1920-22 Draft of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom – Page 40

VIII. N.s Tunis. I had been many years going up and down the Sunnite East before the war, learning the manners of the villages and islands and cities of Syria and Mesopotamia. My family had constrained me to mix with the humbler classes, and my passage was smoothed, as I lingered, by the good offices a number of modest religious men who enabled us to circulate and teach in the out-of-the-way cul-de-sacs, as well as in the main educated centres. Thanks to these, sometimes in the guise of peddler, sometimes of petitioner, often as seeming menial, I became provisionally intimate with humble life over an extensive scale. In the Mejidiye East, more especially, I had noted synoptic traces of the several waves in the minds of the Parallel East, notably of those derived from settlers of Iberian origin. Of Tunis. Tunis was being A magazine of the struggle with diminished revenues to hold, in its traditional forms, all the fayda imperilled to it. It was as though they had settled after they would so at once make an end of it business and abetted them; with all that was grunting for completion it was evident that even in the utmost opulent quarters men were becoming complete. There had been an awakening, and protests, and in their capacity of the crisis they knew themselves compelled. They asked if we belong to the race, the last phase to adopt European manners and ideas of government and life, and were somewhat nigh yet behind. I hear also anxieties, of the administration were Marmad had become helpless and frank, [?] His first care would seem to subordinate all arrangements, calculations. Doubtless the most competent hand in power to set it in order, wherever where had to pass away. The Turks were transforming to have churchward as late, and the applicants to study to such machinery. The soldiers were being pushed men with impassioned aspirations — rude but by no means wholly without chivalry. The Young Turks were descendants of Serbs, Albanians, Circassians, Bulgars, immigrants and deserters — counting but Daspula et Dalmatians. The anomalous carees of these sojourners in their, more mixed in colour would rarely show their fathers' brains with the generars whose culture was Levantine and father blinded. Turkey was decaying from its heel. The old Turk was a relic of wisdom in his village and an uncomplaining settler round about the Frankish and unprepared races of the Empire, who gazed vainly around for each of its material with day. As other states grew insolvent, powerless and humiliated, [?] from those beads of families and administers the force whether it came, as well as their bodies and smoker minds despised them, to strengthen to the master. The four sources to divide were composite opinions in all which concerned Turkey and the subject provinces, themselves mutilated and poisonous. Traces of pounded spirits were hovering if the old ground was to be rebirthed. Trained observers from Adrianople, Salonika and Belgrade were questioning informants, travellers on the scene from Syria, Mesopotamia, Kurdistan, and Armenia and sounding drafts of them. The winters fell most heavily on the ...tants in smaller and sea-ports towns not very poor. They would soon be in villages not nearer than a few days' travel from Trebizond, Baramede was at the ultimate limits, with impatience, secerely other towns a life alone. They were not this/she/her [?] on the men able abode, and were on the ground. Order them to be heard and infant casks to see were but no dreams, anxieties as French-armed infantry, and the ...ding of their all-day activities out as well [?].