One senses, in Lawrence’s description, how strained and fixed his smile must have been, both because of the delay and because of the danger of being hit by a stray bullet. When the Beni Sakhr finally stopped raising the dust and wasting ammunition, Abd el Kader, apparently infuriated by their hailing of Ali and Lawrence, and not of him, and eager to demonstrate that he could put on as good a show, mounted his mare and rode around in circles, as in a dressage ring, followed by his seven servants, firing into the air with his rifle, until the Beni Sakhr chief asked that Lawrence and Ali put a stop to this before one of his own men was shot. This was not, as it happened, a remote possibility. Abd el Kader’s brother, Emir Mohammed Said el Kader, “held what might well be the world’s record for three successive fatal accidents with automatic pistols in the circle of his Damascus friends,” according to Lawrence. This had led Ali Riza Pasha, the governor of Damascus, to remark, “There are three things notably impossible: one, that Turkey win this war; one, that the Mediterranean become champagne; one, that I be found in the same place with Mohammed Said, and he armed.”

As Lawrence continued on across the desert toward Azrak, he still heard the thunder of the British guns, louder now. On October 31 “some 40,000 troops of all arms,” were on the move to attack Beersheba, after an intense four-day artillery barrage, which had convinced Kress von Kressenstein that Allenby was about to launch another full-scale assault on Gaza. By the end of the day, after intense fighting and a brilliant and daring cavalry charge by the Fourth Australian Light Horse Brigade, whose troopers not only swept over two lines of Turkish trenches at the gallop, but then “dismounted and cleaned up with the bayonet thetrenches over which they had passed,” the Turkish left simply collapsed. “General Allenby’s plan to mislead his enemy had been entirely successful"; he had taken Beersheba and, more important, the wells there, before the Turks were able to dynamite them. Fierce fighting would continue over the next few days, but the Gaza-Beersheba line, which had resisted the British since 1914, was broken, and the only question remaining was where—and if—the Turks could reestablish a line in Palestine.

At every stop on the way to Azrak, Lawrence received more disturbing news about the strength and disposition of the Turks in the Yarmuk gorge, from tribesmen and their chiefs who were reluctant to join him. There were three routes he could take, but as the paramount sheikh of the Serahin explained to Lawrence, none of them was good.

In one place the Turks had sent large groups of military woodcutters (wood was a constant preoccupation, since the Turkish locomotives south of Damascus were fueled by wood, it being impossible to add a further burden to the already overtasked railway system by shipping large amounts of coal), and Lawrence could not hope “to slip through undetected.” In another place—Tell el Shehab—the villagers were enemies of the Serahin “and would certainly attack them in the rear"; in addition, the ground would turn muddy in the event of rain, and the camels would then be unable to cross it to get back to the desert. Finally, the villages of the Algerian descendants in the Jaulan that Abd el Kader claimed to control would certainly be hostile, and “nothing would persuade [the Serahin] to visit the one under the guidance of the other.” Lawrence could not go forward without the Serahin—they were the last major tribe on his way—so he gave them a rousing speech, which won them over for the moment. The next day they marched for Azrak, where a Roman legion had once been garrisoned, leaving behind it in the desert monuments dedicated to Emperor Diocletian, and where “the ruins of the blue fort on its rock above the rustling palms” were “steeped in an unfathomable pool of silence and past history,” an Arab Camelot of legends, mythic heroes, and “lost kingdoms.”

Romantic as the legends surrounding Azrak might be, it was here that Abd el Kader and his servants slipped away from the group. Lawrence had no doubt that Abd el Kader would betray him to the Turks; an equally difficult problem was that without him, two of the three approaches to the Yarmuk were essentially closed off, leaving only Tell el Shehab, from which a retreat might be impossible, and where the troops guarding the bridge would now be on the alert—for Abd el Kader knew all of Lawrence’s plans. At this point, Lawrence had no choice but to go forward to Tell el Shehab—indeed, the only surprise is that he managed to so inspire the doubtful Serahin tribesmen that they went forward with him.

Yarmuk was a two-day ride from Azrak, and during those two days Lawrence’s nerves and patience were further stretched by the need to pass judgment on two of his men who had tried to shoot each other in a quarrel while out hunting gazelle. Pushed once again into a position where only he could make a judgment without causing a blood feud, Lawrence ordered “that the right thumb and forefinger of each should be cut off,” the traditional punishment. The fear of this drove the two men to make peace, in token of which each man was beaten around the head with the sharp edge of a dagger, so that the painful scar should become a permanent reminder of their obligation not to renew the quarrel. Under the circumstances Lawrence was lucky that a scouting party sent out by the Turks just missed his men as they were about to water their camels and fill their water skins for the last time before the ride to the bridge. They faced a ride of forty miles; then the laying of the charges; and, after the bridge was demolished, another forty miles of hard riding back into the desert—all of it to be done in the thirteen hours of darkness.

Some measure of just how dangerous the operation was, even had Abd el Kader not betrayed Lawrence, can be gleaned from the concern of Hogarth in Cairo, who wrote to his wife, apparently not mindful of censorship, or in a position to ignore it, “I only hope TEL will get back safe. … If he comes through it is a V.C.—if not—well, I don’t care to think about it.”

Hidden as best he could manage in a hollow by the railway line, Lawrence made a drastic, last-minute decision to rely on speed rather than force. The Indian machine gunners were still slow and clumsy riders, sohe picked the six of them who were the best riders, and their officer, and reduced his firepower to one Vickers machine gun. He weeded out the least enthusiastic of the Arabs, particularly among the Serahin, whose zeal for the operation, never great to begin with, was rapidly diminishing; and with the help of Wood, who was to remain close by in case Lawrence was killed or wounded, he removed all the explosive from its wrapped packages, kneading it all into thirty-pound lumps, then placing each lump in a white sack that one man could carry downhill in the dark under fire. The fumes from the explosive gave both Lawrence and Wood a severe headache.

At sunset, Lawrence set off with his much-reduced company, and rode through the darkness, “very miserably and disinclined to go on at all.” Along the way they bumped into terrified nocturnal travelers—a peddler and his two wives, a shepherd who opened fire on them, a Gypsy woman, a stray camel—and saw the flares of Deraa station, lit up for army traffic. The going in the dark was slow and difficult—this was not desert; it was cultivated land, and the camels “sank fetlock in,” and began to stumble, slip, and labor, as a steady drizzle started to turn the ground to mud, just as the Serahin had warned. Shortly after nine o’clock they halted before a band of pitch darkness, with the sound of a waterfall in their ears—they had reached Yarmuk gorge.

They dismounted and made their way down a steep bank, gripping with their toes in the slippery mud—the reluctant Serahin chosen to carry the bags of explosive were particularly nervous, since a stray shot could set it off—and set off toward the bridge. They halted about 300 yards from it. Lawrence could look down at it from the edge of the gorge through his binoculars, and could clearly see a sentry standing in front of a fire, and a guard tent, on the far side. Followed by the “explosive-porters” he made his way down a steep construction path to where the bridge abutted, the river running far below it. All he had to do now was to climb the latticework of steel beams that supported the bridge, fasten each thirty-pound bag of explosive where it belonged, place the fuses and wires—all of this in the dark, without alerting the sentry—and then makehis way with the wires back to where Wood waited with the exploder. If the sentry heard anything, the Indians were to rake the guard tent with their Vickers.