Third draft

The writing of the third, and final, manuscript draft was meanwhile in progress. This is the manuscript now in the care of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the summary it contains gives its own starting date as 1st September 1920, and completion date 9th May 1922. Notes says 'With Text II available on the table, Text III was begun in London, and worked on there, in Jeddah, and in Amman during 1921, and again in London till February 1922.' Lawrence left London for Jeddah on 8th July 1921. From the Hejaz he went down to Aden, and returned to Trans-Jordan in the early autumn, arriving in Amman on 12th October 1921.

He was back in London just before Christmas, and the following months saw him return to his attic life in Barton Street, neither eating nor sleeping enough as he laboured over the revision. He later wrote of this work, largely a tightening up of style, in a letter to Charlotte Shaw - '. . . . it was my literary method, in making the ms now in the Bodleian, to take its destroyed original, paragraph by paragraph, and to dwell on each till it contained some one sentence, or cadence, or word only, which gave me pleasure. One per paragraph was the ration: because if each sentence had been pleasurable the thing would have become a surfeit. Also a true history of a real proceeding could hardly be written so selectively as that.' (1)

1	21.iv.27, British Museum - quoted by J M Wilson, Introduction, Minorities, Cape, 1971, p 20

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