The starting-point of the raid was the water-pool at Abu Sawana, where the patrol arrived on 5 November, just missing a scouting party of Circassian cavalry which had been sent by the Turks to reconnoitre the area. They left on the morning of the 7th, lay up until sunset on the plain two hours east of the railway, and crossed the line after dark, riding west until they dropped into a shallow depression at Ghadir al-Abyad, where they snatched some sleep among their still laden camels until first light. They could not move before dusk in case they were spotted, and then they must infiltrate forty miles to the bridge, ‘bump’ it, and exfiltrate across the railway by dawn the following day. They had thirteen hours of darkness in which to complete the operation, and Lawrence felt that the Indian machine-gunners were generally incapable of making the eighty miles required within that time. He selected six of their best riders to accompany him, under Jemadar Hassan Shah, with one Vickers machine-gun. He believed that the bridge could be taken with only twenty good men: the Indians could have done it, but they were too few in number. He mistrusted the Serahiyyin, and placed his faith in the Bani Sakhr under their Sheikh Fahad, whom he designated as storm-troops for the assault. To make the demolition easier, Wood repacked the blasting gelatine into thirty-pound loads which would facilitate its handling on the steep hillside in the darkness.

At sunset, they mounted their camels and padded silently out of their lying-up place towards Tel ash-Shehab, following the ancient Pilgrim Road. The mood was sombre. Lawrence himself had a bad feeling about this raid, and was miserable, disconsolate about ‘Abd al-Qadir’s desertion, and despairing of the success of the Arab Revolt. The going was sticky for camels: up and down gravelly ridges, and across ploughed fields or meadows riddled with rabbit warrens. The men were on edge. They came across a merchant and his family travelling with their donkeys, whom they were obliged to put under guard till dawn. Then a peasant fired a rifle at them again and again, taking them for raiders, and screaming out in the darkness. No sooner had they escaped him than they were starded by a stray camel and a barking dog. Suddenly, it began to drizzle and the ground became dangerously slippery, so that the camels slithered: two or three crashed down. The rain stopped and they passed under the telegraph line, to a place where they could hear the sound of water falling down the hillside at Tel ash-Shehab. They barracked the camels silently and Wood helped assemble the machine-gun, while Lawrence and his party carried the gelatine down a muddy slope towards the bridge. A train suddenly clanked past them, and Lawrence, flat on his stomach, had a momentary glimpse of uniformed soldiers, before continuing his crawl towards the bridge with Fahad. They snaked through the mud until they were almost within touching distance of the metals, and observed a single sentry on the opposite side, sixty yards away, clearly illuminated by a blazing fire. Lawrence and Fahad sneaked back to guide the men carrying the explosives, but before they could get to them one of the Serahiyyin dropped his rifle and fell noisily down the bank with a clang and a scuffle which shattered the silence as completely as a shot. Lawrence froze. The Turkish sentry shouted a challenge and snapped off a round in the direction of the noise, bawling for the rest of the guard, who rushed out of their tent and fired into the darkness. The Bani Sakhr blazed back out of the shadows, but the machine-gunners, who had been caught in the act of transferring the Vickers, could not get it into action. The Serahiyyin porters, terrified that the gelatine would go off if struck by a bullet, simply dumped it into the ravine. There was now general panic among the raiding party. The Serahiyyin rushed for their camels, quickly followed by Lawrence, Wood, the Indians and the Bani Sakhr. The shooting had alarmed the nearby villages, and lights began to go up, illuminating the dark countryside. The Serahiyyin came across a group of peasants and robbed them, only adding to the alarm. The villagers for miles around took to their roofs and began shooting volleys at Lawrence’s party, while a troop of Arab horsemen charged them from the flank. The ground was still sticky, bowling the camels over as their flat feet tried to get a purchase. Lawrence and Ali took up the rear and goaded them on. They moved fast, driven by the demon of fear, and before long the shooting fell behind them. By first light they had reached the railway, hungry and exhausted. Lawrence heard the boom of Allenby’s heavy artillery drifting across the landscape from the direction of Palestine, and took the sound as a reproach for his failure. If Allenby’s attack succeeded, the Turks would now have a clear line of retreat along the railway: if it had been cut, not a man, a gun or a wagon need have escaped. The way would have been open for a general Arab revolt in Syria. Though he successfully mined Jamal Pasha the Lesser’s train near Minifir the following day, Lawrence knew that all the great opportunities he had hoped for had now been lost. Dejectedly he returned to the castle at Azraq, arriving there on 12 November.

Azraq castle had stood since Roman times on the shore of a vast, shallow lake, where the waters of the great Wadi Sirhan collected after the rains. Until the 1960s at least it lay in an oasis unique in the Syrian desert – a region of woods and marshes inhabited by every species of water-bird, by leopard, hyena, wild boar and even buffalo. Once, it attracted hunters from all over the Arab world. In Lawrence’s day the black basalt fortress must have stood out for miles across the sand-sheets and lava-fields. Today it is almost lost among ragged streets of breeze-block buildings, petrol-stations and barbed wire. The magic which Lawrence describes has gone, together with the waters of the lake, which have been siphoned off to Amman. I arrived in Azraq in a yellow taxi with my ex-Jordanian Special Forces friend, Mohammad al-Hababeh, and together we walked to the castle, and found it surprisingly well-kept inside. The guardian – an old Druse who seemed half crazy, and who was fond of interjecting English four-letter words into his conversation – showed us a photograph of his father, a Druse officer whom he claimed had served with Lawrence (though the Druses had not generally joined the Revolt until after the fall of Damascus). He shuffled around with us as we paced from wall to wall, following Lawrence’s description in my coverless old copy of Seven Pillars. The most remarkable features of the castle were its two stone doors – giant slabs of basalt a foot thick, weighing tons, which had been ingeniously poised on greased pivots so that they could be opened and closed easily by the effort of a single man. Lawrence wrote that the main door was blocked during his sojourn, and a sentry posted at the postern gate whose job was to slam the great door to at sunset, so that the walls of the castle reverberated. We saw the mosque which had been used as a sheep-fold, until Hassan Shah, the Jemadar of the Indian machine-gunners, had had it cleaned out and sanctified once more, inspected the corner tower which Sharif ‘Ali had chosen as his quarters, and even identified the breach in the wall – now restored – which Lawrence had had made so that the camels could be brought inside at night. Above the gate-house was the room Lawrence himself had occupied, a spacious garret with low windows through which shafts of light pierced the dust. I found Lawrence’s description of how his men would light a fire on the stone floor on cold nights and gather around in their cloaks to recite poems and tell stories, as the coffee-cups went their rounds. On such nights, with the wind ravaging the castle walls, they had heard a ghostly wailing and sighing along the battlements, which the Bedu had attributed to the dogs of the Bani Hillal – the mythical builders of the fort – endlessly questing the six towers for a trace of their lost masters.