more suitable for someone like you. It's called Solomon's Temple.”

“That's for Jews!” Ali objected in his heavily accented voice.

“I don't really care where you lunch. But you won't lunch at the Tic Toc.”

Ali stalked out of the restaurant. He stopped at the door to glare at Dora and Michael.

“Normally I would go back to work,” Michael glared back at Ali, “but I insist upon escorting you home --- right to your door,” Mr. Byrne paid the bill and tipped the waiters for their cooperation.

Chapter 42:

Edward surprised them all. His next letter arrived the very next day. The mailman knocked on the front door. As soon as she answered, Chuck put the letter right into Dora's hands. She ended up reading it standing there with the mailman watching:

Dearest Apple of My Eye,

Lawrence and thirty-five of Prince Feisal's rag-tag force of tribesmen set out to attack the Turks directly. Prince Feisal went first in white. The headman of one of the seven tribes, Sharraf, was on his right in a red head cloth and henna-dyed tunic and cloak. Lawrence was on his left in white and red. It looked like the Middle Ages.

Behind us men carried three banners of purple silk with gold spikes accompanied by drummers playing a march. Last but not least came one thousand two hundred camels of the bodyguard, all packed as closely as cattle being driven from place to place. These men wore whatever pleased them. Everyone was singing in Arabic. I didn't know the words. But I could guess from the repetition of names that they were singing paeans to Feisal and his family. Feisal is the son of King Hussein, and he's the Emir of Mecca. He's the one Lawrence is trying to place on the throne to end the Turkish domination.

It didn't look like a surprise raid to me, but Lawrence managed to capture the town of Weijh. The Turks had been weakened enough in that sector that the village was ripe for plucking, and Lawrence plucked it.

On the way back we encountered that trader named Mohamed. The men were stopped, preparing a celebration feast. He noisily barged in among us, hawking his wares. Lawrence was seated cross-legged near the fire. Mohamed stood over our shereef, looking down at him.

“So, you give me this box, and it's worthless!” Mohamed complained, waving the humidor about.

“How did you come to such a conclusion, friend?” Lawrence was nonplussed. He hardly moved a muscle. He only looked up at the Bedouin.

“I took it to a bazaar. They said it's a fake, a forgery. It's made of cheap pine wood even though it looks like mahogany.”

Lawrence smiled. He stretched by the fire. “Isn't beauty, my friend, in the eyes of the beholder?”

Mohamed glared at him. He threw the box at Lawrence and stomped off. All the other Bedouins broke into raucous laughter. They clapped their hands, thinking Lawrence had gotten the better of the trader.

Mohamed consoled himself by making a few other trades and sales before he left the encampment.

“Did you just make an enemy, sir?” I asked Lawrence when the laughter had died down.

“I have so many enemies already, another one hardly counts for anything,” Lawrence helped himself to a platter of dates.

“You do take chances, don't you?” I commented. “To offend somebody like Mohamed just to get ten more cigars is like . . . “

“Gambling?” he turned toward me. “To live in the desert is to gamble. Every day you throw the dice and hope for the best.”

When we got back to our more permanent encampment and I was approaching my tent, I saw a figure dart out of it. I ran to catch up with him.

“See here, you vagrant!” I called out.

The man disappeared into the desert. One of the Bedouins came up to me, “Don't worry about him, Lieutenant, he's a petty thief!”

“What if he's a spy!” I suddenly remembered how one of the letters from the War Department had never been found. Had this scoundrel stolen it?

Later I asked Lawrence about the thief. He shrugged, meaning he wasn't listening but was preoccupied with his own thoughts. At that moment Prince Feisal came into the Colonel's tent. Lawrence joked, “My secretary is nervous about some vagrant. Thinks he's a spy.”

Much to my shock Feisal laughed and said something in Arabic to Lawrence. They both enjoyed a laugh at my expense.

When Feisal left, I asked Lawrence what I had missed. He explained, “Feisal says, 'Oh, you think he's one of those British army or navy native spies, the ones who are spying for so many sides at once that they can't even remember who is who.'”

After a blank look from me, I remembered that he must be talking about the Lebanese and Armenian exiles, hired by the War Department, and put ashore, then picked up by warships for regular reports. They sold so much misinformation as triple and quadruple agents, riding about on flea-bitten camels, that they'd become universal figures of fun.

Prince Feisal declared an impromptu feast to celebrate Lawrence's victory over the village of Weijh. I had the privilege to sit beside Lawrence during the meal. The servants got a fire going outside the tent, and we watched something that smelled delicious being prepared. The servants then brought in a platter of kharuf mahshi.

You may ask what this is. It is baby lamb stuffed with rice. It was so delicious that I later loitered and asked a servant in my halting Arabic (I am being tutored by Lawrence, who learned the tongue before he arrived) how it is prepared. Not that you would want to prepare such an exotic dish in far off Pittsburgh where it would be considered barbaric, but you might be curious how your fiance is spending his time and how I will naturally expect to be served by you wearing only your veil after we are married. Apparently it is stuffed with not just rice but nuts and raisins as well. It is rubbed on the outside with a paste of onion crushed with cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom. These spices are native to the part of Arabia that borders on the seacoast and in ancient times was called Arabia Felix. It is cooked over a roaring fire on a spit until browned all over in bubbling goat butter. We washed this all down with Arabian coffee (Qahwa Arabeya) flavored with cardamom, which they claim is more famous and stronger than the better known Turkish variety. It was certainly enough to make me open my eyes. Maybe I'll be able to package it and bring a sample back to you as a gift. This is what the noble savages drink instead of wine and liquor, which is forbidden by their religion.

They have a ceremony here that certainly competes with my mother serving high tea in the garden at Ware House. Here even the prince gets involved. It has to do with ancient rules of hospitality in the desert. Prince Feisal actually roasted the beans over a separate fire himself while we were waiting for the lamb on the spit. When he considered them sufficiently browned, he cooled them in water. A servant brought him his grinder. He used a mortar and pestle. Instead of sugar, which they don't have here, he added cardamom pods in equal measure to the coffee beans. After all that labor, all the prince needed was boiling water and Arabian coffee mugs.

While I was sipping the coffee, my neighbor turned to me and said something I didn't understand in Arabic. Later Lawrence told me he'd remarked, 'Feisal makes coffee from morning until night.' That didn't make much sense considering that he was a prince and not a cook. Lawrence explained that it was great praise honoring Feisal's hospitality.

Lawrence remained silent throughout the whole meal. Everyone talked to him. He replied only when spoken to. You could tell he was the honored guest. He sat at Feisal's right hand.

Lawrence rose to propose a toast. “As your poet Abu Tammaam al-Taa'ee says, “More truthful in its tidings is the sword than are books . . . So I honor you, Prince Feisal's army. You have made today possible.”

After the men clapped, I asked Lawrence, “Is that really what the poet said?”

“It's all in the translation,” he told me. “Translations are far more important than you realize. A few words here or there can make all the difference.”

“I didn't know you were a translator of Arabic!” I confessed.

“It was my ambition once,” he said. “Now I'm fulfilling the same mission in a different way.”

Love and kisses,

Edward

P.S. I wish it could have been our wedding banquet. You could learn to do a belly dance like some of the women in Turkish countries --- not that I have seen any of them, though! And we could dance together all night after that.

I don't mind telling you that I'm as lonely for you as you are for me. And there's no female Michael to keep me company in the meantime. I haven't so much as seen a woman anywhere for months. You haunt not only my dreams but my waking hours. Perhaps you could send me something of yours to keep with me when I am off-duty --- something that would remind me of you?

Dora hurled the letter to the floor and stalked off, leaving the mailman gaping at her. Viola picked it up and made her excuses to Chuck, inviting him in for a cup of coffee for all his trouble. Only later did Dora get enough control over her temper to write to her fiance:

Dear Edward:

You promised me that we would be married Christmas, 1915. Now you say maybe Christmas, 1916, but I have less reason to expect that you'll keep your promise this year than last. You seem to think I'm supposed to wait for you forever while you ride around the desert on a camel and pretend you're in the Middle Ages along with this crazy man Lawrence who deals in antique humidors and spouts ancient Arab poetry!

You got one transfer. Can't you get another? Can't you work in the War Office back home in Britain so you could keep your promise? Or aren't I as important to you as Colonel Lawrence and all his Bedouins? Honestly, Edward, I don't know what to think!

Sincerely yours,

Dora

But before she sealed the letter, she hesitated. She slipped a pair of her stockings into a brown paper envelope, looking from side to side to make sure no one else saw her. She wrapped them well and stuffed her letter in next to it. Blushingly she sealed it and put it in the mailbox. It would remind Edward of their time in London. That's what he had been asking for ---- a memory of her.

Chapter 41:

Viola was the one to retrieve Edward's missive from the bottom of the front steps. She brushed it off with her apron and arranged it neatly and in order at Dora's place at the dining room table.

Dora wouldn't come down to dinner until Mr. Byrne went to get her. He sat her down right next to him in front of the dining room windows, where Viola had carefully drawn the curtains for privacy. The neighbors had been sneaking down the drive and peering in to see if they could figure out what was going on.

Dora stared and stared at the pages, turning from one to the next. Her parents and Mr. Byrne said grace and started to eat without her, though slowly. Viola kept on tiptoeing into the dining room to see how Dora was doing. Then the cleaning lady reported back to Frank in the kitchen and one of the peskiest neighbors at the kitchen door. They gossiped in hushed whispers.

Dora gripped her fist as she read and pounded it on the table. Her mother got so curious that she picked up the pages and scanned them for herself. She handed them to Winthrop, who lifted his eyebrows, shook his head, and handed them off to Mr. Byrne, who knew enough to arrange them in a neat pile once again. He didn't bother to even glance at them.

“Damn!” exclaimed Mr. Benley. “You can't eat dinner with this war going on. It spoils the digestion.”

“Dora,” Mr. Byrne nudged her, “why don't you start from the beginning and read it aloud?”

“Oh, Michael, do I have to?” she looked vexed.

He nodded.

She sighed and began to read:

Dearest Dora:

For many months I wasn't allowed to write you. Now General Murray, who commands the Arabian sector, says the situation is stable enough.

The other day we destroyed a railroad belonging to the Turks. It was hit and run. That is Lawrence's new style. It works like magic. The Turks are too well-equipped by the Germans to attack them head on in battle. This kind of thing wears them down slowly but surely.

No sooner did we ride up to an empty section of track than the Arabs dismounted and chopped at the railroad ties with axes, disarranging them so that if any train came that way it was certain to jump the tracks.

