He left the Governor of the Crak a few days later and set off for the coast, spending the first night sleeping on a threshing-floor with some peasants. The men were threshing their grain, and worked in relays much of the night. When they were all exhausted, they woke Lawrence up and asked him to keep watch with his pistol while they slept, as, they said, there were many thieves about. Lawrence thought it all nonsense, but obliged anyway, only to be told in Tartus the following day that the men had been trying to conceal the extent of their harvest, and that it had not been thieves but landlords they had feared. That there werethieves about, though, came home to him strongly, when, near Masyaf, a lone horseman took a pot-shot at him from 200 yards. According to Miss al-Akle, his assailant was ‘a huge cruel-looking Turk’ whose bullet went wide, whereupon Lawrence had coolly drawn his Mauser pistol and fired a deadly accurate shot which took the skin off the giant’s little finger. Petrified by his opponent’s supernatural accuracy, the Turk had stood frozen to the spot, while Lawrence had approached and bandaged up the finger, patted him on the back, and sent him off home with half his money. ‘It is the story of David and Goliath over again,’ Miss al-Akle wrote, ‘with the difference that David conquered his enemy with the sword while the weapon which won the day for Lawrence was that of friendliness.’ 30It is a salutary tale, but how much of it is Miss al-Akle’s imagination and how much Lawrence’s is impossible to say. Lawrence wrote to his mother shortly afterwards that the ‘huge, cruel-looking Turk’ was simply an ‘ass with an old gun’ who had shot at him from horseback. Lawrence had promptly shot back, winging the horse, which had bolted wildly. The bandit had managed to get his mount under control, and wheeled round at about 800 yards for another go. Lawrence had put a second round over his head, at which the man had ‘made off like a steeplechaser’. Once again, it seems likely that neither of these reports was the full truth, for while he referred to the incident as ‘a joke’ there is evidence that in reality he was far less sanguine. He had never been shot at before, and with his abnormal fear of pain, the thought of the bullet – no matter how ‘old’ – slapping into his flesh cannot have been a pleasant one. In fact, he was shaken enough to report the incident to the local Turkish Governor and sufficiently concerned about a repetition to accept an escort of Turkish troopers, despite knowing that they must hamper his freedom of movement. From this point onwards, Lawrence’s confidence took a downward spiral. The fear, the fever, the heat, the hardship – the utter pain of the trek – began to tell on him. His interest in castles waned, as exhaustion, sore feet and malaria took over. He had planned to make a detour to Antioch and remain there several days, but for the first time he dropped one of his major objectives. Though he later claimed to have seen Antioch’s town walls from afar, it seems unlikely that he went anywhere near them. His mounted escort only added to the hardship, simply because he refused to ride. Though Lawrence later told Edward Leeds with customary bravado that on the first day he had ‘walked them to a standstill’, obliging them to return to the starting point to pick up horses, the fact is that once they were mounted, he had to struggle to keep up. The sight of a young Englishman stumping, half-lame, across those hills in the wake of a squadron of horsemen who were supposed to be his escort must indeed have been a bizarre one. No one would have blamed him for riding, but his unrelenting will made it impossible for him to give in. He stalked on on blistered and bruised feet, perhaps cursing the fear which had caused him to report the ‘trifling’ incident to the Governor in the first place. That last burst of 120 miles in five days almost finished him. When he limped into Aleppo on 6 September, two months after leaving Beirut for the first time, his flesh was pared to the bone, his boots were in tatters and his feet a mass of sores that not even his Nietzschian will could mend. He had sworn that he would walk while others rode, but now he was finished as far as walking went. He had believed that there was no limit to the suffering he could force his body through, but now he had found it. That he had already made a remarkable journey of over 1,000 miles mattered not a jot. It was not good enough. He had failed. He had failed to reach Antioch. He had failed to reach Urfa, and Shobek and Kerak in the Belqa hills. He had failed to obtain Hogarth’s Hittite seals. Now, exhausted by overstrain and malaria, he felt that he could not go on.
