Without Auda Abu Tayyi, though, the plan would be doomed. Auda’s Howaytat controlled the Aqaba region, and not only their good will, but also volunteers from the tribe would be needed if the assault were to come off. Fortunately, Lawrence found Auda receptive, and together they formulated the details of the raid. With his British colleagues, he remained vague as to the actual nature of the operation, for he had read Clayton’s reply to Vickery and was perfectly aware that the British intended to keep Aqaba in their sphere of influence. However, he reasoned, the capture of Aqaba by the Arabs, once a fait accompli, would satisfy everyone. For the British it would place the last Ottoman Red Sea port in Allied hands, thus securing Murray’s right flank as he pushed into Palestine; for the Arabs, it would provide a supply-base for operations in Syria, and for Lawrence it would provide the master-stroke which vindicated the Arabs and his work amongst them in the eyes of his masters. He could not risk a direct order to desist, and did not specify his plans in any report to GHQ. Wilson clearly believed that Ma an was the objective, for on 1 May he telegraphed Cairo: ‘in about 10 days time …Sheikh Auda Abu [Tayyi] of the eastern [Howaytat] will proceed to his country east of [Ma an], probably accompanied by Captain Lawrence, he is at once to commence demolition work against the railway… his first objective will be the capture of [Ma an] and consequent clearing of the posts from there to [Aqaba].’⁷

Lawrence was now on his own: his operation had not been authorized, and its true aim was not even known. The risk was huge, but Lawrence satisfied his conscience by reflecting that he was not subtracting anything from the railway operation at al-‘Ula apart from himself and a small group of men. He spent his last few days in the Wejh area travelling in aircraft and armoured cars, locating a plane which had crashed in the desert. On 8 May, he and Sharif Nasir took charge of the Ј25,000 in gold they would need to raise the Bedu levies on the other side. Nasir, whom Lawrence thought the most able guerrilla fighter of all the Hashemites, would command the mission, and he would be accompanied by two Syrians, Nasib al-Bakri and Zaki Drubi, who would help recruit the Syrian peasants to the Hashemite cause. The Howaytat included Auda, his cousin the highly capable strategist Mohammad adh-Dhaylan, and his nephew the notorious raider Za’al Abu Tayyi. With them were only seventeen ‘Agayl fighters under their chief, ibn Dgaythir. Lawrence presented revolvers to Nasir, Auda and Mohammad adh-Dhaylan and the following day each of them drew half a sack of flour, filled their waterskins, crammed spare cartridges into their belts, and roused their camels, groaning and spitting, to begin one of the most daring raids ever attempted in the annals of war.

It was now high summer and the days suffocatingly hot. On the second morning they were so dazzled by the blazing reflection of the sun on the rocks that they halted at eleven o’clock, despite Auda’s wish to press on, and lay at the foot of some acacia bushes, slinging blankets over the thorns to provide a few square feet of shade. By the third day, Lawrence’s fever, boils and swellings had returned. As at almost every crucial juncture in his life, the great enterprise was to be marred by physical weakness. The going soon became execrable, and in the narrow valleys Lawrence and his men were forced to dismount and pull their camels by the headropes, then to work in tandem, one man dragging, the other driving from behind. The sun rained down hammer-blows like bitter steel, and Lawrence staggered along, almost fainting from the heat, the fever and the effort. Finally, the way followed a ledge by overhanging rocks, so perilous that two camels, already weakened by mange, slipped and fell, smashing their legs in the pass. The Howaytat slithered down to them and slaughtered them with their razor-sharp daggers, butchering the meat expertly and doling it out among the men. To avoid any further casualties, though, they were obliged to dump the camels’ loads and repack them. After a few days of slow progress they reached the pool at Abu Ragha, and by now Lawrence’s terrible fear of the risks ahead, dormant while safely in Wejh, came out to haunt him: ‘The weight is bearing down on me now,’ he wrote in his pocket diary on 13 May, ‘ …pain and agony today.’⁸ He became frustrated by the slow ponderousness of the march: accustomed to running about on lightly laden camels, this slow desert trekking was irksome to him. The camels were feeble with mange, and Auda knew that they must be spared if they were to reach journey’s end. To the Bedu, the camels must come first, for to lose them meant certain death. Lawrence, faced with the most fearsome experience of his life, though, was pushed instinctively to flee forward to the fear, and the constant delays sickened him: ‘[if we could] only get on …’ he wrote on 14 May.⁹