Lawrence was grinning from ear to ear. He's making me unlearn everything I ever thought I knew about wars and battles. When his Bedouins had finished with their work, he planted one of his “tulip bombs” out of sight next to the track. When the train hits it, it will blow sky high, twisting the tracks so they can ever be straightened again. Lawrence always says that it's the most beautiful sight he's ever seen --- one of his hand-made tulip bombs exploding with a flourish.

After such a hectic morning, when we got back from our raid on the railroad, I resumed entering letters from the British War Office. I found the latest one missing. It had arrived early that morning. I had laid it aside carefully by placing it under the paper weight on the desk which almost covered it entirely.

You might remember how good I am not when it comes to keeping things in order. I looked everywhere --- under the desk, around the inside of my tent, around the outside, and then all over the periphery of our encampment. At the last minute I checked my pack that I'd taken on the raid in case I'd put it there instead of where I thought I remembered.

When I still couldn't turn up anything I thought I must tell Lawrence. It was my duty, even if it cast me in a bad light. It reminded me of when I was in British public school at Harrow. I was asked to fetch the paddle.

One disadvantage with these tents was that I couldn't knock. Colonel Lawrence was seated in front of his desk. I cleared my throat. He didn't look up. Lawrence reminds me more of one of my professors from Oxford than an army officer. He's always writing something down, taking notes, composing letters, keeping journals, reading aloud, or orating to himself, to me, or to a group. Sometimes I see him doing any one or more of these things on camel back.

He seemed to be totally absorbed in some papers. Perhaps Lawrence himself had “borrowed” the missive. All I had to do was ask about it.

“Colonel, I'm sorry to bother you, but an important letter has been lost,” I interrupted Lawrence.

“I'm afraid a lot more than that has gone astray,” Lawrence sighed as he went on reading.

“So, you have the latest from the War Office?”

“Ours is the civilization of Napoleon, Caesar, of the Magna Carta, of Marco Polo, of white men who have ventured to the darkest corners of the globe,” Lawrence read while he talked. “As Kipling wrote, it's the White Man's Burden. How do we treat the natives who become dependent on us and our enlightenment? Do we then lead them astray, cheat them, rob them, and then expect them to bless Western civilization?” Lawrence looked troubled. “We should reward them and let them participate in the blessings we ourselves enjoy. But not the British War Office!” He shook his head. “They don't listen to me.”

“The War Office doesn't make policy,” I consoled him. “It's the Prime Minister and Parliament.”

“Yes, and that's where all the treachery comes from!” he threw the letter down and paced around the tent.

“But --- but we are only soldiers. It's not up to us . . . “ “What do you think has gotten them nowhere on the Western Front?” he stood nose to nose with me and thundered as if I had turned into the British War Office. “Secret treaties. Dirty treaties. Stalemate. Why, I visited Gallipoli . . . “

“I was stationed there . . . “ I reminded him.

“Soldiers drowned in the trenches from the winter rains. Unburied corpses washed into the lines. Frostbite. Snow. Men killed from exposure because they were ordered to sit there in a trench and shoot and shoot until everyone on both sides was dead and nothing was accomplished,” he whipped about like a fury. “A dysentery epidemic. The young physicist Henry Moseley killed. The poet Rupert Brooke dead of a septic mosquito bite. Altogether over seventy thousand young men from the United Kingdom dead in one battle. One hundred fifty thousand for the allies --- in one stupid military operation that accomplished nothing for anybody.”

The Colonel is so fearsome when he gets in a mood like this, I was rooted to the spot.

“I'm going to actually win this war even if only on one front! I'm going to DO SOMETHING --- regardless if they put me in front of a firing squad for treason or disobedience.”

Most of the missives from the War Office are rather boring. What on earth had been in this one?

He snatched up the letter on his desk.“They should make Leonard Woolley the Prime Minister. They should make him General Woolley. I would sooner listen to him.” Lawrence stood there distracted for a few moments leafing through the missive to find a particular passage.

“Yes, as Woolley writes to me right here, 'I've often had occasion to remark that much of the character of the Arabs comes from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and their shifting courses throughout the whole of recorded history. They had nothing to rely upon. They did not have their Nile River which seemed eternally the same to the Ancient Egyptians. They had no Tiber River like the ancient Romans or anything like our River Thames. Cities would be created and destroyed in the course of a mere generation or two because of the capriciousness of nature. No stability of one strong government was allowed. It led to the strengthening of the tribal system with local potentates of this tribe or that making do with whatever they could . . .'”

It was slow to dawn on me. This was not a letter from the War Office. It was a letter from Leonard Woolley. It was about their excavation --- along with my father --- of the Hittite City of Carchemish before he'd joined the Army.

“So my forces will forge ahead and ignore the British War Office. We won't let them betray the men who depend on me. I'll try to compensate them for the generations that they've spent wandering in the wilderness, looking for their own Promised Land. We'll bring them freedom from the Turks and give them the blessings of liberty as the British people have liberty . . . “

I nodded.

“This little tribe has hegemony over this little area over here,” Lawrence got out a map and started jabbing at it with his finger. “That little tribe has hegemony over there,” he jabbed again. “What we could teach them is to get together so they could start exerting a force for good in the world,” he went on and on. “It's past the time to divide and conquer . . . “

“Since you are talking about the War Office, I wanted to mention that a letter was delivered here this morning while we were eating breakfast. I'm afraid --- “

“A letter from the War Office?” Lawrence looked at me.

I nodded.

“Well, I'll tell you what to do with that,” he proclaimed.

“I can't do anything with it. You see, it's mis --- “

Lawrence picked up a sheet of paper. He ripped it into shreds in front of my face.

My mouth dropped open.

He threw the pieces of paper at me. He kicked the shreds of paper around on the dirt and sand on the floor of the tent. Clouds of dust rose up.

This was not the sort of thing I had learned at Oxford. Since Lawrence was an Oxford man, I don't think he'd learned it there either.

“Let me get this straight. You want me to tear up any letters I get from the War Office?” I repeated.

“Now we're catching on, Lieutenant.”

I wet my lips. “Shall I reply to them first?”

Lawrence paced around the tent some more, obviously considering. Then he stopped short. “Yes, why don't we have a standard reply. Don't bother to read the boring, repetitive stuff. Just reply, 'Proceeding as usual . . . '” He looked off into space as if seeing the faces of the British War Office generals. He laughed and rubbed his hands together with glee.

“Proceeding as usual?” I repeated what he had said.

“Exactly!”

“Shall I still enter them in my register, sir?”

“Amuse yourself if you like! Don't bother me with them,” he ordered.

“Is that all, sir?” I wanted to take my leave so I could collect my thoughts.

He went to fetch his SMLE rifle, an exact replica of my own. He took it to the flap of the tent and rudely shoved it aside. Colonel Lawrence aimed straight up at the sky. Without any ado, he fired.

The English officers visiting our camp came charging out of their tents, wondering if we were under attack. Somehow the Arabs intuited what he was really up to. They knew Turks didn't attack in such a manner.

“Has something happened?” one officer asked.

Lawrence said, “Just proceeding as usual,” with a wry wink.

The British nodded and departed for their tents.

“I dedicate this rifle to the true task that I have set forth,” he told me. “I won't play the War Department's games. I will give the Arabs what they have never had for centuries --- a way to hold up their heads among nations.”

There is very little moisture in the air here, and the swings of temperatures are extreme every day, varying on average between thirty and forty degrees. Right now, of course, my shivering had more to do with my fears than the actual temperature of the air.

So you see, my love, I have my hands full. I am doing things I never dreamed possible before. I feel as if I have been saddled with a grave responsibility. Lawrence, as I have come to realize in the past months, is no mere commander like all the others I met at Gallipoli. He is a great man with a unique vision all his own – sort of like Genghis Kahn, Caesar, Napoleon, Attila the Hun, and Hannibal all rolled into one. Like other great men, he takes big chances and dangerous ones, too.

I hope you will understand why I have not written up until now,

Edward

P.S. I reserve you for my dreaming hours when I am in bed alone. That's also when I'm reading the volume you sent me by Mr. Klein, whom I understand was your first swain. If he was anything like Mr. Byrne I should have liked to meet him. Michael is so amusing. I wish he was here now to make me laugh. Ditto with Mr. Klein. The Lion and the Mouse reminds me of your American way of thinking --- so prudish and severe!

P.S.S. I'm sure you can also understand why I can't get away now. I know it's a few months longer than we had planned. Maybe by this coming Christmas? Yes, you look fetching in your wedding dress. I got your photo. I daydream about ripping it off you piece by piece, including the veil. Now that would make a photo! Speaking of photos, I haven't had much of a chance to use my camera yet.

P.S.S.S. I was finishing up this letter when there was a commotion outside my tent. I ran out to check on it. A Bedouin had arrived hawking wares. The others were gathered around him and haggling for a deal. The Arabs love nothing better than this sort of thing. Lawrence makes sure they have plenty of coins, most of them stolen in raids, so they can amuse themselves.

This particular merchant claimed he had lots of cigarettes, pipe tobacco, and cigars. The men love nothing better than a good smoke after a day of raiding. But low and behold, there came Lawrence out of his tent. He made his way through the jostling crowd. They stepped back when they saw who he is. He threw down a bag of Turkish piasters and said, “Give me the best cigars you have.”

“For that price we can give you the best!” said the Bedouin named Mohamed, searching through his wares. He gave Lawrence a handful of fat cigars that I could smell from where I was standing.

Lawrence then astounded everyone by throwing down those cigars and stepping on them.

“Pah! I want more than that for my money.”

Mohamed grinned at him and said, “You drive a hard bargain, shereef, but so do I. That will cost you more money.”

“I don't have anymore money right now,” Lawrence insisted with his arms akimbo.

His men laughed.

“Well then, no more cigars!” Mohamed shrugged.

Lawrence headed back to his tent. He soon returned with the humidor that my father and Leonard Woolley had given him. He shoved it at Mohamed.

“I used all the cigars up. I'm willing to trade it for more. I don't need the box.”

Mohamed examined the cigar box that my father fancied so. He shrugged. “All right, here are ten more of my very best cigars.”

He and Lawrence shook on the deal. Lawrence went back to his tent smoking. His men applauded.

Such is life in the desert. I bet it's nothing like Pittsburgh.

