Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  She tried out a few horses before settling on a small and lively Arab stallion. She paid about £18 sterling, and hoped to sell him for the same when she left. She wrote home: “a charming little horse, a bay, very well bred with lovely movements, rather showy, but light and strong and delightful in every way . . . Will you order Heath to send me out a wide grey felt sun hat (not double, but it must be a regular Terai †shape and broad brimmed) to ride in, and to put a black velvet ribbon round it with straight bows.”

  She was delighted by all she saw in and around Jerusalem. Riding down to the Jordan, then to the Dead Sea—“very sticky!”—and the Virgin’s Tomb—“shut!”—she began to feel constrained by the stiff posture demanded by riding side-saddle. Amongst the varied local costumes, her habit seemed clumsy and obstructive. With Friedrich’s and Nina’s encouragement, she started to ride astride. She tried out a “masculine” saddle and liked it so much she bought one of her own. When the sisters at the nearby convent made her a divided riding skirt, the first of many, her sense of freedom was complete. Pulling away from the well-used tourist roads busy with Thomas Cook caravans and carriages, she would gallop off on her own, raising clouds of dust as she leapt stone walls, whooping for joy, one hand hanging on to the newly arrived terai hat with its velvet ribbon:

  The chief comfort of this journey is my masculine saddle, both to me and to my horse. Never, never again will I travel on anything else; I haven’t known real ease in riding until now. You mustn’t think I haven’t got a most elegant and decent divided skirt, however, but as all men wear skirts of sorts too, that doesn’t serve to distinguish me. Till I speak the people always think I’m a man and address me as Effendim!*

  Exploring the hills and valleys, she would dismount to pick hyacinths, bee-orchis, or cyclamen, sometimes squinting up at the Anchorites entering their caves high above, then drawing their rope ladders up after them. The Bible came alive to her: every time she wanted to buy butter and bread, her route led her past Herod’s house and the Pool of Bethesda. She started to take her camera everywhere she went, photographing the gracefully robed women she passed in the streets. She watched a mass baptism of singing Russian pilgrims, amused at the way the monks seemed to take pleasure in holding them under water until they struggled for breath. On the outskirts of Jerusalem, she stopped to look at an encampment of black Bedouin tents, appearing out of the desert one evening, then gone without a trace the next.

  A telegram, then letters, from Red Barns interrupted her pleasure with sad news. Aunt Ada, who had helped bring up the motherless Gertrude and Maurice before Hugh remarried, had died. Her father was suffering from a painful rheumatic illness, and Maurice was preparing to depart for the Boer War. Her concern for the two men frequently breaks through her correspondence: she was “much bothered” about her brother—it was “an awful blow” to hear he had left for South Africa. “Rode out in very bad spirits . . . very miserable,” she wrote in her diary.

  It was March 1900. In spite of bad weather, Gertrude decided to make an expedition of ten days or so into the Moab hills, riding some seventy miles down the east bank of the Dead Sea. It would be her first journey with her own caravan and its crew of three—a cook and a couple of muleteers—none of whom could speak a word of English. She would pick up a guide along the route, probably a Turkish soldier travelling between garrisons.

  As soon as she reached the Jordan plain, she found herself waist-deep in a wilderness of flowers. In the first of many letters home addressed “From my tent” she described the scene before her:

  sheets and sheets of varied and exquisite colour—purple, white, yellow, and the brightest blue and fields of scarlet ranunculus. Nine-tenths of them I didn’t know, but there was the yellow daisy, the sweet-scented mauve wild stock, a great splendid sort of dark purple onion, the white garlic and purple mallow, and higher up a tiny blue iris and red anemones and a dawning pink thing like a linum.