As he lay in his bath in the Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, he cannot have avoided the conclusion that his own fear had defeated him. Urfa lay 100 miles away across the Euphrates – 200 miles there and back. That would have meant, at best, an eight- or ten-day trek. Frankly, he was not up to it. Very reluctantly, he decided that he would have to play the privileged tourist after all, and hire a carriage with two coachmen at the exorbitant cost to his pocket of Ј7 . He wrote to his mother the next day informing her of his decision, but saying nothing of his exhaustion: for Sarah, he must be the indomitable white knight. He implied only that he was short of time: ‘I must make haste,’ he wrote. That letter was written on 7 September. What happened to Lawrence between that date and 19 September, when he wrote again from Aleppo, is a mystery.
When Lawrence turned up in Oxford in the middle of October, one week late for term, ‘thinned to the bone with privation’ – according to Ernest Barker – the camera which had been procured for him at great cost was missing. Though he still had Pirie-Gordon’s precious map, it was covered with bloodstains – and thereby hung a tale. Lawrence enthralled his less adventurous but more masculine and sporty colleagues with stories of how, while seeking Hittite seals, he had been attacked by a band of bloodthirsty Kurds who, disappointed that he was not carrying ‘treasure’ as they supposed, robbed him of all his possessions and beat him to within an inch of death. He had managed to crawl to safety, but having been left penniless, had been obliged to work his passage back to Marseilles on a tramp steamer, earning just enough to pay his fare back to Oxford. His friends were impressed, but, more important, his potential sponsor and mentor, Hogarth, was impressed. The young man had performed his sacred task: he had brought back his thirty Hittite seals for the unique collection at the Ashmolean. Lawrence probably did not tell Hogarth directly that he had risked his life to obtain them, but let the information permeate to its target by circuitous routes. He was already becoming expert at ‘massaging the truth’ to achieve his goals, and in this case his goal was to attract the attention of Hogarth, who, high on his lofty pedestal, had taken little notice of him until now. No one knows what was said during their first meeting after his return, only that Hogarth told Leeds afterwards: ‘That is a rather remarkable young man – he has been in places rarely visited by foreigners.’ 31
Just where hadLawrence been during the second and third weeks of September 1909? We last have him writing to his mother that he intended to visit Urfa on 7 September, and that he must ‘make haste’. According to his expense-account, though, he had lingered in Aleppo for a week on that occasion – which puts his date of departure as the 13th, at the earliest. We know he was back in Aleppo by the 19th, because he wrote to Edward Leeds on that date from the Hotel du Pare. The trip to Urfa by carriage generally took three to four days by the most direct route, which ran through the Circassian village of Membij, crossed the Euphrates at Tel Ahmar and passed through Suruj before reaching Urfa, where there existed an important crusader castle. If Lawrence did leave on the 13th, he would have had just enough time to reach Urfa and back by the 19th, assuming he spent one or two days looking at the castle. On 22 September he wrote to his mother, this time from the Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, telling her that his trip to Urfa had been ‘delightful’ but marred by the fact that his camera had been stolen at Suruj on the way back, when the coachman he had left on watch was asleep. The only other incident he related was that the carriage had been upset by a runaway horse, though he had not been badly hurt. In this letter he seemed keen to return home: he was almost out of money, he was very tired, exhausted by a fourth attack of malaria, and discouraged by the early onset of the rains which had started a few days earlier and which would render further walking impossible. He also mentioned that a report had appeared in the Aleppo newspaper that a ‘Mr Edvard Lovanee’ had been murdered near Ayntab. He noted with amusement that the hotel staff had greeted him like a ghost, and called the report ‘an absurd canard’, assuring his mother that he had been nowhere near Ayntab, a Turkish town lying sixty miles due north of Aleppo and some eighty miles west of Urfa.