***********************************************************************************

When Dora got all the way to the PS and PSS, she blushed and stuttered a little, skipping over Edward's racy remarks. She smiled that he had indeed remembered her and then colored again to realize Mr. Byrne understood what she was doing. She read the PSSS rapidly, trying to get to the end and not interested in hearing more about the ubiquitous humidor and how it kept on showing up every place under the sun.

She finally put the letter down and let loose with a sigh of indignation. “Christmas again!” she moaned. “I don't believe it.”

“Is that when the wedding is to be?” her mother looked bewildered.

“And that Lawrence character goes and gives away the humidor as if it didn't mean a thing to him --- just so he can get a few more cigars!”she shook her head. “Ali was willing to stab me for it. Well, if I see him again, I'll have to inform him that a Bedouin by the name of Mohamed has it now.”

Her mother and father excused themselves to go to bed. Only she and Mr. Byrne were still sitting there together.

“Dora, you realize, don't you, that this can't go on forever?” Mr. Byrne asked. “Your father wants me to press you to reconsider if you will marry me and move into the house I'm renting.”

“Oh yes! I know how father thinks,” she sighed, “and he's so right! Nothing would make me happier than to marry you, Michael,” she stared down at her half-eaten plate of food and spoke without enthusiasm. “Everything would be on schedule and on time then. Everything would be very rational and very right.”

“But what about Edward, Dora?”

“Yes, what about him indeed!” she leaped to her feet. She paced back and forth, back and forth. “And that Lawrence, boy would I like to get my hands on him! I hope he gets killed in one of his raids by one of his tulip bombs. Beautiful indeed! Then Edward will come home.”

She grabbed a vase full of her mother's best mums. She smashed it on the floor. The water splashed on her feet. She raced upstairs to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her. She even took a cold shower to forget. But she kept on returning to Edward's insinuation that he would like to have a photo of her without her clothes on, perhaps clad only in her wedding veil.

That night when she was all alone she went to sleep clad only in her wedding veil. And she woke up weeping. She didn't close her eyes again until dawn. Her last thought before drifting off was, Michael, you may understand many things about me. But this you will never understand . . .

Chapter 40:

Dora called Rita the next day. “The wedding's been postponed,” she groaned.

“What happened?”

“Edward was sent on a secret mission. They won't tell me where or for how long. He hasn't written. My Dad had to drag it out of the British Ambassador.”

“I'll hold onto my bridesmaid's dress. I'll keep it freshly pressed to use at a moment's notice.”

“You're a friend.”

“How could I be anything else after all we've been through together?”

Christmas came and went. Dora tossed and turned, waking up thinking she was married and on her honeymoon only to discover that there was snow outside her window and she was all alone. She thought, Edward! Why don't you at least write me? Are they really preventing you from telling me where you are and what's going on? Can't you guess what I must feel?

Lady Ware was getting the same treatment. Dora received a letter every week from her future mother-in-law lamenting the lack of news. Lady Ware described how she carefully pored over the Killed in Action column of The Times every day looking for one name and one name only.

Dora lived in suspended animation. She was unable to really go forward, unable to focus on anything. Her attention was constantly distracted by the coming of the mail and then the disappointment of not hearing anything --- only to build up to the same crescendo tomorrow, and the day after that, and then the week after that.

Spring came. Spring went. Now it was the summer of 1916, more than a year since she'd stood at the pier in Liverpool and waved good-bye to Edward as he departed for the Dardanelles. Chuck, the mailman, came racing down her driveway early one day as she stood pruning rosebushes with her mother. “Dora, here's the letter from Edward!” he shouted. The whole community of Bethel Borough in the South Hills of Pittsburgh had been galvanized. They knew all about Miss Dora Benley's plight.

Dora dropped her pruners and tore it open. The envelope fell to the driveway and blew away. It caught on the branch of a rhododendron now in bloom. She sucked in her breath to brace herself for the worst. Her eyes scanned the letter quickly, trying to devour it all at once. Was he wounded? Was he coming home soon? Instead of important news, the letter bogged down in a morass of words. She would have to slog through it line by line to decipher it. Worse, he seemed to be going on and on about something --- and it wasn't her, his feelings for her, or anything worth reading! She remembered the style of The Wilderness of Zin. She thought, Wait a minute! Is this Edward or Lawrence writing?

“Is Edward all right?” the postman's voice broke into the fog of confusion and sudden revulsion that had consumed Dora's brain.

“What?” she looked up, dazed, to find not only the postman but her mother and several neighbors gathered around her in a tight knot, wringing their hands.

“Is the wedding to be soon?” her mother pressed.

“I --- I don't know!” Dora threw the letter at her mother, burst into tears, and raced up the steps to the front door. She ran right into Viola holding a wicker laundry basket full of clothes. She knocked them all over the oriental rug in the foyer.

“Dora!” Viola exclaimed.

Dora charged up the stairs to her bedroom.

Sharp tongues whispered behind her, talking about the strain visible in every line of her face. “How long has this been going on?” asked one neighbor, entering the house after her mother.

“How much more can she take?” asked another from the bottom of the stairs.

As soon as she got to her room, Dora picked up the phone.

“Benley Tire and Rubber,” answered the receptionist.

“Give me Mr. Byrne!” At least she could trust Michael not to talk like an archaeological monograph!

“Yes, Dora,” said the receptionist.

“What happened this time, Dora?” Michael answered immediately.

“Edward's letter finally arrived,” she sobbed. “After all these months!”

“It doesn't sound as if it's the big moment you've been waiting for,” he observed dryly.

Dora pounded her fist on her nightstand. “He writes purple prose about strange, foreign people saying bizarre things. He sounds so serious all of the sudden,” she ran her fingers through her hair, “like he was twenty years older. It must be the influence of that horrible Lawrence, the war, or who knows what. Edward writes like he doesn't know I'm alive! He could be writing to you, my mother, or to Chuck, the postman!”

“You're father's about ready to leave. We'll be there in about half an hour.”

Click.

“Oh, Michael,” she said with tears in her eyes as she put the phone down, “why can't you be the one who's far away fighting a war and Edward be in your place?”

Chapter 39:

Rita stayed as long as she could. She took the train back to New York to appear in a play and then a movie. She promised she'd call before Thanksgiving, which was when their little group would have to start for England to get there in time for the wedding.

Dora finally agreed with Mr. Byrne and her father, though Mr. Byrne had left the day after Rita. She took a leave of absence from Bryn Mawr College until the war ended. She resumed her grim, summer-time ritual of trekking to the mailbox every day for news about Edward. It got to the point several weeks later that they were sending cables back and forth to Ware House on an almost daily basis. Both Lady Ware and Dora were frantic. It was hard to say which lady was more frantic --- Edward's mother or Edward's fiancée.

“For Christ's sake, how is a man to get any work done around here with all this female prattle and melodrama!” her father pounded his fist on the table one evening at dinner when Dora and her mother did nothing except worry aloud about Edward's whereabouts.

“But, Winthrop, no one's heard from the boy in months!” Mrs. Benley exclaimed.

“Etta May, am I supposed to be in the tire business or in the business of keeping track of wayward British lords?” he thundered. “And there aren't enough of them left to make a business out of that, no matter what I charge.”

“But that leaves Dora in an impossible position!” her mother continued. “She's supposed to be married on December 22 in the chapel next to Ware House. That's a little over a month from now. We've got tickets on the Tuscania next week. Do we sail or not?”

“How the hell should I know!” Winthrop pounded the table again. “Frank!” he yelled.

“May I help you, sir?” Frank appeared in the doorway.

“Bring me the phone. I'm going to call my lawyer.”

“What are you doing, Winthrop?” his wife protested. “You can't sue the British army, can you?” she asked big-eyed.

“Hello, Frederick, yes, this is Winthrop again . . . Yes, I know you have several ongoing suits already. Well, I want to add another task for you to do . . . No, it's not another suit. At least not right away it isn't . . . I want you to cable the British War Office. I want it done every day until you get an answer. I want the whereabouts of a Lieutenant Edward Ware traced. Yes, he's British . . . Yes, he's the lord my daughter has set her sights on marrying against my better judgment.”

“Winthrop!” Mrs. Benley protested.

Mr. Benley motioned to his wife to be quiet.

“Yes, this British lord was last seen leaving the Dardanelles in September, which is the only smart thing I've ever known him to do. He was headed . . . Just a minute . . . Where was he going next?” Mr. Benley asked his daughter.

Dora shrugged. “He was shipping out with Lawrence, an acquaintance of Leonard Woolley. He didn't say where he was going, only that he was applying for a transfer.”

“Nobody knows. That's just the problem. But you can put a trace on a T.E. Lawrence, too. Apparently he's part of this mess, whoever he is. Never heard of him before . . . Yes, I know it will be a lot of work. I'll double your retainer. No, I take that back --- I'll triple it effective immediately!” he got out his checkbook. “And I won't use the mails. I'll have Frank bring it to you.”

They waited for countless days without any word. Finally Frederick Bognar, the lawyer, appeared at the house one night at dinner time. Viola set another place. He looked grim as he got out a cable and handed it to Mr. Benley. Dora couldn't stand it. She raced around the table and stood behind her father, breathing down his neck.

Have never heard of a T.E. Lawrence. STOP. STOP. Don't know anything about a Lieutenant Ware either. STOP.

“Oh, Father, what are we going to do?” Dora clapped her hands over her mouth. “They don't know anything about them. They could be dead.”

“Didn't Edward promise to write?” her mother said.

Dora nodded. “Unless something's preventing him. That's what I'm worried about.”

After several more days of listening to weeping, screaming, wailing women, Mr. Benley was ready to tear out his hair --- even though he had a receding hairline and couldn't spare any of it. “That's it! I've had enough. I'm calling Wilson.”

“Wilson?” his wife exclaimed.

“Yes, Woodrow Wilson.”

Immediately the man whose image Dora had once glimpsed in a black and white photo rose up before Dora's mind's eye. He was a five foot eleven, skinny gentleman with a long, gaunt, oval face and a grim smile. His lips were always pursed tightly together. His nose was long and pointed, held high in the air. He'd been wearing a gray suit with a black overcoat and a black top hat.

His wife and daughter watched in speechless amazement as Mr. Benley called the White House. It took a day or two, but he finally got through to Wilson's private secretary after he reminded him that he was a survivor of the Lusitania disaster and a prominent Pittsburgh businessman.

“Yes, President Wilson, glad to meet you. Not that I pretend to be a Democrat, mind you. I'm an old Rough Rider through and through. But I can cut you a deal about your White House fleet of cars. Yes, I'm just the man for that.”

Wilson replied. Dora and Mrs. Benley couldn't make out his exact words.

