Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  They successfully negotiated a vertical chimney, to emerge onto a narrow ledge sloping steeply downwards. From there, they roped themselves one by one to the rock, then tumbled down eight otherwise impassable feet onto sheer and slippery snow. They had the fixed rope to hold on to, but they were blinded by fog, and they felt as if they were plunging to their deaths. It was now nearly 6 p.m. They struggled on until eight, by which time a storm was raging.

  We were standing by a great upright on the top of a tower when suddenly it gave a crack and a blue flame sat on it for a second. My ice axe jumped in my hand and I thought the steel felt hot through my woollen glove—was that possible? Before we knew where we were the rock flashed again . . . we tumbled down a chimney, one on top of the other, buried our ice axe heads in some shale and hurriedly retreated from them. It’s not nice to carry a private lightning conductor in your hand.

  They could go no further that night, and would have to spend the hours of darkness halfway down a precipice in the thick of the storm. They had no choice. They squeezed themselves into a crack on the rockface, Gertrude finding just room enough to wedge herself into the back of it. Ulrich sat on her feet, to keep them warm, with Heinrich below, both of them with their feet in their knapsacks. They tied themselves individually onto the rock above their heads in case one or another of them should be struck by lightning and fall out of the crack. They could shift their position by only an inch or two, and discomfort soon became agony. “The golden rule is to take no brandy because you feel the reaction more after. I knew this and insisted on it.” She fell asleep “quite often,” to be woken by thunderclaps and flashes, impressed in spite of everything by the power of the storm and the way the lightning made the rocks crackle and fizz like damp wood igniting. “As there was no further precaution possible I enjoyed the extraordinary magnificence of the storm with a free mind . . . and all the wonderful and terrible things that happen in high places . . . Gradually the night cleared and became beautifully starry. Between 2 and 3 the moon rose, a tiny crescent.”

  They longed for the warmth of the sun, but the dawn brought a blinding mist and a cutting, snow-laden wind. They emerged from their crack crippled with cold. Gertrude ate five ginger biscuits, two sticks of chocolate, a slice of bread, and a scrap of cheese with a handful of raisins; she now drank her tablespoon of brandy. For the next four hours the three figures inched their way down blindly, their ropes stiff and slippery with ice, in a gale-force wind that whirled around them in spirals of snow. The couloirs were now waterfalls. As soon as she cut a step in the ice, it filled with water. Always, in situations of extreme danger, Gertrude could somehow detach herself from her suffering and drive on. This extraordinary ability now allowed her to exercise the utmost courage. “When things are as bad as ever they can be you cease to mind them much. You set your teeth and battle with the fates . . . I know I never thought of the danger except once and then quite calmly.”

  That moment came later, after each one of the three had fallen at the same place, one after the other, spinning into the abyss and then brought up with a rib-cracking jerk as the rope held. They thought the worst was over, but they were wrong. Their nemesis came in a short slope of icy rock skirting the base of a tower. This had been difficult enough to climb when, aeons ago yet only yesterday, they had crawled their way up. Now it was covered with four inches of snow that hid every hold and crack. Beside it raced a cataract of watery snow. Both men—Ulrich beside her, Heinrich below—were too insecure to hold her, and the reaches of the next ten feet were too far apart. “We managed badly . . . I had to refix the extra rope on a rock a little below me so that it was practically no good to me. But it was the only possible plan. The rock was too difficult for me. I handed my axe down to Heinrich and told him I could do nothing but fall.”

  In this state of extreme tension, she acted precipitately. Heinrich did not have time to secure himself before she jumped. They both fell, tied together, head over heels down the ice corridor. But Ulrich, on hearing her say she was going to fall, had stuck his axe into a crack, hung on to it with one hand, and held the two of them with the other. Afterwards, he could hardly believe he had done it. Gertrude wrote, “It was a near thing and I felt rather ashamed of my part in it. This was the time when I thought it on the cards we should not get down alive.”

