These powerful administrators were certainly unlike any caliphs, sultans or emirs; yet they were just as disturbing and anachronistic for the twentieth century. The rat-faced Ronald Storrs, for example, who went from glory as Governor of the Sinai to the post of "advisor" to the perverse King Zog of Albania. Then, in his mansion on Cyprus he teetered about playing God until the Greek Cypriots rammed a tree trunk through his portal. He died later of cancer of the rectum in Tangier - an appropriate locale in which to end his career, fading away in transparent jellaba and sequin sandals, seated on a chamber pot.

The young T.E. Lawrence himself figures among the important administrators; he had a brief, fluke tenure. Yet of all the men mentioned here, he is perhaps the one that the public remembers best, thanks to his genius for self-advertisement and to Lowell Thomas who "invented" Lawrence of Arabia and to whom Storrs introduced Lawrence in 1918. Brilliant, doubtless, but not really the man to govern some dry-hole appurtenance of the British Empire.

Where would Lawrence have fit, given his gifts, his tastes, his moment in history - academia? journalism? officialdom? After the glory of the Hejaz, anything would have been a bore - except perhaps a total transformation.