  Beyond were great pale swaths of corn sown by the Bedouin as they passed, which would be reaped when they returned. Her Arabic improving by the day, she talked principally to Muhammad, the handsome Druze muleteer who ate only rice, bread, and figs. She liked him, and everything he told her about his tribal homeland. She decided that one day she would ride into the Jebel Druze, the mountains to the southwest of Syria, to meet his kinsmen. Buying yoghurt from a family of the Ghanimat tribe, she stopped for a rudimentary conversation with the women and children, noting with surprise that they were eating grass “like goats”: “The women are unveiled. They wear a blue cotton gown 6 yards long which is gathered up and bound round their heads and their waists and falls to their feet. Their faces, from the mouth downwards, are tattooed with indigo and their hair hangs down in two long plaits on either side . . . Isn’t it a joke being able to talk Arabic!”

  At the crusader fort of Kerak, where she should have turned back for Jerusalem, she changed her mind and added another eight days to her journey: she would go on to the Nabataean ruins of Petra. She wanted to see the famous “treasury,” a delicate two-storey façade carved out of pink sandstone, approached through a narrow chasm. When a Turkish official turned up to check on her caravan and its destination, she realized she would have to get authorization. Pretending to be German—“for they are desperately afraid of the English”—she asked him to take her to the local governor, from whom she obtained permission to travel on south, with a soldier as her guide. Writing to her parents that she was doubling the anticipated length of her journey, she added that she would, naturally, have telegraphed them to ask their permission if only it had been possible. It was not the last time she would go through the pantomime of following English codes of conduct, while doing exactly what she liked.

  Accompanied by the guide, the little party made their way through companies of storks picking off a cloud of locusts, soon finding themselves next to a camp of Beni Sakhr, the warrior tribe who had been last to submit to Turkish rule. As yet she was ignorant of the rules of the desert. She did not know that whenever she came upon an encampment she should immediately pay a courtesy visit to the sheikh in his tent. And with a Turkish soldier accompanying her instead of a paid local guide, she soon ran into trouble. Her caravan was threatened twice by several of the forbidding Beni Sakhr, armed to the teeth. Appearing out of nowhere, they suddenly sprang up on both sides, and backed off only when Gertrude was joined by the Turk, who was following behind. She was undeterred: “Don’t think I have ever spent such a wonderful day.”

  Soon on the road to Mecca, the route of the annual Haj, she found that it was not a road at all. At one-eighth of a mile wide, it consisted of hundreds of parallel tracks trodden out by the immense caravan of pilgrims on their inward and outward journeys. She learnt the ABC of desert travel as she went. She found the maps full of errors and often underestimating distances. They had water, but soon ran out of barley, charcoal, and all food but rice, bread, and a little pot of meat. They stopped at a village where she thought they might be able to buy a lamb, or failing that a hen, but drew a blank. “What the people in Wady Musa live on I can’t imagine. They hadn’t so much as milk.”

  By the time they reached Petra, her delight at the magical beauty of the Corinthian façade and the amphitheatre beyond was rudely interrupted by pangs of hunger: “. . . the charming façade . . . the most exquisite proportions . . . the tombs extremely rococo . . . but time has worn them and weather has stained the rock with exquisite colours—I wish the lamb had come!” Arriving back late at her tent at Wady Musa, she found “a surprising lot of long black sort of slugs” on the ground, but, nonetheless, she appears to have slept well. From Petra she turned back north towards the Dead Sea, and that night pitched her tent alongside a camp of gypsies. She shared their supper of sour-cream cheese, eaten with the fingers, and a single cup of coffee passed from lip to lip. Darkness fell, a crescent moon appeared, and the music began. She wrote to Hugh:

  . . . the fire of dry thorns flickered up—faded and flickered again and showed th
e circle of men crouching on the ground, their black and white cloaks wrapped round them and the woman in the middle dancing. She looked as though she had stepped out of an Egyptian fresco. She wore a long red gown bound round her waist with a dark blue cloth, and falling open in front to show a redder petticoat below. Round her forehead was another dark blue cloth bound tightly and falling in long ends down her back, her chin was covered by a white cloth drawn up round her ears and falling in folds to her waist and her lower lip tattooed with indigo! Her feet, in red leather shoes, scarcely moved but all her body danced and she swept a red handkerchief she held in one hand round her head, and clasped her hands together in front of her impassive face. The men played a drum and a discordant fife and sang a monotonous song and clapped their hands and gradually she came nearer and nearer to me, twisting her slender body till she dropped down on the heap of brushwood at my feet, and kneeling, her body still danced and her arms swayed and twisted round the mask like face . . . Oh, Father dearest, don’t I have a fine time! I’m only overcome by the sense of how much better it is than I deserve.

