The rescue of Gasim was Lawrence’s most courageous single deed, and did much to enhance his reputation after the war. Though he apparently tried to play down the heroism of the act in Seven Pillars, by portraying his irritation that the duty of rescuing the man fell on him, the fact that it occupies an entire chapter is significant. There is no mention of Gasim in any official reports, but in an article in The Times written in 1918, Lawrence claimed that ‘many of his party’ were lost in crossing al-Houl – a claim less indicative of success than of failure. According to the Seven Pillars account, at least one man was lost in al-Houl, a slave of Nuri ash-Sha’alan’s whom nobody went back for, since he was believed to know the country well. His mummified corpse was discovered weeks later. Although the rescue of Gasim has the characteristics of one of Lawrence’s departures into fantasy, in this case we have solid evidence, from his diary entry for 24 May 1917, that he actually did go back to look for him, for that evening Sharif Nasir apparently beat ‘Ali and Othman – Lawrence’s newly acquired servants – for allowing him to return alone. He also wrote in his diary that he ‘wasted two hours and a half looking for Gasim, which has been taken by some to suggest that the rescue attempt actually failed. Lawrence was precise in his choice of words, and a master of linguistic nuances: is it likely that he would have chosen to write ‘wasted’ if he had really returned with the lost man? If Gasim was indeed rescued, why does his name not appear again in the text of Seven Pillars when he was Lawrence’s servant, and the party a relatively small one? The absence of his name following the incident is considered the most convincing evidence that Lawrence’s heroic rescue attempt was a failure.

Now, it is the case that ‘Gasim’ is not referred to by this single name after Lawrence had supposedly brought him out of the desert, but three weeks after the incident, he does refer to a man called ‘Gasim ash-Shimit’ in a tale he tells in an attempt to parody Auda’s epic style of rhetoric. This tale, it is true, is set at Wejh before the Aqaba expedition, but the important question is whether ‘Gasim ash-Shimt’ and the Gasim of the rescue story are the same man. First of all, the name: ‘ash-Shimt’ means ‘he who rejoices in another’s misfortune’; it is not a family name, nor is it kunya – a name defining the named person in relation to someone else, such as ‘the father of so-and-so’. It is clearly a nickname, and as such it certainly seems to evoke the character of Gasim as Lawrence described him. It so happens that in Seven Pillars there are two references to an Arab Lawrence simply calls ‘The Shimt’ following the incident in al-Houl – the first at the battle of Aba 1-Lissan, about a month later, when Lawrence, searching for Auda on the battlefield, asks ‘The Shimt’ where his horsemen have gone. The second reference is indirect: in his description of the Mudowwara raid which took place the following September, Lawrence notes that ‘The Shimt’s boy – a very dashing fellow’¹⁵ had been killed in the attack. If’ The Shimt’ and Lawrence’s Gasim are the same man, then it seems probable that Lawrence did indeed bring Gasim out of the desert and save his life. Moreover, the phrase ‘wasted two and a half hours looking for Gasim’ does not, in the English idiom, necessarily mean that the rescue attempt was abortive – it could indicate only that Lawrence was annoyed because Gasim had needlessly wasted time and energy by his incompetence: throughout the trek to Aqaba his diary entries frequently express his impatience to get on. Finally, Lawrence also wrote in his diary the phrase ‘not worth a camel’s price’ – which he said later was spoken by Auda, and to which he is supposed to have replied, ‘Not worth half a crown, Auda!’ Such comments smack of deliberate admonishment to someone who has done a stupid thing – such as going to sleep in the desert when the rest of the caravan is moving on: they are scarcely the kind of remarks likely to be made about a comrade – no matter how disagreeable – who has just been lost. The balance of evidence seems to me to suggest that Lawrence did return alone into al-Houl and save the life of Gasim – a remarkable act of bravery for a man who was terrified of being hurt.