  She felt excruciating pain in her shoulders and back, probably caused by a torn muscle. The three of them were shaking with the wet and cold. The day ground on. At 8 p.m. they still had to cross several crevasses and get down the serac before they reached safety. A serac, a barrier of ice at the lower edge of a glacier, is very dangerous to negotiate because of the constant shifting and breaking under the pressure being exerted on it. It should never be crossed at night. But they were desperate. For half an hour they tried to light their lantern with wet matches under the shelter of Gertrude’s dripping skirt. Giving up on that, they began to grope forward in what was now pitch-black night, but straight away Heinrich fell into eight feet of soft snow. “That was the only moment of despair,” she recalled.

  Ahead of them was another night in the open on the glacier, in driving sleet. The men each carried a sack as a mattress of last resort, and Heinrich, gallantly and unusually, gave up his to Gertrude; while Ulrich put her feet, with his own, into the second sack. She passed the hours thinking of Maurice when he was fighting the Boers, commanding the Volunteer Service Company, Yorkshire Regiment. He had written of night after night spent sleeping out in the pouring rain, and assured her that he had been none the worse for it.

  In the grey light of the second dawn, crippled from exposure, they could hardly walk. They staggered on and at last, barely comprehending that they had reached safety, came to the end of their ordeal. Arriving back in the village of Meiringen after fifty-seven hours on the mountain, they found her hotel buzzing with anxiety about their fate. After a hot bath and supper in bed, Gertrude slept for twenty-four hours. Her hands and feet were frostbitten—her toes were so swollen and stiff that she had to delay her return to London for days until she could put on her shoes again. Her fingers recovered quickly enough for her to write the longest letter to her father ever, acknowledging that Domnul’s prognostications on the likelihood of her demise in the Alps had almost come true.

  From the glacier to the summit of the Finsteraarhorn is three thousand feet. It was only the final few hundred that had cheated them of glory. Their fifty-three hours on the rope had nearly all been endured in the worst possible weather, with winds that could have blown them off the mountain, in cold so intense that the snow froze on them and on the ropes as it fell; and, at times, in a mist that prevented them from seeing where their next step might take them. While her traverse of the Lauteraarhorn–Schreckhorn was her most important ascent, she will always be remembered for the expedition on the Finsteraarhorn. The attempt had been a failure, but a glorious one. Their safe retreat under such conditions was a tremendous performance. “There can be in the whole Alps few places so steep and so high. The climb has only been done three times, including your daughter’s attempt, and is still considered one of the greatest expeditions in the whole Alps,” Ulrich Führer wrote to Hugh. “The honour belongs to Miss Bell. Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished.”

  A year later, Gertrude took a couple of days out of a world tour to climb in the Rockies near Lake Louise. There, to her delight, she ran into three Swiss guides from the Oberland who teased her mercilessly, asking, “How did the gracious Fräulein enjoy the Finsteraarhorn?”

  Her last climb of note was the Matterhorn, in August 1904, from the Italian side and once more with Ulrich and Heinrich. Until she had notched up this last giant, she felt, she had unfinished business in the Alps. More than any other mountain in Switzerland, it is full of history. More fatal accidents have occurred on the Matterhorn than on any other Alpine peak. Gertrude had read and reread the account by Edward Whymper, the British climber who thirty-nine years previously had made the first
ascent of the Matterhorn, of the appalling descent on which four members of the party slipped and fell, only the breaking of the rope saving Whymper and the two remaining guides from the same fate. The deaths of his companions undoubtedly ruined his life: “Every night, do you understand, I see my comrades of the Matterhorn slipping on their backs, their arms outstretched, one after the other, in perfect order at equal distances . . . Yes, I shall always see them.”

  Gertrude knew the mountain so well by hearsay that every step was familiar. After an unpromising dawn, the weather cleared and they made the whole climb in comfort. Near the summit, they encountered the famously difficult Tyndall Grat overhang. A rope ladder was usually to be found at this point, but it had broken and been partially replaced by a fixed rope. They took two hours to climb twenty feet. “I look back to it with great respect. At the overhanging bit you had to throw yourself out on the rope and so hanging catch with your right knee a shelving scrap of rock from which you can just reach the top rung which is all that is left of the rope ladder. That is how it is done . . . and I also remember wondering how it was possible to do it.”

