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’.²⁶ Miss 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’.²⁷ The ‘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 building²⁸ – 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

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 were thieves 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.’³⁰ It 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.