That night was a terrible one: the party had no water, and could neither drink nor bake bread. Instead, they lay tossing and turning sleeplessly on the desert floor with thirst and hunger pangs tearing at them: ‘Tonight worst yet in my experience,’ Lawrence wrote in his diary.¹⁶ When the day dawned, however, they found themselves in the great Wadi Sirhan, and knew that they had crossed al-Houl: the terror of thirst lay behind them, the ordeal was over. They struck camp at first light and by eight o’clock they had arrived at the well of Arfaja, an eighteen-foot shaft containing cream-coloured muddy water which both stank and tasted horrible. Nevertheless, it was all there was, and a blessing after the waterless waste behind them, and they drank until their stomachs swelled. They dumped their baggage, watered the camels, drove them out into the grazing and sat down to enjoy a well-deserved respite after the strain of crossing the ‘Devil’s Anvil’. They had not been resting more than a few minutes, though, when they were startled by the cry of ‘Raiders! Raiders!’ and Lawrence saw a wedge of Bedu cantering towards the wells on fast camels with rifles in their hands. At once he and Nasir mustered the ‘Agayl, who fell on their bellies with cocked rifles behind their baggage, ready to defend the camp. Za’al Abu Tayyi rushed for his camel and rode bravely towards the interlopers, who, seeing organized resistance, turned and retreated into the desert. They had not gone far, however. That evening, Lawrence and his men were sitting around the fire being served with coffee in turn by an ‘Agayli called Assaf. Suddenly a fusillade of shots rapped out of the darkness, hitting the coffee-server – the only man standing – who was mortally wounded and died only minutes later. Lawrence’s men doused the flames at once and rolled into the dunes, located the position of the enemy from the flashes of their rifles, and shot back with such concentrated fire that the raiders gave up and disappeared into the night: ‘Tonight we were shot into,’ Lawrence wrote in his diary; ‘an [‘Agayli] killed just after giving men coffee.’¹⁷

No other incident marred their welcome into Sirhan, and within two days they had located the camp of ‘Ali Abu Fitna, a Howaytat chief, where they were to remain for several days, feasting royally on Howaytat sheep. Auda left them here and rode off north to meet Nuri ash-Sha’alan, the paramount chief of the powerful Rwalla, whose help, tacit or explicit, they would require if the operation were to be a success. Lawrence, Nasir and their patrol made slow progress along the wadi, which to Lawrence began to appear sinister – even actively evil – with its snakes, brackish wells, salt-marsh, stunted palms and barren bush. This view was a reflection of his inner state, for the further he moved into enemy territory the more the fear gripped him. He was also troubled by the job of recruiting levies, for as groups of Bedu appeared in his camp each night to swear allegiance to Feisal, he was obliged to reassure them that the Arabs were fighting for independence, not to further Allied objectives in the Near East. This had been easy in the Hejaz, which would almost certainly receive independence if the Allies were victorious, but Lawrence was less able to convince himself of the honesty of his preaching here in Syria: he was quite aware of the Sykes–Picot agreement, and that Britain and France intended to carve the region up between them afterwards. He despised Arab Nationalists like Nasib al-Bakri who believed in development and modernization: he had fallen in love with the ‘Old Syria’ and hated the thought of change: he wanted the East to remain the mystical, romantic land he had encountered in 1909, but without the oppressive government of the Ottoman Turks. He admired the Bedu and the semi-nomadic or tribal peasants such as Dahoum and Hammoudi – these were the ‘real’ Arabs. The ‘fat, greasy’ townsmen of Syria and Palestine were, he considered, of a different race, despite the fact that they were linguistically, culturally and racially homogenous. He perceived the East through a set of highly romanticized – and therefore ethnocentric – ideas. His idea of ‘self-determination’ was in reality determination by certain traditional and reactionary elements – the Bedu, the Hashemites, the conservative Sheikhs and Islamic elders – who represented his own romantic idea of what the East should be like: not the ‘will of the people’, but the superimposition of a romantic structure of his own. That Lawrence believed in these ideas passionately, and believed that they were right for the Arabs, is beyond question: from early childhood he had seen himself always as the clever ‘elder brother’. It is similarly likely that his views changed as he moved into Syria: the wily intelligence officer who had at first accepted the realpolitik of sacrificing Arab priorities to those of the Allies became increasingly plagued by doubt. Though the guilt niggled at him more and more strongly, his chameleon-like quality never allowed him to abandon the pose of the tough, practical politician with his own side. War correspondent Lowell Thomas, who actually spoke to him only a few months later, reported his opinion that the British could never keep the ‘promises they had made to the Arabs, and that, in wartime, promises were made to be broken’.¹⁸ Lawrence made a great deal of his anguish in having to deceive the Arabs in Seven Pillars: no doubt this is part genuine, part ‘elaboration’. Beneath this role of martyrdom lies the stratum of Lawrence’s masochism – the constant need to be punished for mankind’s transgressions, and to be seen to be punished: ‘In the contradictory and paradoxical phenomenon of [masochistic] exhibitionism,’ Lyn Cowan has written, ‘the roles of masochist and martyr interchange in the same actor, their distinction almost obliterated in the spotlight’s glare.’¹⁹ The fear and the hypocrisy, the divided loyalties, the divided soul, the sheer inertia of the heavy days in Sirhan, wandering from tent to tent, stuffing himself against his will with vast quantities of mutton and rice in order to placate his hosts, receiving delegations, exchanging pleasantries, telling lies: all this began to inflate his emotions to bursting point.