  Poor Heinrich found it “uncommonly difficult.” They reached the summit at 10 a.m. and came down the Swiss side, Whymper’s original route, which was now hung with the ropes of recent climbers. Gertrude described the descent as “. . . more like sliding down the bannisters than climbing.”

  The most recognizable of all mountain profiles, it is the Matterhorn that is portrayed in the memorial window to Gertrude in East Rounton church. At the top of the window, the mountain is pictured opposite a vignette of her on camelback, with palm trees behind. These two parts of her life were, indeed, in opposition, and her interests were now to focus on archaeology and the desert. The Matterhorn was her last great mountain. In 1926 Colonel E. L. Strutt, then editor of the Alpine Journal, wrote that in 1901–2 there had been no more prominent female mountaineer than Gertrude Bell:

  Everything that she undertook, physical or mental, was accomplished so superlatively well, that it would indeed have been strange if she had not shone on a mountain as she did in the hunting-field or in the desert. Her strength, incredible in that slim frame, her endurance, above all her courage, were so great that even to this day her guide and companion Ulrich Führer—and there could be few more competent judges—speaks with an admiration of her that amounts to veneration. He told the writer, some years ago, that of all the amateurs, men or women, that he had travelled with, he had seen but very few to surpass her in technical skill and none to equal her in coolness, bravery and judgment.

  Six

  DESERT TRAVEL

  Miss Gertrude Bell knows more about the Arabs and Arabia than almost any other living Englishman or woman.” These were the words of Lord Cromer, a former British Consul General in Egypt, in 1915, when, with no end to the First World War in sight, Gertrude’s knowledge would become the key to unlocking the stalemate.

  As a tourist in Jerusalem in 1900, she could not have known where and how far her arrival would lead her. It would be the beginning of her passion for the desert. Most of the world was profoundly ignorant about the territory that went by the all-encompassing name of “Arabia,” as if one race and one nation ruled all the uninhabitable deserts, fertile valleys, and inhospitable mountains, tribal territories, regions, imamates, sheikhdoms, and colonies that comprised its 1,293,062 square miles. Over 2 per cent of the global landmass, it reached in roughly rhomboid shape from the River Jordan near the eastern Mediterranean and the corner of the African continent, then south to the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, and northwards along the border of Persia to the Russian front, with Turkey forming its great northern lintel.

  This vast terrain was not given the name of “Middle East” until 1902, when the phrase was coined by the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. As far as the West was concerned, once the Suez Canal was cut in the 1860s, the desert routes formed by millennia of oriental camel trade became redundant. Once British steamships could conveniently reach India, before the days of the combustion engine and of oil, the great landmass ceased to be of interest to anyone beyond its southern shores and northern mountains, except its Turkish rulers in remote Constantinople. The countries known today as Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq were at that time undifferentiated regions of the Ottoman Empire.

  For several hundred years the Turks had been infiltrating, then taking over, the administration of the towns and the few large cities that ringed the deserts at the heart of the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire had systematically set about replacing the Sharia law, the divine law of Islam, with their own Napoleonic laws, and had introduced Turkish as the language of administration and education. The Turks drew leading Arab figures into the Turkish web, rewarding them for loyalty until its gentle hold on Arabia had become a vice-like grip. All this was kept in place by systematic corruption and the careful fostering of enmity between its peoples. But, as Gertrude soon discovered, Ottoman power petered out only a few miles into the wilderness: there the Bedouin sheikhs did as they pleased, defending their precious wells, camel routes, and sparse grazing grounds against their neighbours and rivals. The deserts remained lawless, only to be crossed, as Gertrude would so courageously cross them, by arming herself with a mastery of the language, politics, and customs of the Bedouin tribes, until she was welcomed to their tents.

