http://www.limpidsoft.com/small/sevenpillars.pdf
стр. 28 в этом издании сразу дает первую часть ключа к пониманию текста, можно начать оттуда же. Хотя язык затейливый и как бы вокруг да около. Continent - сегодня имеет смысл не ссать в трусы, а у Лоуренса в тексте встречается сплошь и рядом в смысле сексуальной воздержанности.
Man in all things lived candidly with man.
The Arab was by nature continent; and the
use of universal marriage had nearly abolished
irregular courses in his tribes. The public
women of the rare settlements we encountered
in our months of wandering would have been
nothing to our numbers, even had their raddled
meat been palatable to a man of healthy
parts. In horror of such sordid commerce our
youths began indifferently to slake one another’s
few needs in their own clean bodies–a
cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began
to justify this sterile process, and swore that
friends quivering together in the yielding sand
with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace,
found there hidden in the darkness a sensual
co-efficient of the mental passion which was
welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort.
Several, thirsting to punish appetites they
could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride
in degrading the body, and offered themselves
fiercely in any habit which promised physical
pain or filth.
Вторая часть на стр. 1235-1239.
нет возможности сравнивать с изданием 1922 года, но вроде бы почти или полный вариант. Заметим, что все это выдумано из головы благовоспитанного джентльмена, офицера разведки.
"Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy"
ну да, понятное дело.
оттуда же - ...whereas no doubt they had laid into me much as usual, and
the fault rested mainly upon my indoor skin, which gave way more than an Arab’s.
ну понятное дело, Арабы в этом деле превосходят англичанина. Но зато какой у англичанина богатый язык! "Indoor skin". Русский так изящно бы не смог сказать, а выразился бы неприлично и грубо.
и далее 1527:
Three years of Sinai had burned the colour from their tanned
faces, in which the blue eyes flickered weakly against the dark possessed gaze of the Beduin. For the rest they were a broad-faced, lowbrowed people, blunt-featured beside the finedrawn
Arabs whom generations of in-breeding had sharpened to a radiance ages older than the primitive, blotched, honest Englishmen.
Инбридинг тут подается как нечто положительное, типа "сохранение великолепной арабской расы". У которой indoor skin например попрочнее. Ну и семь фаллических столпов премудрости в промежутке.