Глава о Дераа из первого издания "Семи столпов мудрости". На английском.

[arabiannights]

Когда я только заинтересовалась историей Лоуренса, я видела в сети статью, в которой цитировались отрывки якобы из главы о Дераа, непохожие на то, что я читала в "Семи столпах мудрости". Возникала мысль, не взяты ли они из первой редакции книги, изданной в Оксфорде в 1922 г. Когда  amethyst deceiver показала мне текст, приведенный ниже, я поняла, что виденные мной отрывки были не из него. Для того, чтобы легко можно было сравнить первый вариант главы со вторым, а их оба — с тем, чего Лоуренс не писал, я решила поместить этот текст в сообществе. Он не так уж сильно отличается от общеизвестного варианта, если не считать заключительного абзаца, но все же и маленькие различия любопытны.* Наверное, надо было тогда же поместить этот текст тут, но я тогда отвлеклась и забыла про него, а недавно  FleetinG_ мне напомнила.

[Опущены первые четыре абзаца.] I was marched through the tall fence into a compound which was set about with many low temporary huts and a few buildings. We passed some of this to a mud room, outside which was an earth platform, where, on a green tent canvas sat a fleshy Turkish officer. One leg tucked under him, and he hardly looked at me when the sergeant brought me up and made a long report in Turkish. He asked my name: I told him Ahmed ibn Bagr. “An Arab?” I explain I was a Circassian from Kuneitra. “A deserter?” “But we Circassians have no military service.” (Lawrence was wrong. Circassians did have military service. - примечание Н.-С.) He then turned round and stared at me curiously, and said very slowly “You are a liar. Keep him, Hassan Chowish, till the Bey sends for him.”
They led me into a guardroom, mostly taken up by large wooden cribs, on which lay or sat a dozen men in untidy uniforms. They took away my belt, and my knife, bur let me sit on a spare place, made me wash myself carefully, and fed me with their own food: I passed the long day there unmolested. They would not let me go on any terms, but tried to re-assure me. Tomorrow, perhaps it would be permitted, if I fulfilled the Bey's pleasure this evening. The Bey seemed to be Najim, the Governor, though what he was to do with me I could not gather...
Soon after dark they called me. I was waiting for the summons, but three men came with me, and one held me all the time. I cursed my littleness. They took me over the railway, where were six tracks, besides the sidings of the engine-shop. We went through a side gate north of the platform, and there turned to the left down a street, past a square, to a detached house… there was a sentry at the door, and a glimpse of one or two others lolling in the dark entry. They took me upstairs to the Bey's room, which I was astonished to see was his bedroom.
He was another bulky man, a Circassian perhaps, perhaps, sitting on his bed in a night gown, trembling and sweating as though with fever. When I was pushed in he kept his head down, and waved the guard out. Then in a breathless voice he told me to sit on the floor in front of him, and after that was dumb for several seconds, while I gazed at the top of his great shaven head, on which the bristling hair stood up stiffly, no longer than the dark stubble on his cheeks and chin. At last he looked me over, and told me to stand up: then to turn round. I obeyed, and he flung himself back on the bed, and dragged me down with him in his arms. When I saw what he wanted I twisted round and up again, glad to find myself equal to him in wrestling.
He then began to fawn on me, saying how white and clean I was, and how fine my hands and feet, and how he was all longing for me and would get me off drills and duties, make me his orderly, and pay me, if I would love him. Incidents like these made the thought of military service in the Turkish army a living death for wholesome Arab peasants, and the consequences pursued the miserable victims all their after life, in revolting forms of sexual disease.
I was obdurate, so he changed his tone, and sharply ordered me to take off my drawers. When I hesitated, he snatched at me; and I pushed him back. He clapped his hands for the sentry, who hurried in and seized me. The Bey cursed me horribly and threatened me, and made the man holding me tear my clothes away bit by bit till I stood there stark naked. His eyes rounded as he saw the half-healed places where the bullets of Jamal Pasha’s guards had flicked through my skin a little while ago. Finally he lumbered to his feet, with a glitter in his look, and began to paw me over. I bore it for a little, till he got too beastly; and then jerked up my knee and caught him hard. He staggered back to his bed, and say there, squeezing himself together and groaning with pain, while the soldier shouted for the corporal and the other three men of the guard to come and hold me hand and foot. As soon as I was helpless the Governor recovered courage, and spat at me, saying he would make me ask pardon. He took off his soft slipper, and hit me with it repeatedly in the face. He leaned forward and fixed his teeth in the skin of my neck and bit till the blood came. Then he kissed me. Afterwards he drew one of the men's bayonets. I thought he was going to kill me, and was sorry - but he only pulled up a fold of the flesh over my ribs, worked the bayonet point through, after considerable trouble, and gave it a half turn. This hurt, and I winced a little, while the blood wavered down my side in a thin stream, and dripped to the front of my thigh. He looked pleased and dabbled it over my stomach with his fingertips.