“I need for you to put me in touch with someone who can locate soldiers in Europe engaged in that wild fracas over there.”

Wilson answered again.

“Yes, I know we're neutral, and thank God for that! But you see, my daughter here is engaged to a Lieutenant Edward Ware. His father's Sir Adolphus Ware, a baronet of Rufford, Bart to be exact,” he read it off a piece of paper. “It seems that Lieutenant Ware's disappeared into the Wild Beyond with a T.E. Lawrence.”

Wilson spoke.

“Yes, I've tried the British War Office. I might as well consult a Swami. They pretend not to know a thing for reasons of their own. They claim they've never heard of either fellow, which is of course an outright lie.”

Wilson said something else.

“You want me to talk to the British Ambassador? Very well, I'll call him in the morning. If this lead turns out to be good, you can expect a large contribution to your political party for your trouble, even though I'm not a Democrat. Yes, Mr. President, thank you.”

A few days later Winthrop Benley was on the phone with the British Ambassador. “I want you to contact the British War Office to look up a T.E. Lawrence and a Lieutenant Edward Ware.”

A few days later at dinner the ambassador called back. Viola acted flustered. She had answered the phone herself and couldn't wait to hand it to Mr. Benley. Everyone --- including Frank and Viola --- clustered around Mr. Benley and leaned over his shoulder. Dora was biting her nails. Mr. Byrne was visiting at the time since it was a Saturday. Even he put down his fork and knife and listened respectfully.

“Simply put, you've committed a diplomatic faux pas by inquiring into the whereabouts of your son-in-law to be and T.E. Lawrence,” the gentleman's impeccable British English could be heard on the other end of the phone very clearly even though he was in Washington, D.C.

“Faux pas or not, just give me an answer. Where the hell is Edward Ware hiding out?” Mr. Benley was impatient.

“That's what I'm trying to explain to you. I'm not at liberty to tell you.”

“Not at liberty is different from don't know, I suppose?” her father was blunt.

“I'm going to be frank. Both Lawrence and Ware have been sent on a secret mission. It's not being publicized in the press in Britain either. The High Command wants it that way for reasons of their own. Lord Kitchener doesn't want the enemy to have any advance notice.”

Dora exchanged desperate glances with Mr. Byrne.

“Are you suggesting that my daughter communicates with the enemy?” Mr. Benley sounded insulted.

“I'm sure she's a red-blooded American girl,” the ambassador said. “But war is war, and this one seems to be a particularly nasty one.”

“You can say that again! It never ends,” her father shook his head.

“Well, we're giving Lawrence his chance at ending it. He has a plan that everyone thinks will work. He wants only a chance to put it into action. I can't tell you anything else except that both he and Edward are alive. That's the very most I am authorized to say.”

Dora grabbed the phone. She would never have had the nerve if she hadn't been so desperate. “Mr. Ambassador, Edward and I are supposed to be married at Christmas. Is Edward coming home in time?”

There was a pause. “I don't think so, miss. You'll have to put it off, postpone it until after the war. I'm grievously sorry. Now I understand the reason for your concern. Yes, I really am dreadfully sorry for you all.”

Dora handed the phone back to her father. She sat gazing at her vanilla ice cream as it melted all over the apple pie. Mr. Byrne squeezed her hand. Dora smiled at him through her tears. “Yes, I know, Michael, you told me so.”

“Bastard British,” her father cursed after hanging up, “all this secret dealing, secret treaties, all this diplomatic hanky-panky, that's what started this damn war to begin with. Don't they ever learn?”

“You should have been in charge of the British navy instead of this Churchill,” Mrs. Benley declared. “You should have been named First Lord of the Admiralty. Then they wouldn't have sunk the Lusitania.”

“All it takes is some right thinking instead of all this deviousness. Mr. Byrne,” Mr. Benley paused with his pie fork halfway to his mouth, “you're looking for a job, right?”

“Yes indeed, sir.”

“You're a God-fearing man. I can tell.”

“A Methodist, sir.”

“That's the best kind next to the Presbyterians,” Mr. Benley decreed.

Mrs. Benley smiled, cutting another piece of Viola's freshly baked apple pie. “Winthrop, we only attend that church because it's the nearest one and you don't like to waste time on Sunday mornings. We were both raised as good Lutherans, Mr. Byrne.”

“You're hired, Mr. Byrne. I don't have time to deal with all these ladies and run a business at the same time. I need all the help I can get,” Winthrop Benley decided in an instant.

“Thank you, sir,” Mr. Byrne smiled. “I couldn't hold off my employer about going to England any longer anyway. I handed in my resignation on Friday.”

“To tell you the truth, I thought you were a troublemaker at first, shacking up with my little girl on the Lusitania. By golly, it turned out you really were hot on the tail of some fugitive from justice. You saved my little girl to boot.”

Mr. Byrne's cheeks flushed.

“Besides, I like your loyalty. You've proved to be a good friend.” The two men shook on the deal. Viola brought in the after dinner mints. “In uncertain times, one needs somebody he can trust and count on.”

Dora sighed, thinking of someone else with red hair, bright reddish-orange freckles, and wicked green eyes.

She thought, But can I count on you, Edward?

Chapter 38:

That evening everyone sat outside on the patio until dark. Dora, Rita, and Michael took up one whole cushioned bench with Michael between the girls. Mr. and Mrs. Benley occupied their usual white-painted, wooden Adirondack chairs under the maple trees, which had already shed most of their leaves.

“Michael,” Dora sighed with her eyes shut, listening to the cicada during the last days of Indian Summer, “I'm glad you don't want to be a hero.” She yawned. The war seemed very far away.

“No, Dora, I just want a little peace and quiet. I want to earn a living,” Michael confessed with his arm resting around her shoulder.

“If everybody in Europe thought like that,” Mr. Benley smoked his cigar, “we wouldn't have so much trouble in the world.”

Everyone else retired for the night. They left Dora and Michael sitting there alone. Dora raised her hands as if to fend off his unspoken words. “You don't have to tell me again how irresponsible Edward is, about how he's going to have adventure after adventure and forget I ever existed.”

“You're saying it better than I could, Dora.”

“You act like we're two old folks who've been sitting on the patio forever and ever --- older than my parents. You must be about eighty years old you're so wise,” she said sarcastically.

“I'm really not so smart. If I were, I wouldn't be sitting here next to you,” he looked back at her pointedly.

“That's not a very nice thing to say!” she said reproachfully.

“If I had any sense, I would have meant it that day I slammed the door in your face and put you out of my life forever.”

She moved a little farther away from him on the bench. “You don't say!”

“No, Dora, I'm afraid I'm in it for the long, long, long haul. I can't walk out on you in a world that's so topsy-turvy you can call me from college because you're cornered by a saboteur. No, as Rita says, we Lusitania survivors have to stick together. As the old Chinese proverb says, when a man saves your life, you owe him yours. In that sense we two pledged each other our lives months ago.”

“Michael, what are you --- “ Mr. Byrne's arms closed around her.

He pressed his lips down against hers. She quickly pushed him away. She didn't want to hurt his feelings. But how did she explain to him that her own feelings for him weren't the same as what she felt for Edward? She thought he was just her best friend and someone who understand her the way nobody else did.

“I'm ready any time you are to make you my wife, the mother of my children, and to live with you until we both die as your parents have done all these years. I love you, Dora. I can't run away out of jealousy as I tried to do this summer. I have to face up to it. I have to have patience.”

“Michael, I don't want you to think that I'll get tired of waiting for Edward and change my mind. Edward will be coming home, and --- “

He got up, ready to go to bed. He started toward the door. He turned. “And if he doesn't come back, if somebody shoots Edward dead, who else would you marry then?” he asked pointedly.

She bit her lip. She didn't like to think about it, but she guessed he had a point.

“I thought so,” he said and closed the door behind him.

“Michael!”

He opened the door. She said, “Would you marry me on such terms?”

“What terms, Dora?” he leaned out of the door in the shadows.

“I mean, well . . . knowing I really loved another man?”

“A dead man isn't a man anymore, Dora. He's six feet under. If he cuddles up to anybody, it's the worms. I can hardly be jealous of them.”

He closed the door with a note of finality. She shivered sitting there all alone. “Edward, where are you?” she asked the mums, the owls, and the rustling dead leaves of autumn. “How can you leave me all alone like this?” But even though a tear rolled down her cheek, only the night was left to wrap its arms around her and keep her company.

Chapter 37:

The next day Mrs. Benley, Rita, and Dora took the trolley into downtown Pittsburgh on a shopping expedition. Dora tried on several different wedding dresses. They settled on the new style, a bride's dress of white satin and mousseline de soie. The trim consisted of garlands of orange blossoms that wreathed the tulle veil. Even the ladies behind the cash registers came out to view it. They thought it was the most magnificent dress for sale at Kaufmann's Department Store that autumn of 1915.

Rita decided to buy her bridesmaid's dress at the same time. Before they'd finished, they'd invited half the store to the wedding at Ware House outside London. Dora had the store photographer take a picture of her with Rita standing side by side in their new dresses. She would send it to Edward to remind him of where he should be and when.

They lunched at the Tic Toc Restaurant at Kaufmann's and then left by the door nearest the Kaufmann's Clock at Smithfield Street and Fifth Avenue, ready to wave down the first trolley. They were so overloaded with packages they could hardly carry them, each sporting the Kaufmann's logo.

“Bang bang, pow pow!” Rita laughed as they emerged from the store. “We can barely climb out of the trenches with all our gear. We're going over the top anyway, as my brother says in his last letter from the front.”

Dora hadn't giggled like this in a long time. “The war can't go on forever.” So it seemed that day as the women met Mr. Benley and Mr. Byrne for dinner. They traveled only several blocks down the street to the Duquesne Club.

Mr. Benley and Mr. Byrne were driving up when they arrived. They'd come from Mr. Benley's office, where Mr. Benley had given his daughter's friend a tour. They talked shop as two doormen hurried over to open the car doors for the gentlemen. The ladies descended from the trolley, and they all entered the Richardson Romanesque style building together. They were escorted into a lounge where they were served hors d'oeuvres for a couple of hours before the dining room opened for dinner.

As they were being served the main course, the head waiter approached their table looking grim. Dora felt cold prickles up her spine. Could it be about Edward? Mr. Byrne exchanged glances with her. She could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“A cable for your party, sir,” said the waiter, presenting the message to Mr. Benley. “It was delivered to your house. Your cleaning lady's husband brought it to us.”

