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 had Lawrence 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.

His letter to Leeds, written three days earlier, told a very different story. He had, he wrote, been searching for Hittite seals north of Tel Bashar – a village in the Ayntab district – when a man who had been following him had jumped on him, bitten his hand, pounded him on the head with stones and robbed him. He had recovered the stolen goods, he said, by paying baksheesh, but it had cost him so much effort that he had grown sick of the district and returned to Aleppo. He asked Leeds to keep quiet about the attack for the sake of his parents, but did not mention the trip to Urfa nor the stolen camera. He made no reference to the two coachmen who were supposedly with him, nor the coach. Neither did he express to Leeds any intention of returning home immediately, but declared that he still wanted to seek Kerak and Petra, which lay in the Vilayet of Syria, far away from Aleppo. Had we only Leeds’s letter of 19 September, we would judge that he had been on an entirely different journey from the one described briefly to his mother three days later.

However, he wrote a third letter while in Aleppo. On the 24th, two days after writing to Sarah, and five after his letter to Leeds, he wrote to Sir John Rhys, the principal of Jesus College, explaining that he would miss the first week of term. The letter is a masterpiece of English understatement and a display of stiff upper lip which would hardly have disgraced Lord Nelson. He told Rhys that he had had four attacks of malaria when he had ‘only reckoned on two’, and had been ‘robbed and rather smashed up’ only the previous week. It was a combination of these irritating circumstances, he said, which prevented him from carrying out his plans to visit Kerak and Shobek, for by the time he was fit for walking again the rainy season would have begun. Apart from this, though, he told Rhys, his trip had been ‘delightful’: he had visited three dozen castles out of the fifty on his route, and had secured for Hogarth thirty Hittite seals. He had, he said, travelled ‘on foot and alone’ all the time and had ‘lived as an Arab with the Arabs’ and had consequently gained an insight into their way of life that one who had travelled with a caravan would have missed.

It was true that Lawrence had visited thirty-six castles (he would later tell Liddell Hart sixty), and that he had made a remarkable journey, trekking over 1,000 miles through Syria on foot in the height of summer, was undeniable. The rest of the letter to Rhys, however, was lily-gilding. He had not travelled alone all the time – at one point he had employed a guide, and for a major section of the journey he had travelled with a mounted escort. For the last part of the journey – a matter of ‘a fortnight’, according to his expense account – he had paid current Baedeker rates to hire a carriage and two men to visit Urfa, though the carriage is as conspicuously absent from his letter to Rhys as it is from his note to Leeds. This was hardly ‘living as an Arab with the Arabs’ in Doughty fashion. In fact he had worn European dress throughout, including the pith-helmet which, as he himself said later, the Arabs regarded with superstitious hatred. He had been the guest of Turkish officials and Western missionaries, had stayed in hotels – good hotels where available – and while he had certainly sojourned on occasions with local Arabs, it was as frequently as not as a paying guest. Since so much was invented, or at least ‘exaggerated’ in Lawrence’s letter to Rhys, why not the story of having been ‘smashed up’ too? Had Lawrence simply been injured in the coaching accident which he mentioned to his mother, but been too embarrassed to reveal it to Rhys? Certainly it was not true that he had been so badly smashed up that he was unable to walk, as his letter implied. A few days earlier he had told Leeds that he still intended to visit Petra. He had not been injured enough to seek medical treatment; neither, it seems, did he report the incident to the British Consulate in Aleppo. He told Rhys that the thief had been caught within forty-eight hours, and regaled Robert Graves later with an extended yarn about how he had accompanied a large party of Turkish police and volunteers to the bandit’s Kurdish village to demand restitution. Yet he seems to have been away from Aleppo for seven days in all: a diversion on foot to the Tel Bashar–Ayntab region – which was not on the direct route to Urfa – with an extra two days’ wait for the recovery of his property seems quite out of the question on the grounds of time alone. When he retraced the same journey in 1911, it took him over a month. If he made a diversion in his hired coach, where were the trusty coachmen when he was being attacked? Why does he claim in his expense-sheets to have hired them for ‘a fortnight’, which would mean that he had left Aleppo even before he had arrived there, on the 6th? Moreover, he clearly bought some of his Hittite seals in Aleppo, for he told Leeds on the 19th that he had only twenty, while by the 24th the number had increased to thirty. If the seals were available so readily in Aleppo, why go to the trouble, expense and effort of visiting Tel Bashar at all? Was the whole story invented merely to ingratiate himself with Hogarth, in whose service, he could claim, he had been ‘almost killed’? Why did he choose to write first to Leeds, rather than to his close friends Vyvyan Richards or Leonard Green, unless it was to catch the eye of Hogarth? Lawrence knew that he had not accomplished what he had set out to do: the journey had been too hard, just as Hogarth and Doughty had warned him it would be. He had been too exhausted to complete it on foot. Was the story of the robbery an imaginary expiation of the sin of failure, the first obvious instance of a pattern which would become familiar later, of public success, private failure, expiation by violence? On the other hand, if Lawrence did not visit Tel Bashar, how did he meet ‘Ahmad Effendi’ – a man who lived in a village near Tel Bashar, to whom he referred in his 1911 diary as being a friend from his earlier visit? Finally, how did he get away with lying to Hogarth, who had been at Tel Bashar only the previous year? It is a conundrum Lawrence would have delighted in bequeathing to his biographers. In the end, we are left with only a series of questions, a cycle of stories, and some tell-tale bloodstains on a map.