Читать книгу With Lawrence in Arabia онлайн

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“Mr. Woolley, the archæologist in charge of the work of excavation of Carchemish, had just come from the diggings, clad in his business dress of gray flannel shirt and golf-trousers. Lawrence, his youthful associate, also fresh from the works, was stepping lightly across the mounds of earth clad in what we Americans would call a running-suit and wearing at his belt the ornate Arab girdle with its bunch of tassels at the front, the mark of an unmarried man. But he was out of sight in a moment; and when we gathered for supper the freshly tubbed young man in his Oxford tennis-suit of white flannel bordered with red ribbon, but still wearing his Arab girdle, launched into the fascinating story of the excavations; of relations with the Kurds and Arabs about them; of his trips alone among their villages in search of rare rugs and antiquities, that gave opportunity for cultivating that close touch and sympathy with them that subsequently was the basis of his great service in the time of his country’s need. The meal was delicious and was served by a powerful, swarthy Arab in elegant native dress, with enough daggers and revolvers in his girdle to supply a museum. Soon he entered with the coffee, delicious as only Turkish coffee rightly made can be. And our British friends, who were hardly able to find interest in the Roman nut-dishes merely a couple of thousand years old and part of the rubbish to be cleared away before reaching the Hittite ruins, pointed out with pride that our little brown earthenware coffee-cups were unquestionably Hittite and probably not far from four thousand years old.