Mr. Benley tipped the man and read the cable. He grimaced. “Humbug! It's from Lady Ware,” he thrust the paper at Dora.

Dora paled as she took it. She could think of only one thing. Rita grabbed it from her. Dora's hand crept under the table, looking for Mr. Byrne's. She found it.

“What does it say, Rita?” Dora pleaded, unable to stand the suspense any longer. “Has Edward been killed in action?”

Rita shook her head. “Lady Ware is asking if you've heard from her son, Edward. She hasn't heard a thing since he left in late May.”

Dora decided to cable back immediately. She would copy Edward's last message for his mother and affix a date to it. Now that she counted, she hadn't heard from Edward in weeks and weeks herself!

When they got back to the house, Viola shuffled through an old pile of papers and mail. She brought them an old letter dated at the very beginning of September right after the last one Dora had received. She must have just missed it, going back to Bryn Mawr when she had. Dora grabbed and opened it. It was very short:

My dearest love,

I got your letter! Of course I'd be glad to come home sooner. I'd leave right this minute except that I'd feel like I was betraying my company, my parents, and my country. I'd be a coward, and I want to be a hero for you, my love. Wouldn't you rather be married to someone you could be proud of instead of someone who makes you ashamed?

My new assignment won't take any time at all if Lawrence is to be believed. You should be seeing me in just a few more weeks.

Love and kisses --- and more!

Edward

Dora threw the letter down on the floor in front of everybody and stomped on it. “But it's more than a few weeks already, and we still haven't heard from him!” She charged up the stairs to her room in a rage. Rita raced after her.

Just before Dora slammed the bedroom door behind her, she caught sight of Mr. Byrne's gaze. He was looking up at her from the bottom of the stairs. He was saying, I told you so, without having to move his lips.

Chapter 36:

Dora rushed back upstairs to throw a few clothes into her damaged suitcase. They marched out of Denbigh Hall side by side as a crowd of girls in Lantern Night costumes lined the hallways and the front entrance gawking at them.

“Michael, where are we going?” Dora pleaded after they started out to the darkened street that ran through the campus, illuminated only by gas lamps.

“There are no more trains until tomorrow, when I intend to take you home to Pittsburgh. We'll have to spend the night at a hotel, I suppose.”

They hailed a cab, which took them to the Bellevue in downtown Philadelphia. They talked about how Ali could have traveled to America. They puzzled over how he had discovered the Benleys' address. Perhaps he had snooped in Lady Ware's address book in the morning room before leaving Britain.

When they arrived back in Pittsburgh by train, Mr. Benley was scandalized by the lack of response of the Bryn Mawr police department. He called the mayor and complained. He phoned the police chief. “I'm going to sue them, too!” he declared at breakfast.

“You really do have to understand that Ali represents a great danger to your daughter,” Michael explained to Mr. Benley over scrambled eggs and hash browns.

“I didn't believe either of you at first. But after the Lusitania, one's inclined to believe almost anything of Europeans and their wastrel allies,” Mr. Benley shook his head and finished his pancakes.

“Ali followed me to Bryn Mawr, Father,” Dora emphasized.

“There was that awful driver who bumped into us!” Mrs. Benley exclaimed.

“That was Ali,” Dora announced to her mother.

“You don't say!” Mrs. Benley's eyes grew as big as saucers.

“Well, my daughter's dropping out of that school! At times like this, she should stay close to home,” Winthrop Benley decided.

“Wait a minute!” Dora protested.

“That's a wise decision, sir,” Mr. Byrne looked at Dora.

Since she was getting married in December and moving to England, she didn't bother to protest very much. Besides, it was the beginning of Fall Break. There was time to decide what to do next. And she was distracted, to say the least.

On the second day back, after Viola had spoiled her with a hash browns, sausages, and scrambled eggs breakfast complete with everything, the doorbell rang. Frank opened the front door. Excitedly he raced back to the dining room that was set for four for breakfast.

“Viola!” Frank cried to his buxom, portly, raven-haired wife with the big smile and the apron tied around her waist. “Set another place. Quick! We have a guest.”

A sylph-like young woman with a perfect face not much older than Dora entered the room carrying her suitcase, which Frank took from her immediately. “Rita!” Dora rose to her feet, clutching the table for support. It was like seeing a ghost risen up from the grave. “I --- I didn't know . . . I didn't know . . . “

Rita threw out her arms and ran for Dora. Dora knocked her own chair over running for Rita. The two young women hugged each other and broke into tears. “I didn't know you had survived either,” Rita wept, “until your mother called me two weeks ago and invited me down to your house.”

“I read about Rita in the newspaper. They were talking about how she's going to star in a new film,” Mrs. Benley explained.

Viola set another place next to Dora. The two young women had so much to talk about. They ended up never leaving the table all day long. Viola served lunch while they were sitting there. Many hours after that she served dinner. The two girls hadn't budged an inch the whole time. Instead they chatted like twin sisters.

Rita was telling her friend, over meat loaf with a variety of garden vegetables and some Italian touches that Viola had sneaked in all by herself, “I've always been scared to death of drowning as I told you. I swim, but I don't swim that well,” the French-American woman gesticulated.

“I don't swim all that well myself,” Mrs. Benley added. “If it hadn't been for Winthrop, I don't know what would have happened. Winthrop's always so ingenious!” his wife smiled. “He got that lifeboat launched when the crew didn't know how to do it.”

Mr. Benley declared as he ate his baked Idaho potato with lots of butter and bacon, “Teddy Roosevelt wouldn't have had it any other way.”

“I wish you could have saved me!” Rita shuddered. “I stayed next to Mr. Vanderbilt and Mr. Frohman until the very last minute. I didn't think someone as important as Mr. Vanderbilt could drown,” she shook her head. She looked off into space as if she could see it all happening over again right now. “My God!” she crossed herself. “He was the richest man in America. I thought those distinguished Robber Barons knew what they were doing. They kept on hanging onto the rail and climbing up the Boat Deck as the waters washed up after us. They kept on saying we'd be rescued, that the ship couldn't sink.”

Viola paused with a serving dish of buttered mixed vegetables in her hand. Her mouth was open. Her eyes were bulging out of her head. She leaned closer. She looked as if she couldn't imagine such a horrible thing. Frank peered out the kitchen door, hanging on every word.

“I didn't hear what happened to them until later, because a big green wall of water swept me off the deck.”

“Yes, I remember that,” Dora nodded.

“I never got to shoot myself. My pearl-handled pistol got knocked out of my hands,” Rita gesticulated.

“Thank goodness!” exclaimed Mr. Byrne.

“I went under,” Rita turned pale as if reliving the experience. “I got dragged down, down, down. I thought I was dead. Then I got spit back out on top of the ocean. I found a floating board to cling onto. I stayed there for hours. My legs were so numb and cold I couldn't feel them anymore.”

“The water was exactly fifty-two degrees that afternoon at ten after two when the torpedo struck,” her father said. “I found that out later. This is why I am suing the Cunard lines,” her father stirred his coffee self-righteously.

“I didn't get picked up until it was dark,” Rita wiped her eyes.

“Here, have plenty of extra hot coffee,” Viola ran back to the kitchen to fetch some. “Drink this, and your toes will never be cold again, no?”

“At least you're here now,” Dora hugged her friend. “Just in time to be my bridesmaid, if you will do me the honor.”

“Wonderful!” Rita clapped her hands. “Are you finally marrying Mr. Byrne?”she asked hopefully, looking up at him. “I remember you two were together on the ship all the time.”

Mr. Byrne looked down at his coffee cup. He was a long time about stirring it.

“She would be if I could knock some sense into my daughter's head!” Mr. Benley sighed.

“Winthrop!” his wife chided him.

“Mr. Byrne and I had quite an adventure, didn't we, Michael?” Dora winked at him, changing the subject.

“Amen!” said Mr. Byrne. “I'm not sure it's quite over yet.”

“But how is that possible?” Rita leaned closer, her eyes agog. “We're on the land right now.”

“Haven't you told her, Dora?” Mr. Byrne turned to her.

Dora shook her head. “I've been followed by a stranger ever since I boarded the ship. He plagued me in London and at Ware House. He showed up at Bryn Mawr College, too.”

Rita's eyes grew bigger and bigger. “Is he a German spy?”

Dora shook her head.

“He's definitely an exotic,” Mr. Byrne said. “Someone from the other side of the world. He has dark skin and eyes. According to what Dora says, I think he's Middle Eastern. He was hired at Ware House as a servant named Ali.”

“I go to England to cement a profitable business deal, and this is how I get rewarded,” her father complained. “First I get sunk by a German torpedo, even though America's neutral. Then my daughter is plagued by some British colonial --- and that's after she gets engaged to a mad British lord.”

“British colonial?” Rita's eyes got bigger.

“All those Middle Eastern types are British colonial subjects. If the British don't keep them in line, who will? I'll sue the British Parliament and even King George himself if I have to,” Winthrop Benley shook his head and made a fist.

“Winthrop would take on anybody,” his wife smiled and nodded.

“Britain didn't have to set a bad example and enter some stupid war that Austria-Hungary started with Serbia. What kind of backwater is Serbia anyway? Who cares if some crackpot assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife? Never heard of them before! This war madness keeps on spreading. I'm glad that America has the good sense to keep out of the mess!”

“Wilson did say he wouldn't tolerate any German aggression,” Mr. Byrne reminded him.

“Yes, since the Lusitania went down with all of us aboard save only Frank and Viola, thank God!, Wilson's made the Kaiser himself apologize and recant.”

Viola was a good Catholic. She crossed herself when he said that and grabbed the rosary beads hung around her neck.

Mr. Benley continued, “Wilson's promised no more nonsense on the high seas with neutrals and civilians, especially with women and children involved.”

“What if the Kaiser doesn't keep his promise?” Rita threw out her arms.

Winthrop Benley looked personally offended. He stuck out his chest and growled, “He'll have me to deal with then.”

“Winthrop!” even Mrs. Benley was amazed.

“What am I to do if I wake up tomorrow and the whole world has turned to monkeys, apes, and chimpanzees except for the USA? Do I have to turn into one, too?” Mr. Benley exclaimed.

Later when the girls were alone up in Dora's bedroom, Dora filled Rita in about her new fiance, Edward. “He says he'll be back at Christmas. The war has to be over by then at the latest. He's going to come here to Pittsburgh to fetch me, though I've asked him to come sooner. We're going to Ware House to get married.”

“How wonderful!” Rita clapped her hands. “But after the Lusitania, I don't know if I want to live anywhere but right here in America.”

