Версия Десмонда Стюарта о том, что произошло с Лоуренсом вместо Дераа.Pink oleander flowers in a drought-brown wadi: white clouds of aromatic broom hiding a camel and its rider in Rumm's sandstone gorge: such sights predicted in little the surprise of an oasis.
To Azrak's south, the immense low wadi of Sirhan stretched through shimmering dust and mirage to the upland domain of Ibn Saud and his puritanical Ikhwan, a warrior brotherhood ready to slaughter for infractions of their code. To the north, the desert was black with jagged lava. Yet in the oasis itself men had contrived, for thousands of years, not merely to subsist but to know delight. A black basalt fortress commanded a chain of wells, palm groves and bird-thronged marshes. Fragments of a Greco-Roman altar, inscriptions of the Emperor Jovian and a Mameluke governor, attested the variety of its passing tenants. Its newest were to be Sharif Ali and Lawrence. Lawrence's servants used brushwood and palmfronds to repair the leaking roof of the northern gate-tower. Ali, as commander, occupied the corner tower to the south-east. For the first time in many months Lawrence could spend as long as ten days in a single place. He needed to come to terms with his failure to carry out Allenby's assignment; his camels needed rest.
читать дальше Lawrence later wove into this brief rest — from 12 November to 22 November 1917 — the most harrowing experience of his life. It is therefore important to be clear about the dates. They alone make it possible to sift fiction from fact. His skeleton diary followed the entry Nov. 12, Azrah, etc., with Nov. 23, Wadi Butm, on the return ride back south to Akaba. Lawrence's etc., as his fictional claim of meeting with Ali Ridha al-Rikabi showed, could mean anything or nothing. To Lawrentian mysteries, the earliest documentation always provides the best key. Lawrence wrote two letters to his father at the time. The first, written from Azrak itself on 14 November, told of living in 'an old fort with stone roofs and floors, and stone doors of the sort they used in Bashan.(1) He was making, he reported, daily improvements to the fort and planned to stay a few days at Azrak, resting his camels. The second letter (unavailable to earlier writers on Lawrence) was written a month later. Lawrence was then staying as Wingate's guest at the Nile-side Residency in Cairo. 'I wrote to you last from Azrak,' he told his father, 'about the time we blew up Jemal Pasha, and let him slip aw'ay from us. After that I stayed for ten days or so there, and then rode down to Akaba in 3 days: good going, tell Arnie: none of his old horses would do so much as my old camel.(2) Neither the information in these documents, nor in the letters which Hogarth was writing at the
time to his wife in Oxford, nor in the official reports on Lawrence's movements, fit with the later account of a strenuous return ride to Deraa nor with the chapter of humiliation which was to form the spiritual climax of his post-war book (3).
The only link between the events of 12 to 22 November and the episode he created in his book (which will be discussed in due course) was one of mood. He metamorphosed guilt and failure into a myth of degradation and torture and transferred its site from Azrak to Deraa.
Even if Sharif Ali had been the kind of Arab who wrote books, prudery would have deterred him from recording behaviour contrary to Islamic norms. (Even Cairo's vigorous novelists have produced little confessional writing: no author has, for example, admitted to sexual or other vice.) So that, apart from Lawrence's own letters, no contemporary accounts describe the stay at Azrak on which Lawrence later imposed the myth of Deraa. Sharif Ali was ten years younger than Lawrence. He had none of the Englishman's sense of failure. On the contrary, for the first time in his life, the young Arab was enjoying the exercise of authority. The fiasco at the Yarmuk viaduct was for him eclipsed by the triumph of outraging a Turkish general. Ali's master was Feisal, whose instructions he was carrying out with success. In his refurbished Azrak tower he received potential recruits with a generosity made possible by English gold. Reporting to von Oppenheim in French as late as May 1918, a proGerman Druse wrote of an 'Amir* Ali' established within range of the Jebel Druse and subverting the people. (4)
Lawrence's dejection at letting down Allenby, his clearsighted recognition that his promise to cut the enemy's supply-route had not been kept, led to a desire for punishment. This is not surprising in one of his upbringing. As a boy in Polstead Road misdemeanours had been followed by 'humiliating whippings with the trousers pulled down,(5) indelibly implanting the necessary link between crime, punishment and spiritual relief; as we have seen with Dahoum at Halfati he had learnt that the plenitude of pain could bring physical relief as well. Sharif Ali, the most attractive man he had met in Arabia, the formal commander of the expedition, could be seen as Allenby's representative at Azrak.
