How I came to the idea that S.A. had multiple meanings, and began watching the text of the book for meanings, possibly in cypher

In my first reading of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, at age 16 in 1931, I was held spellbound by its first two pages. On its first page was the dedication, with its secret “SA” and its unidentified “death” that so powerfully dominates one of the dedication’s segments. On its second page were the opening lines that begin:

“Some of the evil of our tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. Years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us, and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by the dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare.”

But not until 32 years later, when I came into possession of the 1962 reissue of the “Deluxe edition” of SPW (originally issued in 1938) did I finally become aware of the full meaning of all I had been seeking for so many years. There, when I removed this 1962 Delux Edition’s dust jacket, within the stunning embossed imprint of the crossed swords, it leaps out to capture the attention of the reader before the reader even opens the book, beginning with that one- word-per-line inscription, and on the next line the separation between “Also” and “Means Clean-ness and Death”

The

S Sword

A Also

Means clean-ness &

Death

S.A.: arabiyun = an Arab or Arabic; sayfun = a sword.

I now needed to search for the individual pieces that would fit the category “clean-ness and death”.

By now I had long since read the Letters of T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, published in 1938, edited by David Garnett. In a letter from Lawrence to artist Eric Kennington, Lawrence writes of peaceful meanings for the sword, including the Arab movement, and Faisal’s name, which means a flashing sword, and being excluded from the Garden of Eden. The paragraph ends with the words:

“and the sword also means

clean-ness and death.”

Thinking through I now already had three jigsaw puzzle pieces:

1. The Arab movement, to free the Arabian lands from the Ottoman Empire.

2. The goal of restoring the Arabian royal family, represented by Faisal, to leadership of the freed Arabian lands.

3. The Garden of Eden (Lawrence’s vision of the Carchemish area) “excluded touch.”

Each of these had begun in beautiful clean-ness. Each ended in death, as result of the Sykes Picat Treaty. Number three was exquisitely personal for Lawrence, who was excluded from his Carchemish Garden of Eden after Syria was taken over by the French. He saw himself excluded just as Adam had been.

Almost simultaneously with the above three jigsaw puzzle pieces, I also found a fourth, as follows.

During the same period of time when I read the Lawrence Letters book I also acquired another book published the same year, 1938, titled T.E. Lawrence to his Biographers, Robert Graves and Liddell Hart.

Going back to my first reading of Seven Pillars of Wisdom at age 16 in 1931, I was introduced to SPW by my first lover Richard, a British hero of World War 1. He was almost twice my age – 31 years old – and was later temporarily horrified to learn that I was still in high school.

Because of my love for Richard, I associated him with Lawrence and myself with SA; hence for me, SA had to be a woman, although all current thinking at that time was that SA was a man –Salim Ahmed, or “Dahoum”, the donkey boy at the Carchemish digs, with whom Lawrence had formed a blood-brother relationship.

"I have to find out who S.A. was," I told Richard. Rejecting all he could recall of speculation to the contrary in the four years since publication of the subscribers' edition, I persisted in contending "S.A. is a woman," pleading for belief within myself as well as from him. Over and over I repeated my mandate: "I have to find out who she was."

In the Graves/Hart biography book I found superb confirmation of my current conclusion that SA was a woman (cf. pp 16-17). Graves cites conversations and correspondence he had with Lawrence during the winter of 1922 confirming beyond a doubt Graves’ own belief that SA was a woman, which he states in the 1938 book he still believed at the time (three years after Lawrence’s death.)

Thereafter, the other occurrences of “clean-ness and death”, the rest of my jigsaw puzzle pieces, led me to the multiple meanings of S.A.