Dora said, “Well, I just assume we're living in England. He has an estate there and all. But who knows? Edward says he's dying to see Pittsburgh.”

She showed Rita her engagement ring. She didn't care if Mr. Byrne had proved it to be a fake. She thought it was a wonderful romantic gesture, and the very memory of it kept her warm at night.

Rita moved a little closer and whispered, “But poor Mr. Byrne, he looked so down at lunch!”

“Yes, I know, Rita, I know,” Dora bit her lip. Michael weighed on her conscience.

Chapter 35:

Dora realized there was only a flimsy metal screen between her and the saboteur. She slammed both windows shut and locked them. She raced out of her dorm room, stopping only to lock the door behind her from the outside with her key.

She charged down the hallway yelling, “Help!” She wondered why none of the other girls were responding to her cries. She stopped cold at the end of the dark, dimly lighted hallway of the old dorm building. It was the October evening chosen for the Step Sing. All the girls on the campus had brought their Bryn Mawr lanterns with the red glass and the owls to the steps of Taylor Hall, where the bell tower was located, to sing “Akoue” in classical Greek. It was a Bryn Mawr tradition.

Surely the house mother must be in residence. Dora flew down the wooden staircase to the ground floor where the “bells desk” was located. But the dorm mother had gone to the Step Sing. No one was manning the desk. Dora grabbed the dorm phone. She dialed the police with shaky hands. She tapped her fingers while they took their time about answering.

“Hello, this is Dora Benley. I'm at Bryn Mawr College at Denbigh Hall. Please come at once. There's a man prowling about outside, and --- “

“The police don't respond to campus calls. That's for the college to take care of,” replied the dispatcher.

“But --- but you don't understand,” she darted her eyes about, “this isn't some boy from Haverford College. This is an arsonist and saboteur. He was involved in the sinking of the Lusitania. I know. I was on it, and --- “

“Miss, the police have better things to do than participate in campus pranks. Go call your sorority sisters instead.”

Click.

Dora gaped at the phone. She couldn't believe the police weren't going to answer her cry for help.

The double wooden doors at the entrance to the hall creaked. Someone was pulling on them from outside. That must mean . . . She raced forward and locked them from the inside. Only Denbigh residents knew the “tricks” for opening the old, balky door. You had to hold one door up with your foot while you pulled the other with your hand. Ali wouldn't know the “tricks”. But he might have discovered them soon enough.

Dora raced from window to window in the front lounge, locking them. She hurried back to the bells desk, wondering what she should do next. Maybe she should call the police again and plead with them? No, that would be a waste of time. And her parents were too far away to help. That left only one person . . .

Although she'd called him only once when she'd gotten Edward's letter from Gallipoli, she had Michael's phone number in New York memorized. Her nervous fingers had trouble dialing it.

“Hello?” he picked up the phone on the first ring, answering her prayers.

“Michael!” she wept.

“What's happened, Dora?” his voice dropped the mocking, sardonic, bitter tone that he'd adopted with her lately. He sensed her panic right away.

“It's Ali. He's here right now outside my window.”

“Where, Dora? Tell me where.”

“I'm in my dorm, Denbigh Hall, in Philadelphia.”

“Yes, at Bryn Mawr College,” he finished her sentence for her.

“I'm all by myself. I called the police. They think it's a prank. They won't come. And --- “

“I'll be there in two hours. Maybe an hour and a half. The station's right across the street from where I live. A train leaves in seven minutes.”

“I'm locked in.”

“Go to the bathroom. There aren't any windows there. Right?”

“Right,” she gulped.

“I'll find you. Try to hold on. Arm yourself if you can.”

“Yes, Michael, yes!” she hung up.

She didn't know what to do for a weapon. Then her eyes lighted on the silver service for the dorm's dining hall, located next to the bells desk right next to the entrance to the now silent eating area. She grabbed a fork and stuffed it in her pocket. She raced back upstairs to hide herself in the girls' showers.

She locked the door with her key. She pushed a chair against it to make sure it would hold. Then she disappeared inside a shower stall and pulled the curtain across the rod. Her heart was thundering in her ears. Her pulse was racing. She hoped Ali couldn't hear her ragged breath. She crouched there for she didn't know how long before she heard footsteps.

“Michael?” she whispered, hoping against hope. When she consulted her watch, she saw it had been only an hour. Much too soon. Michael was coming from New York City. It was too early for the Step Sing to be over with.

It must be Ali. She couldn't imagine how he'd gotten into the dormitory. She'd closed all the windows and locked the doors. He was making a lot of noise searching for her. Finally she heard him trying the door to the girls' showers. When it didn't open, he ran against it.

There was no window for escape except one high up on the wall above the sink. It was a slim chance. She pushed off the faucet, turning it on in the process, and pulled herself up to the ledge. She had her hand on the window handle when the door to the shower room gave way.

Ali seized Dora by the ankle. “Help!” she called out the slit of a window that was now open. “Help!” She could hear the Bryn Mawr girls singing in the distance. They couldn't hear her.

He yanked her down before she could holler anymore. He backed her up against the wall. She felt his big hands on her for the first time since she'd been his captive aboard the Lusitania, when he'd dragged her from cabin to cabin. “All right, where have you hidden it?”

“Do you mean a wooden humidor?” she guessed. Back on the ship she'd had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Now she had some vague notion, though it made no sense.

“What else could I mean?” Ali shot back. “I wouldn't be here for anything less.”

She remembered Edward telling her that these Moslems had strange customs, such as the one about not eating pork. She wondered if this was another bizarre tradition. Did they worship cigar boxes or cigars?

“I don't have the humidor anymore,” she admitted the truth.

“I went to your cabin on the Lusitania while the ship was sinking. I found it above the drapes over the painted window. “It was a fake!” he hissed.

Dora remembered Sir Adolphus saying to Leonard Woolley that the gift he'd sent her father was a “good way to get it out of here”. What had the baronet meant? This whole business was getting more confusing all the time.

“What is the significance of the humidor?” she dared to ask. She had to play for time. She hoped Michael would arrive before this madman killed her.

Ali's eyes flashed. “It is not for such as you to question.”

“Did it have to do with the ancient Hittite script on the bottom? I --- “

Ali started to pound her against the wall, heaving her back and forth with his hands. “Where is it? What have you done with the real humidor?” Ali demanded.

Dora remembered the humidor that Sir Adolphus had rescued from the burning house. He'd given it to Edward to take to Lawrence. Edward had written that he'd given it to him. He'd said Lawrence had been expecting it. But she didn't dare tell Ali that. She didn't want to endanger her fiance.

She screamed at the top of her lungs instead. She hoped that someone would hear her. It was the wrong thing to do. Ali stopped pounding her against the wall and got out a knife. He pointed it at her.

Dora remembered the whole set up at Ware House --- how Woolley and Sir Adolphus had the library made up to look like a museum. They were all artifacts from the dig at Carchemish. Did she dare to ask about that? She hadn't tried that tack. “They told me you were a helper at Carchemish,” Dora tried to distract Ali from using his knife. She got her hand around the fork in her pocket in case he attacked her again.

“What about it?” he hissed at her.

“What wrongs did Sir Adolphus and Leonard Woolley commit?” she asked.

“What wrongs indeed!” he shook his head. “You Englishmen think you can do anything, spit on us, and get away with it.”

“Did they steal sacred artifacts? Is that what this humidor was somehow?”

“Ha!” he laughed in her face, startling her. “Englishmen steal ancient artifacts all the time. Do you think we Arabs care about those? My family sells them in the market for money. How else do you think I bought my ticket on the Lusitania? How do you think I got here? Pah! I spit on your precious ancient trinkets!”

She was so astounded she didn't know what to say. “What other wrong could they have committed against your religion?” Dora asked, trying to force herself to keep calm. Time was still passing, but all too slowly.

“Only the greatest wrong of all ---- the great forbidden!” he glared into her eyes with such intensity she wanted to shrink back, though she was already smack up against the wall and couldn't move an inch. “The thing the Prophet said to guard against above all other things.”

“Sir Adolphus sent me the fake humidor as a birthday gift for my father. I didn't know what was inside the package until after the ship sank. I --- “

“You deserved to drown, but you escaped,” Ali interrupted her.

“Even Sir Adolphus wasn't the one who started this.”

“He lies!”

“Leonard Woolley himself said it was Lawrence's idea to begin with, and he even advised him against it. Lawrence wouldn't listen and . . .”

She stopped talking when she saw the change that came over Ali's face when she mentioned Lawrence's name. Before he'd at least been able to voice his grievances. Now his face turned into a ghoul's mask. He plunged his knife at her. She ducked. He missed, leaving his knife sticking in the wall.

She fled to the door and raced out of the bathroom. She ran down the hallway with Ali in hot pursuit.

“Anyone who deals with the diabolical Lawrence deserves to die,” Ali shouted.

Dora heard footsteps racing upstairs ahead of her. “Michael!” she screamed, flying right into his arms. “Ali's right behind me.”

Ali ducked into an open dorm room. Michael reached the doorway to the room just as Ali disappeared through the window and jumped to the ground. He quickly picked himself up and darted into the shadows cast by the large Elm tree that surrounded the dorm. 

Girls were rushing back into the dorm, dressed in their Lantern Night costumes carrying their red-glass-paned lanterns with the Bryn Mawr owl symbol. Michael grabbed Dora's hand and guided her through the crowd of screaming females down the stairs to where the house mother had now appeared.

“What is your business here, sir?” the woman confronted him, looking him up and down.

“Doing what your police refused to do. Defending the life of this young woman, Dora Benley,” he insisted. “I think I can speak for her father, Winthrop Benley. It isn't safe for her to stay here. Dora,” he turned to her, “go get your things. We're leaving --- now!”

Chapter 34:

They arrived at the Bryn Mawr campus the next day. She kissed her parents good-bye for the next several weeks. This would be the first time she'd been apart from them since the morning that she'd met them at the Cunard pier in New York on May 1.

Dora had dinner with some of her old friends on campus who gathered around to admire her engagement ring. Then she took a stroll through the Cloisters. Bryn Mawr College had been modeled after Oxford University in England --- on a miniature scale. It was awash with dark stones, gargoyles, and medieval terminology. She perched herself on the edge of the lily pond and gazed down into the water, wondering what Edward would think of the place.

A man's face was reflected in the water between the green pads floating on the surface. She turned. Nobody was there.

“Is someone here?” she asked.

No one answered.

