Lawrence parted with the Kawakiba after the raid, and, having received Dhami’s promise to meet him at Bair with a force of tribesmen in a few days, he rode south with a small escort towards Damascus. At the village of al-Qabban, three miles outside the city, he met with ‘Ali Ridha Pasha ar-Rikabi, a covert Arab nationalist who was then mayor of Damascus, and whom Lawrence had once met at Carchemish. He warned ar-Rikabi not to take any action prematurely, though the Pasha replied that as he had only 500 Turkish gendarmes and three unarmed labour battalions in the city, he was in no position to do anything even though he might have wished to. Lawrence then rode south again, meeting Sa’ad ad-Din, Sheikh of the Leja, and Hussain al-‘Atrash, leader of the Druses, who informed him of the terms on which his people were prepared to rise against the Turks. Finally he rode to Azraq, an oasis standing on a lake where the Wadi Sirhan debouched into the Syrian desert, and where he hoped to meet Nuri ash-Sha’alan of the Rwalla, and his son, Nawwaf. In 1927, the Arabist Carl Raswan, who lived among the Rwalla, heard a story that Nuri’s scouts had found Lawrence asleep in a wadi near Azraq, and had identified him as an Englishman. Nuri had by this time got wind of the Sykes-Picot agreement, revealed to the world by the Bolsheviks, who had just seized power in Russia. He was inclined to regard Lawrence as a dangerous spy, and debated whether to kill him or not. Though the Bedu considered it cowardly to kill a sleeping man, Nuri posted guards with instructions to shoot or capture him as soon as he made a move, to prevent him claiming daakhil – the Bedu right of protection, which could be gained by touching a tent-rope, spitting on a slave, or various other ploys. The guards watched him for three hours, and in that time Nuri decided to spare him. When he awoke the Emir called him into his tent, and slapped a fat file of documents in front of him, demanding to know which of the contradictory British promises was to be believed. Nuri was the most powerful Bedu chief in Syria, and Lawrence realized the success or failure of the Hashemites might depend on his answer. It was with some agony of mind, he said, that he told Nuri to trust the most recent of the contradictions. Lawrence said later that Nuri was inclined to sit on the fence: he did not wish to commit himself to the Hashemite cause, but was circumspect enough to countenance the possibility that they might defeat the Turks, in which case he ought to be on the winning side. For now, his support would remain tacit: ‘he is willing now to compromise himself to any extent short of open hostilities,’ Lawrence wrote in his journal, ‘pending the collection of his year’s food supply.’²³

Lawrence arrived back in Nabk on 17 June, having made a trek of 560 miles through enemy-held territory. He had blown a bridge and caused the Turks to move six battalions from the front, had met many of the principal leaders in the region, and had surveyed the prospective battlefields. It was a magnificent achievement – certainly one of the great intelligence-gathering missions of the war – and deserved the highest accolade. Yet if the northern ride is shrouded in uncertainty, Lawrence himself bears much of the blame for his incorrigible habit of self-mystification. In Seven Pillars he alluded only fleetingly to the expedition: ‘the results,’ he said, ‘were incommensurate with the risks, and the act artistically unjustifiable, like the motive.’²⁴ Vyvyan Richards suggested that there was a purely literary motive in Lawrence’s skating over the ride: to have described it in detail would have detracted from the action in the Aqaba mission, and produced an anticlimax. Several biographers have concluded that the story was a fabrication, and Nasib al-Bakri, speaking forty years after the event, told Suleiman Mousa that he was certain Lawrence had never left Wadi Sirhan even for a day, and accused him of ‘double-dealing, slander and dissemination of discord’. The tone of the denial, though, suggests strongly that Nasib’s memory was coloured with anger at Lawrence’s remarks about him in Seven Pillars.²⁵ Nasib also reported that while Auda and Nasir had asked for the return of the Ј7,000 given to him by Feisal, on the grounds that their own funds had run out, he had refused to give it back. Nasir, he said, had revealed confidentially that Lawrence lay behind the demand, and they had pretended that Nasib had surrendered the money, whereas in fact he never returned a single pound. Against Nasib’s insistence that he never left camp, though, there is Lawrence’s diary, which, while the writing is often illegible and the entries sometimes incomprehensible, makes it clear beyond reasonable doubt that he did visit Raas Baalbek and the other places mentioned in his later report. Why, then, did he later tell Robert Graves: ‘in my report to Clayton… I gave a short account of my excursions from Nabk northward. It was part of the truth. During it some things happened, and I do not want the whole story to be made traceable…’²⁶ Why, if the story was true, did Lawrence not wish it to be traceable, and what did he mean by his earlier statement that the motive was ‘unjustifiable’? There are two possible answers – or rather two complementary answers representing two levels of Lawrence’s psyche. First, on the rational level the purpose of the ride was to prime the Syrian tribes for a general revolt which would coincide with any British invasion of Palestine. The information Lawrence gathered at so much risk to his life provided a detailed report for G H Q showing the various groups of Syrian Arabs ready to strike. It was partly on the basis of this report that vast funds and resources were eventually assigned to the Arabs. However, the Syrian revolt was never to come off completely, and not even partially until the last days of the campaign. The master-plan which Lawrence conceived on this northern ride went askew because, when the time was ripe, he lost his nerve and failed to call a general uprising in Syria. His feelings of guilt over this failure are clearly expressed in the Oxford version of Seven Pillars, and may have prompted him to cut the details of his northern ride. The second reason probably lurked on the shadow side of his mind. That the ride had actually been initiated by his masochism – his need to ease tension by fleeing forwards – is clear from the note in his diary stating that he was going north to ‘chuck it’. Afterwards, he could not forget the fact that he had been moved by fear rather than the more chauvinistic brand of courage others expected. He was later awarded the Companionship of the Bath on the strength of his own report, and might have had the Victoria Cross had another officer been present. The idea that he should be rewarded for what, in his own eyes, amounted to ‘cowardice’ amused him acidly: ‘A bit of a handicap, is funk,’ he wrote, ‘to people of the VC class, in which reputation would put me! Of course, I know in myself I’m not a brave person: and am not sorry. Most brave people aren’t attractive.’²⁷ The idea that cowardice and bravery were two aspects of the same quality occurred to him later, when he declared that a man who could run away was a potential VC. His attitude to bravery is summed up in a letter to Charlotte Shaw: ‘When a VC… passes an army guard-room the guard turn out and salute,’ he wrote; ‘the poor shy soldier wearing it isn’t thereby puffed up to believe himself brave. He convicts himself of fraudulence …’²⁸ Lawrence’s low self-esteem; the feeling that he was ‘not a brave person’, that he was ‘fraudulent’; the notion that he had been driven forward by fear rather than some idealistic notion of ‘higher courage’ caused him to coil his bravest act within a labyrinth of conundrums which would make it almost impossible for posterity to discover its exact nature.