By T. E. Lawrence

Facsimile of an article in the Jesus College Magazine, January 1913

During the winter of 1912-13 Lawrence received an appeal for contributions to a new Jesus College Magazine, and in February he sent in an account of a visit he had made with Dahoum during the previous summer to the fabled palace of Ibn Wardani. According to popular legend every room in the ruined building had been scented with a different perfume; Lawrence wrote home that his description of it was 'more like the rumour than the reality.'²

This essay was the first piece of his descriptive writing about the Middle East to be published. Its closing page invokes the barren nomad philosophy that was to have such a deep influence on his own life: 'At last we came into a great hall, whose walls, pierced with many narrow windows, stood to more than half their height. "This," said he, "is the liwan of silence: it has no taste," and by some crowning art it was as he had said. The mingled scents of all the palace here combined to slay each other, and all that one felt was the desert sharpness of the air as it swept off the huge uncontaminated plains. "Among us," said Dahoum, "we call this room the sweetest of them all," therein half-consciously sounding the ideal of the Arab creed, for generations stripping itself of all furniture in the working out of a gospel of simplicity.'

The visit is also described in Chapter 3 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

1. Title of this Jesus College Magazine version was mistranscribed from Lawrence's handwriting. It should read 'The Kasr of Ibn Wardani'.