His mood was temporarily alleviated, however, when, camping at the water pool, he met two young ‘Agayl boys named ‘Ali and Othman, who were due to be punished for having set fire to the camp. Although Lawrence later wrote in Seven Pillars that the pair had implored him to take them with him, evoking the reply that he, Lawrence, was a simple man who had no desire for servants, he wrote in his field diary that he had actually ‘begged them’ from Sa’ad al-Gharm – chief of Sharif Sharraf’s Agayl escort – which they met at the pool. ‘Othman soft-looking,’ he wrote, ‘‘Ali fine fellow. Both apparently plucky.’¹⁰ Lawrence insisted in Seven Pillars that he had never been ‘lofty’ and had never had cooks or body-servants, only his guards, who were fighting men. This was untrue: in the Hejaz he had travelled with a Syrian cook called Arslan; Hamad the Moor – whether or not Lawrence had executed him – was clearly a servant of some kind. When Lawrence met ‘Ali and Othman, he had already had a substantial entourage of his own: three ‘Agayl named Mukhaymar, Marjan and ‘Ali: Mohammad, a fat peasant from the Hauran in Syria, and Gasim, a bad-tempered, yellow-toothed fellow from Ma an, who had lived among the Howaytat. Lawrence noted on his equipment list for the Wejh–Aqaba trek that he had provided four revolvers for his ‘servants’. He wanted the ‘Agayl boys simply because they were attractive, or ‘clean’, as he put it, but he justified himself by maintaining that Gasim and Mohammad were useless, and declared that he must have extra men.

‘Ali and Othman were to become immortalized in Seven Pillars as ‘Farraj and Da ‘ud’ – the puckish figures whose mischief seems to counterpoint the grimmer side of the action in the text with remarkably opportune timing. So opportune, indeed, Lawrence’s friend Vyvyan Richards observed wryly, that ‘had all the Arab campaign been planned by some Shakespearian dramatic genius he could not have imagined a more delightful human relief for the great story than this astonishing pair’.¹¹ Lawrence represented them as homosexual lovers with a deep devotion to one another – an example of the Eastern ‘boy and boy affection’ which, he said, the segregation of women made inevitable. He suggested that such coupling was commonplace, and on the second page of Seven Pillars launched into a lengthy description of homosexuality among the Arabs, illustrated by passages of an overtly sensual character: ‘friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace’.¹² The story of ‘Farraj and Da’ud’owes much more to Lawrence’s Uranian connections than to Arab culture: even the ‘fleshiness’ of the prose is evocative of Uranian novels, such as Rolfe’s Don Tarquinio, which Richards listed as one of Lawrence’s favourite books while an undergraduate. The homoerotic theme in Seven Pillars, while purporting to be ethnographical, is actually an expression of Lawrence’s own suppressed desires: it is possible that the idea of ‘friends quivering together’ is what he imagined was happening, but it is unlikely to have been the truth. Homosexuality, accepted only tacitly among Arab townsmen and villagers, was taboo among the Bedu, for whom merest suggestion of it would be likely to bring out daggers. The explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who travelled among them for five years in the 1940s, living closely with his companions day after day, far from their womenfolk, recorded that he had never encountered among them a single instance of homosexuality. No doubt it existed, but it was so much frowned upon as to be carefully hidden – certainly it was never flaunted in public as Lawrence claims was the case with ‘Farraj and Da’ud’.