Lawrence's urge to blurt out fusions of fact and fantasy has left two clear indications that, with Ali, he underwent a ritual involving token imprisonment and punishment. The punishment left scars and accorded with the savagery Lawrence repeatedly cited as characteristic of Ali's actions. (6) His acceptance of it accorded with what was to become a dominant feature of his post-war behaviour.
The first indication dates from the following summer. In September I9i8 the war was nearing its end. Machines increasingly dominated the desert; Lawrence's claim to have spent z,ooo hours in the air was certainly exaggerated but nevertheless attests the new mechanical element in which war was waged. Driver Rolls had chauffeured Lawrence north to Azrak, now Feisal's forward base for the final advance on Deraa and Damascus. There Lawrence showed him round the black fortress in which he had lodged with Sharif Ali. 'He beckoned me to him and, pointing to what looked like the crumbled mouth of an old well, bade me look into it. It appeared to lead into a sort of cellar, but all was black down there, and I could see nothing. I looked at him inquiringly. He said to me, "Once I was kept a prisoner in that dungeon for months." I was amazed to hear this, but there was more to come yet. He leaned down and pointed to the inside of the hole, at a place where the light just reached, and said, "Do you see those scratchings?" I looked, and saw something which appeared as though the decaying surface of the stone had recently been scraped away. I looked at him again without speaking. "Those are some of my attempts to escape," he said.' (7)
The story is incorrect in detail. There are no lost 'months' which Lawrence could have spent in prison and before the war he had not visited this part of the desert. The only possible occasion for even a mock imprisonment was thus the crucial period of November 1917, in which he later set the myth of Deraa.
The second indication of what really happened came a year after the first. In 1919, under circumstances to be detailed later, a brother officer saw Lawrence naked in the bath. He was horrified by the sight of red weals across Lawrence's ribs, as prominent as tattoos. Lawrence passed them off as due to 'a camel accident at Azrak; dragged across barbed wire.(8)
Azrak, not Deraa, was the place where Lawrence made the deepest discoveries about his basic nature. The discoveries resulted, not from a Turkish pasha's lust, but from the compliance of a sturdy young Arab whom he respected and loved.
*The word can mean commander, or prince.
1. HLs, p. 342.
2. Ibid, 343.
3. For Hogarth's letters, see text and notes to chapter 19; Cairo (presumably
Wingate) cabled to the Director of Military Intelligence, War Office, London,
on 3o November that 'Lawrence himself has been until recently at Azrack but
is is believed that he intends to leave today (3o November) for Jauf,' SAD/147/1.
4. Chelib Aslan; BSA; IA Turkei 177 Bd 17 Damascus 7.5.1918; German
Consulate.
5. John E. Mack: 'T. E. Lawrence: A study of Heroism and Conffict'
American Journal of Psychiatry, Feb. 1969, p. 1088. Mack was helped by the
Lawrence family.
6.Lawrence attributes an instance of Sharif Ali's adjudication to 5 November
1917, two days before the failure to blow the bridge: 'I referred the case to Ali
ibn el Hussein, who set them [two quarrelling tribesmen] at liberty on probation,
after sealing their promise with the ancient and curious nomad penance of striking
the head sharply with the edge of a weighty dagger again and again till the
issuing blood had run down to the waist belt. It caused painful but not dangerous
wounds, whose ache at first and whose scars later were supposed to remind
the would-be defaulter of the bond he had given.' Seven Pillars, p. 425.
7. Rolls, op. cit., p. 249.
8. Meinertzhagen, op. cit., entry for 20. 7. 1919.
T.E. Lawrence: A New Biography by Desmond Stewart, London: Harper and Row, 1977, pp.187-189.