At Nabatiyyeh he found himself carried along in the swirl of a festival, in narrow streets of chaffering crowds, water-sellers, sherbet-sellers, peasants with fresh produce from their gardens, men rushing along with the fly-blown carcasses of sheep or bags of charcoal on their backs. From here he hired a Christian guide called Barak to take him to the castles of Beaufort and Banias, which he thought might be important for his thesis. Beaufort was memorable for its wonderful view: to the west the scintillating blue of the Mediterranean, and to the east – far across the Jordan valley – Mount Hermon, its gorges sparkling with snow. From the castle window he dropped a pebble into the Litani river, 1,600 feet below. To reach Banias – the biblical Caesarea Philippi – Barak took him through the lush green meadows of the Jordan, which seemed almost tropical after the barrenness of the Lebanon range. The village itself was of little interest, but Lawrence discovered there a spring of deliciously cool water in a hidden cave, above which he was delighted to find an ancient Greek inscription dedicated to Pan. Banias castle – built by the Knights Hospitallers in the twelfth century – stood on a spur of Hermon, and Lawrence climbed all over it with enthusiasm. He even had the gall to set fire to the brushwood in the inner court so that he could see it more clearly: ‘It must have made a jolly bonfire from a distance,’ he wrote. 25It certainly brought the castle’s owner running to see what he was about, though Lawrence reported that he had not objected, since he was now able to enter the courtyard again after twenty years. He set out alone from Hunin, slept at Tibnin and arrived at Safed the following day. Having recovered from his bout of malaria, he made a side-trip to Chastellet on the Jordan, where he had his first taste of the scirocco, the furnace-blast of flint and dust which uncoils off the Arabian desert in summer, giving him a sudden sense of the vast emptiness which lay beyond these homely hills. He descended to the Sea of Galilee, then headed off towards the Mediterranean across the plain of Esdraelon, a vast chequerboard of brown and gold, threaded with red paths like strings, and scattered with nests of black tents, between which great caravans of camels were constantly in motion. Women were winnowing grain on the threshing floors, and now and then he would see clouds of chaff and dust rising above the fields as the peasants reaped or threshed with flails and fans. From the coast at Haifa he passed north into what is today southern Lebanon, trekking through Tyre and Sidon back to Beirut.
After a week of comfort in Beirut’s Victoria Hotel, he began the second phase of the journey, which he hoped would take him to Latakia, Antioch and Aleppo. In the first week of August he arrived at Jebayyil, north of Beirut, where he called at the American Mission School, run by a Miss Holmes. Miss Fareedah al-Akle, a teacher at the school, remembered him arriving, dusty and exhausted-looking, ‘with a bundle tied to his back’. 26Miss Akle, who was later to become Lawrence’s Arabic instructor, recalled how he had dashed upstairs after the maid without waiting to be asked in, and how, later, he had regaled her with tales of the ‘adventures and hardships’ he had endured on the trip, with ‘many narrow escapes from death’ at the hands of ‘cruel Kurds and Turks’. Lawrence’s avowed preference for ‘hardships’ and sleeping out of doors was an aspect of his reverse exhibitionism – which required public notice – but secretly he much appreciated comfort, and was blissfully happy to spend a few days at the Mission in Jebayyil, eating well, bathing, lounging about under ‘real green trees’ in the garden, and reading in the extensive library. He was received at the American Mission in Tripoli a few days later, presumably with an introduction from Miss Holmes. From there it was a three-day walk to Kala at al-Husn – the famous Crak des Chevaliers, where the Turkish Governor or Qaimiqam, far from being ‘cruel’, proved exceedingly kind and helpful, indeed ‘very comfortable’ as Lawrence himself put it. The Crak was to have a central role in his thesis, and he lingered there for three days, inspecting and photographing it. Like Banias, it was a Knights Hospitallers castle – a vast, double-walled Gormenghast of a fortress standing on a lonely plateau in arid scrubland. Lawrence climbed half-way up its moss-covered inner talus barefoot in the sun, his mind ranging over its advantages and drawbacks. Though he was unable to reach the top, he saw that it would have presented no difficulty to besiegers with scaling-ladders, but its relatively gentle incline meant that they could never ‘get underneath’ the boulders and burning pitch hurled down on them from the defenders above. He also noticed with pleasure that the machicolations – the openings in the masonry through which the defenders threw their projectiles – were of a kind not known anywhere else in Syria, though they were known in Europe – suggesting that the Knights Hospitallers had introduced them as an innovation from the West. Lawrence was altogether impressed with the Crak, and wrote later that it was ‘the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world’. 27The ‘comfortable’ Governor also provided him with an escort to visit the castle of Safita which stood nearby, and which Lawrence admired for its Norman keep with original battlements – the like of which, he said, he had never seen in Europe. Crak, Safita and Sahyun – a castle to the north, whose slender needle of rock supporting the centre of a drawbridge Lawrence thought the most sensational thing he had ever seen in castle building 28– were the highlights of the tour, and having seen them, he wrote to his mother:’… you may be happy now all my rough work is finished successfully: & my Thesis I think assured.’ 29