O got angry and said something to him. His face changed and he stood still, then controlled his voice with an effort, to say significantly, “You must understand that I know all about you, and it will be much easier if you do as I wish.” I was dumbfounded by this, and we waited silently for another moment, staring at one another, while the men who had not seen an inner meaning shifted about uncomfortably: but it was evidently a chance shot, by which he himself did not, or would not, mean what I feared. I could not again trust my twitching mouth, which faltered always in emergencies, so at last I threw up my chin, which is the sign for 'No' in the East and then he sat down, and half-whispered to the corporal to take me out and teach me till I prayed to be brought back.
They kicked me to the landing at the head of the stairs, and there threw me on the guard-bench and stretched me along it on my face, pommelling me. Two of them knelt on my ankles, bearing down with their arms on the back of my knees, while two more twisted my wrists over my head till they cracked, and then crushed them and my ribs against the wood. The corporal had run downstairs; and now came back with a Circassian riding whip, of… single thongs of supple black hide, rounded, and tapering from the thickness of a thumb at the grip (which was wrapped in silver, with a knob inlaid in black designs), down to a hard point much finer than a pencil.
He saw me shivering, partly I think, with cold, and made it whistle through the air over my head, taunting me that before the tenth cut I would howl for mercy, and at the twentieth beg for the caresses of the Bey, and then he began to lash me across and across with all his might, while I locked my teeth to endure this thing which wrapped itself like flaming wire about my body. At the instant of each stroke a hard white mark like a railway, darkening slowly into crimson, leaped over my skin, and a bead of blood swelled up wherever two ridges cross. As the punishment proceeded the whip fell more and more upon existing weals, biting blacker or more wet, till my flesh quivered with accumulated pain, and with terror of the next blow coming. From the first they hurt more horribly than I had dreamed of, and, as always before the agony of one had fully reached me, another used to fall, the torture of a series worked up to an intolerable height.
To keep my mind in control I numbered the blows, but after twenty lost count, and could feel only the shapeless weight of pain, not tearing claws, for which I was prepared, but a gradual cracking apart of all my being by some too great force whose waves rolled up my spine till they were pent within my brain, and there clashad terribly together. Somewhere in the place was a cheap clock, ticking loudly, and it troubled me that their beating was not in its time.
I writhed and twisted involuntarily, but was held so tightly that my struggles were useless. The men were very deliberate, giving me so many, and then taking an interval, during which they would squabble for the next turn, ease themselves, play a little with me, and pull my head round to see their work. This was repeated time and again, for what may have been no more than ten minutes. They had soon conquered my determination not to cry, but sp long as my will would rule my lips I used only Arabic, and before the end a merciful sickness came over me, and choked my utterance.
At last when I was completely broken they seemed satisfied. Somehow I found myself off the bench lying on my back on the dirty floor, where I snuggled down, dazed, panting for breath but vaguely comfortable. I had strung myself to learn all pain until I died, and no longer an actor, but a spectator, cared not how much my body jerked and squealed in its suffering. Yet I knew, or imagined, what passed about me.
I remembered the corporal kicking with his nailed boot to get me up: and this was true, for next day my left side was yellow and lacerated, and a damaged rib made each breath stab me sharply. I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me: and then that he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin. This jerked me over, screaming, or, rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. Someone giggled with amusement, but another cried, “Shame, you've killed him”. A second flash followed. A roaring was in my head, and my eyes went black: while within me the core of my life seemed to be heaving slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang…