  Suddenly the weather changed, and it became excessively hot. Gertrude’s face was burnt red, and when she rode back into the plain she found that the brilliant flowers she had passed earlier had all died and turned to hay.

  It was the end of her first expedition. She had travelled 135 miles in eighteen days, and learnt one more lesson: to wrap up well against the sun. On future journeys into the Syrian desert she would wear the traditional white cloth, the keffiyeh, tied over her hat and wound over her lower face, and a fine blue veil with holes cut for her to see through. Her white linen divided skirt would be partly covered by a large masculine coat in khaki cotton, with deep pockets. Effectively, though unintentionally, she would disguise herself as a man.

  The Rosens had promised Gertrude a week’s expedition north to Bosra, at the edge of the Druze mountains, a Roman city with a castle and triumphal arches. By April, however, she had already taken off alone into the desert for weeks at a time, and was beginning to think of this scheme as a rather tame affair. When the Rosens returned to Jerusalem, she said she would press on into the mountains to meet some of Muhammad’s fellow Druze, and perhaps even aim for the Syrian desert as far as Palmyra, some two hundred miles beyond. Her friends’ reaction, if they expressed one, is unrecorded. The fierce Druze, a closed Muslim sect, were considered by the Turks to be dangerous and generally regarded as subversive. The Rosens must have had misgivings about Gertrude’s travelling among them as a woman alone.

  The journey began in comfort, with two cooks, Muhammad, and two other muleteers, plus five mules to carry the equipment. In her diaries, written in her tent almost nightly, she noted every archaeological ruin passed and every tribal encampment: Abbad, Beni Hassan, Adwan, Hawarni, and Anazeh. There are few anecdotes amongst the mass of information, but she records that when a small boy stole her riding crop, she chased after him, boxed his ears, and took it back.

  At Bosra, she walked around town in the way normal for many Arab villages—on the rooftops—and began tiresome negotiations with the mudir, the local Arab authority, about the rest of her journey. The proper procedure was to request permission to enter Druze territory, but she knew she was unlikely to get it. She therefore pretended that her destination was Salkhad, to the north-east, where she wished to look at the ruins. She was not the first desert traveller to use archaeology as the ostensible motive for a journey undertaken for quite different reasons, but it was the first time she had done so. By now, her Arabic was good enough to encompass the formality and high courtesies of the language. She was beginning to speak it on two levels—a patois, and a purer dialect. She re-enacted the scene for her parents:

  “Where was I going?”

  “To Damascus.”

  “God has made it! There is a fine road to the west with beautiful ruins.”

  “Please God I shall see them! But I wish first to look upon Salkhad.”

  “Salkhad! There is nothing there at all, and the road is very dangerous. It cannot happen.”

  “It must happen.”

  “There has come a telegram from Damascus to bid me to say the Mutussarif fears for the safety of your Presence.” (This isn’t true.)

  “English women are never afraid.” (This also isn’t true!)

  Her next interview, with the head of the town’s military, went equally badly, partly because he was in his shirtsleeves, being shaved by an orderly throughout. He had his eyes nicely blackened with kohl, she remarked drily, but otherwise his toilet was incomplete.

  She did not like the mudir, and she liked him even less when he turned up at her tent late at night. She hastily blew out her candle and told her cook to say that she was asleep. Eavesdropping on the conversation, she heard the man warn that she was to go nowhere without permission. Whenever she was threatened with any kind of restriction, she would act fast. She struck camp at two in the morning, shivering in her thin summer clothing, and by dawn was well on her way northwards, beyond Salkhad, where she knew the mudir might well have her followed.

