From Rosh Pinna, I rode up into ice-cold mist which settled over the hills like a blanket, and the pedalling became agony. Headlights loomed out of the fog at regular intervals, like demonic eyes. Occasionally a waft of wind pushed the mist on, and there were momentary glimpses of the country below, a magical, sunlit country of hills and fields. I had never imagined that the road to Safed would ascend so relentlessly for all of its 2,700 feet: at times it seemed that I was pedalling all the way up to heaven. I had been cycling upwards in first gear for almost five solid hours, and my calves were screaming, when the mist suddenly cleared and I saw Safed, a large town spread round the skirts of five or six peaks. As I rode into the centre, rain came bucketing down through the eucalyptus groves. There seemed to be no sign of the crusader castle. I stopped an old man to ask directions. He was friendly enough, but shook his head: ‘No English! No Hebrew! No Arabic! Only Yiddish!’ he said. Safed was a place of Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Why should they be interested in crusader castles? There was only one history for them. I never did find the castle, but I was content enough with the stunning view I had of Mount Hermon, when the rain peeled back the last skeins of mist.

Lawrence arrived in Safed on the evening of 16 July 1909, exhausted after what he called a ‘terrific climb up from the valley and then over undulating country’.²¹ He had left Tibnin that morning and halted at noon for a drink at the famous Spring of Kadesh, having in the course of the day marched up and down the height of Mont Blanc: ‘Palestine is all like that,’ he wrote, ‘…the roads go either up or down all the time … and never reach anywhere at all.’²² There was no hotel in Safed then, but he had found accommodation with the family of an English doctor called Anderson who worked for the Jewish Mission Hospital. The doctor was very kind to his young visitor, and took him to see the castle after dark, but the rigours of the journey were already affecting him, and Lawrence came down with the first of several bouts of malaria which were to dog the entire trek.

He had been walking for just over two weeks, having set out alone from Beirut at the beginning of July. On the first day he had hiked down the coast to Sidon, through mulberry orchards and olive groves. The road had been full of movement: peasants in baggy trousers and fezzes, bristling with rifles, revolvers and cartridge belts, riding horses or driving great trains of camels down to the coastal markets with their harvest. There were camels everywhere, and Lawrence looked at them with interest. He thought their faces ‘horrible’, but loved the rough tones of the camel-bells which faded as the caravans wound placidly into the haze of sunset. Sidon stood on the tip of a headland and it was satisfyingly medieval – a walled town of alleys so narrow that two men could scarcely pass, and which no wheeled vehicle could enter. From there he had climbed the hills towards Nabatiyyeh, tramping up deep gorges and enjoying the refreshing breeze off the Mediterranean. He passed through hamlets of baked mud houses among patchworks of brown fields, and practised his Arabic with the villagers. For the first time he stayed with Arabs in their own houses, and delighted in learning the social rituals involved. On greeting his host with ‘Peace be upon you!’ he would be invited inside, where the womenfolk would drag out a heavy quilt for him to sit on. While his host made coffee and plied him with the customary questions, the children would examine his belongings. After tea or coffee, dinner – generally greasy boiled wheat called burghul, and wafer-thin bread – would be presented. There was no talking during the meal, and afterwards, about nine, he would retire with his quilts, either to the verandah or to the roof. The quilts, he discovered, were far too thick for summer nights, and as they were invariably full of fleas anyway, he usually slept on top. He would be up at sunrise, and would join his host at the hearth, and splash a little water over his face for his morning ablutions. After breakfast of bread and sour milk – or fresh milk if he was lucky – he would be on his way. The simplicity of the peasants’ lifestyle appealed to him, and evoked the landscape of Malory and Morris. He felt comfortable in the simple houses with their spartan furniture – rush mats, tiny stools, and sleeping quilts which doubled as chairs and which could be packed away in a stepped alcove when not in use. He admired the way in which the house doubled as a byre – the lower floor for the cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys and horses, the upper one for humans. He approved of the economy of eating with the hands from a communal dish, or of using pieces of bread as a spoon, and appreciated that the Arab way of washing hands – pouring water over them rather than scrubbing them in a basin – was far cleaner than the English method. He also acknowledged the Arabs’ sense of hospitality: ‘this is a glorious country for wandering in,’ he wrote to his father, ‘for hospitality is something more than a name … there are the common people each one ready to receive one for a night, and allow me to share in their meals: and without thought of payment from a traveller on foot.’²³ Though this was not entirely true, for often his hosts would take money, he clearly found their simple dignity attractive. It was an aesthetic appreciation: some of their ways were quaint, they were pleasant and dignified, but ‘very childish and simple of course, and startlingly ignorant’.²⁴ Lawrence also stayed with foreign missionaries, and expressed high praise for their work in ‘civilizing’ and ‘educating’ the natives. In his letters home, he displayed his customary need to bolster self-esteem by revealing his apparent uniqueness: his diet, he said, was that of the natives, and considered ‘lunacy’ by the expatriates, though his habit of drinking fresh milk was viewed as equally crazy by the Arabs. The natives thought him ‘mad’ to walk instead of riding, while the foreigners thought him batty to walk round in the heat of the afternoon. He told his mother that he had become ‘Arab in habit’ yet in the same sentence related proudly how a Frenchman had ‘taken him for a compatriot’, without apparently being aware of the contradiction. On close reading, the character which emerges from Lawrence’s Syrian letters is one who is capable of adapting quickly to a new community, but who essentially belongs to none.

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.²⁵ It 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.