I next knew that I was being dragged about by two men, each disputing over a leg as though to split me apart: while a third astride my back rode me like a horse. Then Hajim called. They splashed water in my face, lifted me to my feet, and bore me, retching and sobbing for mercy, between them to his bedside: but he now threw me off fastidiously, cursing them for their stupidity in thinking he heeded a bedfellow streaming with blood and water, striped and fouled from face to heel. They had laid into me, no doubt much as usual: but my indoor skin had torn more than an Arab's.
So the crestfallen corporal, as the youngest and best looking on the guard, had to stay behind, while the others carried me down the narrow stair and out into the street. The coolness of the night on my burning flesh, and the unmoved shining of the stars after the horror of the past hour, made me cry again. The soldiers now free to speak tried to console me in their fashion, saying that men must suffer their officers' wishes or pay for it, as I had just done, with still greater suffering.
They took me over an open space, deserted and dark, and behind the Government house to an empty lean-to mud and wooden room, in which were many dusty quilts. They put me down on these, and brought an Armenian dresser, who washed and bandaged me in sleepy haste. Then all went away, the last of the soldiers whispering to me in a Druse accent that the door into the next room was not locked.
I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed, and a locomotive began to whistle in the station. These and a draining thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Yet the first movement brought anguish, but I struggled to my feet, and rocked unsteadily for a moment, wondering that it was not all a dream, and myself back five years ago in a hospital at Khalfati where something of the sort had happened to me.
The next room was a dispensary, and on its door hung a suit of shoddy clothes. I put them on slowly and clumsily, because of my swollen wrists: and from the drugs chose some tablets of corrosive sublimate, as safeguard against recapture. The window looked north onto a blank long wall. I opened it, and climbed out stiffly. No one saw me, which perhaps was the reason why I had been shut up in so weak a place. I went timidly down the road towards the village, trying to walk naturally past the few people already astir. They took no notice, and indeed there was nothing peculiar in my dark broadcloth, red fez and slippers: but it was only by restraining myself with the full urge of my tongue silently to myself that I refrained from being foolish out of sheer terror. The atmosphere of Deraa seemed inhuman with vice and cruelty, and it shocked me like cold water when I heard a soldier laughed behind me in the street.
By the bridge were the wells, with men and women already about them. A side trough was free, and from its end I scooped up a little water in my hands, and rubbed it over my face: then drank, which was precious to me: and afterwards wandered along the bottom of the valley for some minutes, towards the south, till out of sight of both town and station. So at last was found the hidden approach to Deraa for our future raiding party, the purpose for which Mijbil and myself had come here it seemed so long ago… I was feeling very ill, as though some part of me had gone dead that night in Deraa, leaving me maimed, imperfect, half myself. It could not have been the defilement, for no one ever held the body in less honour than I did myself: probably it had been the breaking of the spirit by that frenzied nerve-shattering pain, which had degraded me to beast level when it made me grovel to it, and to it, and which had journeyed with me since, a fascinatiоn and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious, perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame.

* Наш с  amethyst deceiver перевод:"Я чувствовал себя ужасно, словно какая-то часть меня умерла той ночью в Дераа, оставив искалеченным, несовершенным, половиной прежнего. Это не могло быть осквернением, поскольку меньшего почтения, чем я, к своему телу никто и никогда не выказывал. Вероятно, это была ломка духа той неистовой, сокрушающей нервы болью, которая низвела меня до уровня животного, заставив унижаться и так и сяк, и которая сопровождает меня с тех пор – очарование, и ужас, и болезненное желание, похотливое и порочное, возможно, но сродни тому, как мотылек устремляется к своему пламени."

Цитируется по книге "Тайные жизни Лоуренса Аравийского" Филлипа Найтли и Колина Симпсона.The secret lives of Lawrence of Arabia‎ by Phillip Knightley, Colin Simpson - 1970. 239-244
Для сравнения — глава о Дераа во второй редакции.