  For all that the religion of Islam predominated and the Arabs were in the majority, the towns of Arabia were extraordinarily cosmopolitan. The few Jews who survived the destruction of their communities by the Romans in the first century AD had taken shelter, continuing as traders, where they could. Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Armenians, and Assyrians both Christian and Muslim had thrived on the camel-borne trade between India, Europe, and Africa. They profited from the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and served the Turks as minor officials.

  Most cosmopolitan of all was Jerusalem. Continually invaded over the centuries since the Romans left, it had become ostensibly an Arab town, being merged into the Ottoman Empire in 1840. From then on it had been a focus for every European nation that wanted to affirm its religious history. The French, British, Germans, Italians, and Russians in particular had built churches, hospitals, and colleges there. By the time Gertrude arrived, the Jewish community was gaining influence, with increasing numbers of refugee settlements. With a population of seventy thousand, Jerusalem was an axis of cultures and special interests at the entrance to Arabia.

  Gertrude’s career as a desert traveller did not begin until she was thirty-one. She had accepted a Christmas invitation from Nina Rosen, an old friend, now wife of the German Consul at Jerusalem.

  The German consulate was small, having only three bedrooms. The two little Rosen boys shared one, and Nina’s sister Charlotte was installed in the other. Gertrude intended to stay in Jerusalem several months. She booked herself into the Hotel Jerusalem, two minutes’ walk from the consulate, where she would join the family for meals and expeditions. On 13 December she wrote home:

  My apartment consists of a very nice bedroom and a big sitting room, both opening on to a small vestibule which in its turn leads out on to the verandah which runs all along the first story of the hotel courtyard with a little garden in it. I pay 7 francs a day including breakfast . . . My housemaid is an obliging gentleman in a fez who brings me my hot bath in the morning . . . “The hot water is ready for the Presence” says he. “Enter and light the candle” say I. “On my head” he replies. That means it’s dressing time.

  Settling into a Middle Eastern hotel, be it in Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, or Haifa, would become a happy ritual, an almost sacred preliminary to the extensive organization required at the start of Gertrude’s desert expeditions. At this particular moment she was wanting only to buy a horse and begin a new course of Arabic, but these initial arrangements set a pattern that would never vary. She would always book two rooms with a veranda or view, and turn one room i
nto a work space for the campaign ahead; she would stipulate two armchairs and two tables, and banish all unnecessary furniture. Having unpacked her books and maps she would trail cigarette ash across the room as she tacked up her pictures with the small hammer and nails she had brought for the purpose. “I spent the morning unpacking and turning out the bed and things out of my sitting room; it is now most cosy—two armchairs, a big writing table, a square table for my books, an enormous Kiepert* map of Palestine . . . and photographs of my family on the walls. There is a little stove in one corner and the wood fire in it is most acceptable.”

  On this first visit, she at once engaged a teacher and set herself six Arabic lessons a week. The rest of the time before Christmas she would spend mainly riding, and joining the Rosens and their children in festive activities such as painting walnuts gold to decorate the Christmas tree. On Christmas Eve they all attended high mass at the Franciscan church in Bethlehem, before joining a candlelight procession to the Grotto of the Nativity.

  Gertrude already spoke French and Italian, her Persian was as good as her German, and she understood a little Hebrew. She would learn Turkish easily, but it would be the only language she did not retain. Arabic proved to be far more difficult than she had anticipated. Slow progress in this most difficult of languages, however, did not stop her reading verses of Genesis in Hebrew before dinner, for light relief. The first fortnight of her Arabic lessons brought her to the brink of despair:

  I may say in passing that I don’t think I shall ever talk Arabic . . . It is an awful language . . . There are at least three sounds almost impossible to the European throat. The worst is a very much aspirated H. I can only say it by holding down my tongue with one finger, but then you can’t carry on a conversation with your finger down your throat, can you? I should like to mention that there are five words for a wall and 36 ways of forming the plural.