    23

    sitt

    had occupied his gaze hours earlier, unmoving, unmotivated.

    Eventually, at the age of 47, Lawrence died on a lonely country

    road, victim of a motorcycle accident.57  Or was he really the victim of

    something far more subtle?

    Not long before his death, Lawrence wrote to Eric Kennington,

    "You wonder what I am doing?  Well, so do I, in truth.  Days seem to

    dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep.  What I have

    done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle me and bewilder

    me.  Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn

    and been really puzzled about it?  That's the feeling."58    Experts  on

    suicide explain that vehicular accidents often occur to those who are

    depressed and courting death.59 Was it mere chance, then, that T.E.

    Lawrence, a man of almost superhuman physical skills, was killed by a

    bit of sloppy driving on a vehicle he had used for years?  Or had the

    former leader of the Arabs' inner calculators come to the conclusion

    that, like the un-needed cell in a complex organism, it was time for him

    to simply slip away?

      ing at the table by lunchtime, staring vacantly at the same object that

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