Azraq castle had stood since Roman times on the shore of a vast, shallow lake, where the waters of the great Wadi Sirhan collected after the rains. Until the 1960s at least it lay in an oasis unique in the Syrian desert – a region of woods and marshes inhabited by every species of water-bird, by leopard, hyena, wild boar and even buffalo. Once, it attracted hunters from all over the Arab world. In Lawrence’s day the black basalt fortress must have stood out for miles across the sand-sheets and lava-fields. Today it is almost lost among ragged streets of breeze-block buildings, petrol-stations and barbed wire. The magic which Lawrence describes has gone, together with the waters of the lake, which have been siphoned off to Amman. I arrived in Azraq in a yellow taxi with my ex-Jordanian Special Forces friend, Mohammad al-Hababeh, and together we walked to the castle, and found it surprisingly well-kept inside. The guardian – an old Druse who seemed half crazy, and who was fond of interjecting English four-letter words into his conversation – showed us a photograph of his father, a Druse officer whom he claimed had served with Lawrence (though the Druses had not generally joined the Revolt until after the fall of Damascus). He shuffled around with us as we paced from wall to wall, following Lawrence’s description in my coverless old copy of Seven Pillars.The most remarkable features of the castle were its two stone doors – giant slabs of basalt a foot thick, weighing tons, which had been ingeniously poised on greased pivots so that they could be opened and closed easily by the effort of a single man. Lawrence wrote that the main door was blocked during his sojourn, and a sentry posted at the postern gate whose job was to slam the great door to at sunset, so that the walls of the castle reverberated. We saw the mosque which had been used as a sheep-fold, until Hassan Shah, the Jemadar of the Indian machine-gunners, had had it cleaned out and sanctified once more, inspected the corner tower which Sharif ‘Ali had chosen as his quarters, and even identified the breach in the wall – now restored – which Lawrence had had made so that the camels could be brought inside at night. Above the gate-house was the room Lawrence himself had occupied, a spacious garret with low windows through which shafts of light pierced the dust. I found Lawrence’s description of how his men would light a fire on the stone floor on cold nights and gather around in their cloaks to recite poems and tell stories, as the coffee-cups went their rounds. On such nights, with the wind ravaging the castle walls, they had heard a ghostly wailing and sighing along the battlements, which the Bedu had attributed to the dogs of the Bani Hillal – the mythical builders of the fort – endlessly questing the six towers for a trace of their lost masters.
When Lawrence arrived back at Azraq castle on 12 November, he claimed to be nursing no fewer than five bullet wounds sustained in the railway attack at Minifir, and a broken toe sustained by a boiler-plate falling from the exploding train. This was the first movement in the concerto of his public chastisement for the failure at Yarmuk. The period between 14 November and his apparent ‘return’ to Azraq on 22 November marks another of those mysterious Lawrentian descents into the underworld about which nothing is certain. According to Lawrence himself, it was during this week that he suffered the most devastating and humiliating experience of his life: his capture, torture, and homosexual rape by the Turks of Dara’a. In the 1935 text of Seven Pillars,this sudden transfer from the conscious to the unconscious, from the specific to the general, is marked by the interruption of the dating-sequence. Up to 14 November, Lawrence specifies the date of events recalled on each page: for the next four pages he simply tells the reader that he is in ‘November 1917’. The hiatus extends until 20 November, when he reappears at Dara’a, having jumped six days in the process. Where was Lawrence during those six days? His story is that he remained in Azraq for some time – long enough to oversee the refurbishment of the castle, to rest, and to receive hordes of guests and supporters. One of these guests was Talal al-Haraydhin of Tafas in the Hauran, a powerful figure amongst the Fellahin, and an outlaw with a Turkish price on his head. Lawrence told Talal that he would like to see the Hauran to reconnoitre for a future rising, and they rode off together, with two specially enrolled guards, an old man called Faris and a boy named Halim. They travelled by horse, and called at Umm al-Jamal, Umtaiye, Ghazala, Sheikh Miskin, Sheikh Saad, Tafas, Tel Arar, Mezerib, ‘Uthman, Dara’a, Nisib and back to Azraq, a distance of roughly 170 miles.
Now, Dara’a, the capital of the Hauran, was a key point on the railway, for it was here that the lines from the Hejaz to Damascus and from Haifa in Palestine to Damascus intersected. Any advance by the Arabs on Damascus, then, must necessarily take Dara’a into account. Lawrence decided to slip into the town in disguise to assess its strengths and weaknesses for a future assault. Talal could not accompany him, since his face was well known to the Turks, so Lawrence left the ponies with Halim, donned the boy’s peasant garb, and walked into the town with Faris, ‘an insignificant peasant’. Near the aerodrome, they were called by a Turkish sergeant, who grabbed Lawrence by the arm and told him roughly: ‘The Bey wants you.’ He ignored Faris and marched Lawrence in front of an officer to whom he gave ‘a long report’. The officer asked his name, and Lawrence gave it as Ahmad ibn Baqr, a Circassian from Qunaytra. The Turk accused Lawrence of being a deserter, and he replied that Circassians were not subject to military service. This was a mistake, and the officer called him a liar, instructing the Sergeant to enrol him in his section ‘until the Bey sent for him’. Lawrence was taken to the barracks and after dark was marched by three guards across the railway lines to the Governor’s two-storeyed house. The Bey – Nahi – a bulky, spiny-haired man, was sitting on his bed when Lawrence was brought in. He inspected Lawrence’s body, then flung his arms around him, trying to drag him down on to the bed. When Lawrence resisted he called in the sentry to pinion him, and stripped off his clothes, staring in surprise at his recent bullet-wounds. The Turk tried to touch his genitals, and Lawrence kicked him in the groin, making him stagger back, groaning with pain. He yelled for the guards to pinion Lawrence, then slapped him repeatedly in the face with a slipper, bit his neck until the blood flowed, kissed him, and drew a bayonet from one of the guards, pulling a fold of flesh over one of his ribs and working the blade through and twisting it, dabbling his fingers in the blood which poured over Lawrence’s stomach. Lawrence said something in his despair, and Nahi answered, mysteriously: ‘You must understand that I know: and it will be easier if you do as I wish.’ 6Lawrence raised his chin in a gesture of refusal, and the Bey instructed the guard corporal to take him out ‘and teach him everything’. 7