  She was the first woman ever to travel alone in this territory. Even her crew were alarmed at what might happen. But luck was on her side, and her idyll with the Jebel Druze began as it would go on. From the moment she arrived at her first Druze village, in the shadow of Mount Kuleib, she was warmly welcomed and treated with kindness and respect:

  The women were filling their earthenware jars . . . and at the water stood the most beautiful boy of 19 or 20. I dismounted to water my horse; the boy came up to me, took my hands and kissed me on both cheeks, rather to my surprise. Several others came up and shook hands with me . . . Their eyes look enormous, blacked with kohl, men and women alike; they are dark, straight browed, straight shouldered, with an alert and gentle air of intelligence which is extraordinarily attractive.

  With the boy, Nusr ed Din, to accompany her, she made for the village of Areh, mentioned in her guidebook as the homeland of the paramount sheikh of the Druze. In Areh, men came out to greet her, linked their little fingers with hers, and led her into a house where she sat on cushions and drank coffee: “The sense of comfort and safety and confidence and of being with straight speaking people, was more delightful than I can tell you,” she told her parents.

  She knew by now that it would be courteous to ask to pay her respects to their chief, Yahya Beg, and in asking if she might meet him, she took the correct next step in the elaborate desert etiquette whereby the visitor earns the protection of the tribe. The old warrior, the first tribal chief that she got to know, had just been released from five years’ imprisonment in a Turkish jail. He was a splendid figure: “He is the most perfect type of the Grand Seigneur, a great big man (40 to 50, I suppose), very handsome and with the most exquisite manners . . . He’s a king, you understand, and a very good king too, though his kingdom doesn’t happen to be a large one.”

  He piled up cushions for her on the floor, patted them, then beckoned her to join him and his men in their meal of meat and beans, which they ate with their fingers from a central plate. He asked her about her journey, and told Nusr ed Din and another Druze to show her all the archaeological ruins in the area, then to accompany her in safety to her next destination. Before she left, she asked permission to take his photograph. She learnt how far the protection of a paramount sheikh could stretch when she heard, weeks later, that Yahya Beg had continued to monitor her progress, sending messengers to ask villagers, “Have you seen a queen travelling, a consuless?” She already travelled in style, if not as elaborately as she would later on. The linen, glasses, knives, and forks that were her everyday ware must have been borrowed from the consulate.

  Undoubtedly she was attracted by these courteous warriors: before she left them she visited another village where, again, she was overwhelmed by the beauty of the men. Slightly embarrassed, perhaps, at writing of this to her family, she phrased her appreciation carefully: “They were a group of the most beautiful people you would
wish to see. Their average height was about 6 ft 1 in. and their average looks were as though you mixed up Hugo and you, Father.”

  She made a short stop in Damascus and travelled on towards Palmyra with three more Turkish soldiers, avoiding the tourist road and making diversions along the route. She learnt to be tough. Until now she had drawn the line at drinking murky water, but after two waterless days she closed her eyes and drank from pools alive with worms and insects, pretending to herself that she was drinking the snow and lemonade mixture you could buy in china bowls from the bazaars. Then: “We bought a lamb today. He was a perfect love and his fate cut me to the heart. I felt if I looked at him any longer I should be like Byron and the goose,* so I parted from him hastily—and there were delicious lamb cutlets for supper.”

  They moved slowly on through the desert, rising before dawn for the sake of the horses. Ahmed the guide rode in front, dressed in white; beside her were the black shadows of her three soldiers; and the mules, their bells tinkling, in her wake. The three camels came on at their own pace—they would all meet up in camp. She was struck again by the total silence of the desert, more intense even than on the mountaintops, she thought: there you heard a sort of echo caused by falling ice and stones. Here you heard nothing at all.

  Every day she was learning a new lesson in desert survival: she found that the sun could burn her feet right through her leather boots if she did not cover them, as well, in swaths of fabric. She recognized as mirages the “immense plaques of water” that never left the horizon; and she sewed herself a sleeping bag of muslin to protect herself from the sandflies at night. “I’m very proud of this contrivance,” she wrote home, “but if we have a ghazu [raid] of Arabs I shall certainly be the last to fly, and my flight will be as one who runs a sack race.”