Читать книгу With Lawrence in Arabia онлайн

10 страница из 70

“Underneath Oxford,” this companion tells us, “runs a subterranean stream bricked over, the Trill Mill Stream. Ned Lawrence and another boy, carrying lights and often lying flat to scrape through the narrow culverts, navigated the whole of that underground water passage.

“Oxford is a great boating center. Every stream that joins the Thames is explored as far up as any slender craft will float. But the River Cherwell above Islip is said by the guide-books to be ‘nowhere navigable.’ To say that is to challenge boys like Ned Lawrence to prove the statement untrue, and that is what he and a companion did. They trained their canoe to Banbury and came right down the part of the stream that was ‘nowhere navigable.’”

He was fond of climbing trees and scrambling over the roofs of buildings where none dared to follow. “It was on such an occasion,” one of his brothers informed me, “that he fell and broke a leg.” His relatives attribute his smallness of stature to that accident. He seems never to have grown since.