She peered into all the dark corners. She couldn't see another soul. Had it been her imagination? Perhaps she was tired after the long journey. She should return to her dorm room in the abbey-like Denbigh Hall and retire early.

Her first night back at Bryn Mawr, Dora wrote another letter to Edward:

Dear Edward:

I've seen the saboteur again. He's come to America to chase after me. I felt much safer when you were there to protect me. You should ask your parents if Ali is still at Ware House. I don't think he is. I'm sitting in my dorm room at Bryn Mawr College. I keep on telling myself that this is America. Things like this can't happen here. But they are happening anyway.

After my mid-terms I'm going home in mid-October for Fall Break. Mother and I will be shopping for the wedding gown. She's been in touch with Lady Ware. They are coordinating the wedding invitations for Christmas. I haven't heard from you yet. Did you ever get my letter about coming home sooner than expected? I'm getting very lonely here without you. Every night when I climb into bed, it feels chilly without someone beside me to keep me warm.

Yours forever,

Dora

P.S. I'm going to buy a surprise for our wedding night.

She fell asleep that night dreaming of Edward. The next day she thought of little else when she was in class. Her archaeology professor was discussing Leonard Woolley's dig at Carchemish. She was able to raise her hand and volunteer that she'd been to England and had seen the study of Sir Adolphus, one of Woolley's friends. He had lots of artifacts there.

She ended up doing a report on Woolley's dig before the war. She'd buried herself in the Art and Archaeology Library for the next few weeks, often late into the day. She wasn't allowed to check out all the books she wanted. They were part of the rare book collection. So one afternoon she waited until the librarian had left so she could smuggle them out to her room.

As Dora darted across the grassy area in front of Taylor Hall, headed for Denbigh with her stash of rare books, a man loomed up beside her. She didn't get a good look at him. She cut and ran as fast as her feet would take her back to her dorm.

When she opened the door to her big single room with a bay window and window seat, she immediately noticed that somebody had been there in her absence. Furniture was overturned. The mattress had been dragged down onto the floor and hacked to pieces with a knife. The stuffing had all been shaken out. The box springs were exposed. All the sheets and pillow cases had been torn off the bed. The fiend had even hacked her pillows to pieces as if she were hiding something inside them.

All her books on the book shelf that she had carefully arranged, had been thrown down onto the floor. They'd been kicked about. She noticed an ugly shoe print on the cover of her Woolley and Lawrence book, The Wilderness of Zin, that she'd been reading on her trip back to Bryn Mawr. Even The Lion and the Mouse had been smudged! The rug she'd shipped to the campus in a big trunk was torn to shreds. It would have to be thrown away.

Her closet was flung wide open. Her entire wardrobe had been hurled about the room. Most of her school dresses had been torn apart with a knife. It was the same sickeningly familiar scene that Dora had encountered twice before in the past few months --- once on the Lusitania and once at Ware House. Now Ali had left his mark at Bryn Mawr, too.

She reached down to start picking things up, when she happened to glance out the window of her second floor dorm room. There on the window ledge, crawling along on his hands and knees, crouched Ali himself! He was just outside the double hung, wooden frame windows, overlooking her window bench covered with the cushions that her mother had made specially for her dorm room. He was impaling her with his gaze.

Chapter 33:

Dora canceled her trip back to Bryn Mawr. She'd wait here in Pittsburgh for another letter, even if she had to start the semester late. Several tense days went by. She was afraid to go to the mailbox for fear she'd find the inevitable letter from Edward's parents about their son's death in battle. Sometimes it took her half the day to get up the courage to pace up the drive. She wouldn't let her parents or Frank fetch the mail. She had to make the trek herself. It would be bad luck not to.

One day she was sorting through a huge pile of mail with a dulled sense of inevitability and resignation when she came upon that familiar handwriting with the slant. The letter looked battered, as if it had suffered quite a bruising trip to her mailbox at the end of the long gravel drive. The envelope was torn and smudged. Her fingers trembled. She ripped it open.

She didn't care about the honor of the regiment. All she cared about was that Edward was safe! She read the letter over again standing there at the mailbox to make sure that her original impression was correct. There was no mistake about it. She made her way back to the house.

Her mother met her at the door with an inquisitive look. She snatched the letter from her daughter's hand and read it herself. A smile suddenly irradiated Mrs. Benley's face. “Winthrop!” she called to her husband who was home that Saturday. Her heels clicked along the tile floor as she went to find him in his study. “Winthrop! Edward's alive.”

Dora walked to the kitchen like a sleepwalker, hardly aware of her mother's chirping and glad tidings to her father. She put on the tea kettle. She made steaming hot water for everyone and carried it to her father's study along with the tea cups, the cream, and the sugar. They toasted Edward's survival, even if her father did it grudgingly.

The whole time she sat there shivering, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. The chill of that trench in far off Greece was sinking into her bones thousands of miles away in Pittsburgh. Viola's sauerbraten with Italian touches, now baking in the oven, and her mother's wild roses right outside the window climbing up the side of the chimney, failed to distract her.

While they sipped hot tea, Dora read Edward's letter aloud:

Dear Dora:

No sooner did we start the evacuation than I received word. Apparently my letter requesting a transfer must have crossed with the latest from the War Department. As it turns out, we survivors (What else can you call us? We didn't accomplish much) of the Battle of Gallipoli are being awarded the Victoria Cross. Wish you could be here when I receive it. Reminds me of graduation. Actually, cross that out. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. It certainly wouldn't be fitting for a fetching thing like you. Even if a stray shell didn't get you, you'd never be able to stand the canned food and rations.

Ten more kisses,

Edward

Dora had never heard of the Victoria Cross. She supposed it was an award for soldiers. Edward talked of it as if he expected her to know. Her father looked it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica. The Victoria Cross was the highest military award given to soldier serving Great Britain.

Dora thought, But what about coming home? He acts like he never received my letter! She figured her P.S. must have crossed in the mail. That was too frustrating to be real. She quickly scribbled another note:

Dear Edward:

Did you get my letter? Don't you want to come home? I hate reading about the war now, and I don't want you to be part of it. Join me, and we'll forget all about it in your favorite place --- in my arms.

Love,

Dora

********************************************************************************

The next day the Benleys waved good-bye to Viola and Frank, who would take care of the house while they were away. They stuffed their suitcases onto the newly upholstered black leather seat of their Model T Ford Touring Car, next to Dora seated in the back. They tooted as they started up the gravel drive. After coffee at the local diner, they headed off toward U.S. Route 30, the only road to Philadelphia and Bryn Mawr College.

Route 30 wound through the countryside on a two-lane road, constantly going up and down over rolling hills into broad valleys until it gradually flattened out in Eastern Pennsylvania's Amish Country before reaching the City of Brotherly Love.

They'd soon driven from the South Hills in Bethel Borough over a bridge to the downtown Pittsburgh area. Then they'd motored on through Monroeville and McKeesport and out into the Allegheny countryside. The first part of the trip until they got past Old Bedford Village would be the most mountainous with the steepest grades.

To distract herself Dora had brought along a monograph that Leonard Woolley had written along with this same T.E. Lawrence that Edward and his father admired so much. It was entitled The Wilderness of Zin: An Archaeological Report, the account of Woolley's and Lawrence's 1913-1914 archaeological survey of biblical sites in and around Palestine, financed by the Palestine Exploration Fund and published in London in 1915 by Harrison & Sons. The Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh had the title in the stacks. They'd been willing to loan it to her, although they hadn't quite finished cataloging it yet.

She'd expected to be bored. Somehow the dedication seemed unusual for an archaeological report:

To Captain S.F. Newcombe, R.E.

Who showed them “the way wherein they must walk, and the work that they must do.”

This quote from Exodus 18:20 galvanized her. She was swept right into the narrative, which was not only colorful, but almost literary in its pictorial quality and powers of description. It bucked the current trends to write in a bombastic, wordy style. Lawrence picked out salient points and highlighted them instead. She found herself unable to put the little volume down:

From Gaza the track to Beersheba passed through a wide undulating plain of deep, rich soil; there are no trees, and virtually no houses to be seen, but everywhere there are visible the traces of an older and more settled civilization --- village sites strewn with Byzantine pottery, olive presses built of marble and cement, and broken water-cisterns. A little way from the road, on the west bank of the Wady Sharia, rises Tell abu Hareira, a splendid mound, partly natural and partly artificial, now crowned by a shrine of the saint, and covered with Arab graves.

Dora finally forced herself to close the book. She'd expected to be able to write to Edward that his new mentor was a bore who wasn't worth her fiance's time. She hadn't counted on being put under some strange sort of spell herself. She remembered what Woolley had said in the library at Ware House: “It was Lawrence's idea to begin with . . . “

What was Lawrence's idea? She was beginning to understand the powers of hypnotic persuasion this young man possessed. I hope this T.E. Lawrence doesn't talk the way he writes . . . If he does, I'm lost . . . I can't write to Edward using such purple prose . . .

Still she had other attractions besides literary style. Edward should miss her in the way she missed him and want to come home right away. As she straightened her dress from slouching too much in the car, the material tugged at her bodice. She remembered Edward's fingers touching the exact same spot.

She picked up the novelette she'd also brought with her, The Lion and the Mouse: A Story of American Life by dear old Mr. Klein. She settled back against her seat. The struggles of Shirley and Mr. Ryder were more homespun and everyday. It reminded her of the world back home in Pittsburgh. She'd already bought a copy of an older version of the novelette. She'd given the package to Viola to take to the post office just before she'd left for Bryn Mawr so that Edward would have a copy to read on his voyage home. She'd meant to give it to him in London, but she'd only gotten around to it now.

She was absorbed in the novelette when she heard another car swiftly approaching them from behind. She ignored it at first, used to such sounds on the two-lane highway. “Winthrop!” her mother objected. “Why does that car behind us keep speeding up, riding on our bumper, and slowing down.”

“That's what most cars do, Etta May” Winthrop assured her. “It's a two-lane road. They all can't wait to get to the passing zone,” he sighed. “Maybe someday they'll widen this to four lanes.”

They came to a bump in the road and slowed down. The car behind them grazed their bumper.

“Did you feel that, Winthrop?” Mrs. Benley gasped.

“Yes, Etta May, I did. They let nincompoops drive on the highway, I'm afraid.”

Dora turned around, putting down her book. Her mouth fell open. It was true. The car behind them, a Model T, was riding on their bumper. It seemed to be only a few inches away. “Father --- “

“Not you, too, Dora!” he fumed. “Don't be a backseat driver. I'm trying to pass.”

She could only hope that he'd make it around the car in front of him and lose the driver behind them, who wore a billowy wool coat and a big floppy hat that made it hard to see his face.

She happened to glance up at the rear view mirror. Her heart almost stopped. The driver glared at their car with dark eyes. She'd seen those eyes on the deck of the Lusitania. She'd glimpsed them at dinner at Ware House carving the pork roast. They'd haunted her dreams ever since.

How on earth had he gotten into back country Pennsylvania along this quaint, old, two-lane road where he was as out of place as a Martian would be? How had he even discovered that this was where she lived?

She hunched down in the backseat and tried to hide her face. Her father finally got around the car in front of him. Dora relaxed a little, thinking they'd escaped.

“Look, Winthrop, it's that car again!” Mrs. Benley pointed.

Those were the words Dora dreaded most to hear. The stranger named Ali was really following them. She wanted to say something, but she knew that would violate the rule against upsetting her mother, who already seemed to be in a state.

They stopped first at Jeannette and then at Greensburg. The road curved and wound among hills. It went up steep inclines and down again. No matter what, they couldn't seem to shake the man.

Mr. Benley pulled into a gas station at Youngstown. Dora didn't see Ali as she paced up and down the dirt parking lot with her books. Her father filled the tank and had the station attendant look under the hood as her mother used the facilities. Dora stayed away from the main road. If their pursuer drove past, she didn't want him to catch sight of her.

Dora, like her mother, took the opportunity to use the restroom. There was no shelf for her purse so she placed it on the floor next to her in the stall. No sooner did she flush than she looked down. Her purse was gone!

The scene with Ali grabbing her purse and slashing it apart with a knife in the first-class lounge of the Lusitania flashed through Dora's mind. She raced out of the stall and over to the sink. She searched the other stalls. She rushed up to her mother outside the restroom. “Did I leave my purse with you?”

“Your purse? You never leave your purse with me!”

Had somebody stolen it? She knew things like that happened to other people. It had never happened to her before. She'd thought she was safe here in rural Pennsylvania if nowhere else on earth!

She kept her composure while going back to the car. She fished her new Russian boot gaiters with pointed toes out of the backseat. It had just rained. The dirt parking lot was a little muddy. She strode around observing whether any other woman had by chance picked up her purse.

No one else seemed to have her Pandora bag. They had every other style of purse. She saw velveteen bags, leather bags, pin seal bags, imported beaded bags with fringe which were all the rage right now despite the war.

Dora turned to see a tawny-skinned man in a long wool coat charge across the parking lot and leap into his car. He was carrying something in his hand. She couldn't quite get a clear view of it. He slammed the door and started the engine. Then he was gone.

Her father was signaling to her from the other side of the parking lot. She couldn't stand here gaping after the disappearing car much longer. She had to go.

Mr. Benley grumbled as she climbed into the front seat. “The station owner is crooked. He and his whole family live behind the lot. They'll rob you blind if you let them.”

“I suppose you didn't let them, Winthrop,” Mrs. Benley commented as she powdered her nose in the rear view mirror.

He complained about this and that all the way down the road past Ligonier. They were approaching Old Bedford Village, just off Route 30, by the time her father switched subjects.

They had reservations to stay at the Bailey Boarding House and Auto Court. The main building was an old two-story log farm house built by Pennsylvania Germans in 1762 and later renovated. It was remarkable for the notching of its corners, called V-notching. The main building also featured a two-sided fireplace built of lighter colored stones from the area plastered together.

They pulled into to the small parking lot. Mr. Benley went to check in and get the key.

“We'll go shopping, Winthrop. We'll be back in about an hour,” Mrs. Benley assured her husband. “I'm sure Mrs. Millrose will have shown you to our room by then.”

Dora and her mother entered Furry's Basket Shop. A buxom German girl wove baskets together for tourists. Mrs. Benley bought one of the baskets hanging overhead. She could rarely resist shopping of any kind.

As they were leaving the shop, Dora tripped on something lying on the ground. What was her purse doing here? She checked inside. There was her comb and mirror – and her wallet!

A shadow fell on her. She looked up. Not far away, leaning against another building, stood Ali. At this distance it was impossible to mistake him for anyone else. He eyeballed her. The corners of his lips, which naturally turned downward, rose into a sort of half-grin before resuming their normal position.

She turned into the first shop she came to, the Dutch Corner. She plunged into a crowd of people. “Dora, where are you going? Wait for me!” her mother rushed after her.

She shoved her mother into line in front of the counter. She hadn't been planning on buying anything to eat quite yet, but why not? Anything to get away from Ali. A Pennsylvania Dutch girl with blond pigtails leaned toward her and asked, “May I help you?”

“What do you think, Mother? We can bring something back to the room for Dad.”

Her mother, who was always an expert on buying things, felt right at home. She stepped in front of her daughter and took over. She gave directions to the cooks about exactly what she wanted for dinner.

“It looks like they have quite an assortment of everything,” her mother clapped her hands and exclaimed in a jovial fashion. “I see shoo-fly pies, whoopie pies, jams, pecan buns, jellies, home made breads, hand-made pretzels and mustard, funnel cakes, brittle, and lots and lots of chocolate fudge.”

“Funnel cake!” Dora replied mechanically. She shivered. She didn't have the nerve to turn around.

“You must have something to hand over to me,” Dora heard the overly familiar gruff and highly accented voice right at her elbow.

Dora's mouth opened and closed. She glanced down at her purse.

“It has to be somewhere,” said the voice from beside her.

She darted her eyes to the side. She couldn't quite see him.

“Is that man bothering you, miss?” asked the Dutch girl from behind the counter, frowning at him.

Dora didn't know how to answer. She kept her lips sealed.

“They don't serve that kind here anyway,” exclaimed a lady who was standing next to Dora and her mother in line. “He looks like a foreigner.”

The blond girl glowered at the stranger behind Dora. She left the counter to talk to an older man who seemed to be her father. The girl's father picked up the phone. “Hello, sheriff, there's a foreigner who looks like he has no business here harassing the customers,” the man said loudly enough for all the other shoppers to hear.

Dora glanced over her shoulder. Ali was gone. He'd disappeared into the crowd the way he'd vanished into the Irish Sea.

“Would you like anything more, ladies?” the Dutch girl pressed as if nothing had happened.

“Winthrop, that's my husband, loves your pretzels. I'll take a bag,” said Mrs. Benley, who had missed the whole proceedings in her intense preoccupation with the food.

“With mustard?”

Mrs. Benley nodded as they handed her several packages and she handed over a wad of dollar bills.

As they left the building Dora couldn't help noticing an ugly scene going on. A muscular Dutchman, with football player-like shoulders, had pinned a man to a tree. It wasn't Ali. It was someone who looked like an Eastern European. The Dutchman was socking the man in the jaw.

Dora wanted to say, “Can't you see he's not the right suspect?” But her mother was oblivious to the whole incident as she strode on past with her packages for dinner. Dora remembered the Eleventh Commandment, “Thou shalt not upset your mother!” and kept her own lips sealed. She averted her eyes.

Her father met them at the door to their room at the auto court. Dora showed him the bag full of pretzels. His eyes lighted up. It reminded him of the food his own mother used to make.

Mr. Benley glanced at the victim tied to the tree. “The war seems to be spreading. When it gets to rural Pennsylvania, now that's serious!”

Chapter 32:

The next morning Mrs. Benley picked up Edward's letter and happened to read the last paragraph, which nobody had seen until now. She rushed up to Dora who was packing her suitcase to return to college. “Look! Edward says he's applying for a transfer.”

Dora grabbed the letter from her mother and continued reading:

It took forever for us to be evacuated from that damned beach. Despite our losses, our commander insisted that we dig in and practically bury ourselves in a trench for safety. With the hot weather and the rains it became a miasmic bog. The few survivors sickened. My lucky fairy must have been watching over me. Maybe it was you. I was the only one to get by with a mere cold and a few bruises from falling into the damned trench, trying to escape a stray bullet from the Turks. We waited for reinforcements that never came. The commander finally cut his losses and retreated.

You can't blame me for being here. You wouldn't understand as an American. But boys I grew up with died. Imagine if all the schoolmates you knew in Pittsburgh were slaughtered in one day. I wanted to get revenge for them.

Still, even for a Brit enough is enough. Lawrence agrees with me. He has explained how he plans to win this war against the Turks another way in another place. I've applied for a transfer to join him. I hope to be leaving the Dardanelles soon. It may happen so quickly --- Lawrence has connections in the War Office --- that I'll be gone by the time you read this letter.

So don't despair, my love,

And one thousand kisses in all the right places from your,

Edward

P.S. You should have seen Lawrence's eyes light up when I gave him the humidor. He acted as if he'd been waiting for it all along. It was just the right surprise.

Dora exclaimed aloud, “Now wait a minute!” She didn't want Edward to leave for another front of this crazy war right away, certainly not before he'd received the letter she'd written him. She'd already put it in an envelope and stamped it. She raced out to the mailbox at the end of the drive to fetch it. She hurried back to her bedroom. She tore open the envelope and pondered what she should say next:

Dear Edward:

If things have reached such an impasse, there's not much you can do to help. Why risk your own life for such a hopeless cause?

If you take the first troop transport back to England, you could arrive there before the really bad weather starts. You could cross the Atlantic and get to Pittsburgh well before Christmas. There's so much I'd like to show you! To think you've never been Downtown, eaten in the Tic Toc Restaurant, or seen the Kaufmann's Clock! You haven't started to live until you've ridden a trolley.

We'll have plenty of time to enjoy ourselves before Christmas when we'll sail back to England for the wedding. If it weren't for you, by now the memories of everything except the Lusitania would be growing dim. I'd be immersed in my old routine. You're the only impediment standing in my way.

Make me a happy woman and come home right away!

All my love,

Dora

Dora decided to add a P.S. to the letter. She wrote:

P.S. I just finished your letter. I'm devastated to hear about your transfer to another front. I hope my letter reaches you first and changes your mind. Don't disappoint me, darling. Your future wife begs you on bended knees.

She raced back up the driveway. She got there as the mailman, Chuck, was strolling up the street with his mailbag slung from one shoulder. All out of breath, she thrust her letter at him.

He glanced down at the address. “Another letter for your fiance?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Greece? Sure is far away from Pittsburgh,” he observed. “Seems like the other side of the moon. Doesn't have much to do with what goes on around here, does it?”

The mailman ambled his way up the tree-shaded street. He whistled as he walked.