Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  On her last evening he played a game with her, showing her a photograph or drawing at random from one of his books, and asking her to identify it. She thought she must have passed the test, for at the end of the evening he paid her the compliment of inviting her to write a book review for the magazine. The book was by Josef Strzygowski, the controversial Viennese archaeologist who looked to the Orient for origins and influences on the West. He was noted for a conviction—debatable—that the antecedents of Christian buildings could be traced to Iran. Writing about any book by Strzygowski would require a delicate balance of views, but Gertrude was not daunted. She spoke to Reinach of her forthcoming journey, and he encouraged her to examine Roman and Byzantine ruins and learn about the impact of these civilizations upon the region. Of the two empires, the Byzantine was then the smaller and less developed field: from now on it would become her special field of study. He would publish her essay, Reinach told her, and they parted company warmly. She would meet him again in Paris after her trip, and he promised to unravel for her some of the mysteries of Nabataean and Safaitic inscriptions.

  In January 1905 she set off from Beirut, buying herself two strong horses and aiming south along the coast, riding astride. Her crew was small. She took a couple of mules, carrying her own green waterproof tent bought in London, a travelling canvas bath and extra pistols, as well as lesser gifts bought locally to give, as necessary, to sheikhs.

  The journey began badly and became much worse before she ended up in Konya in Anatolia, nine hundred miles later. Even before she had covered the 150 miles from Beirut to Jerusalem, “the mud was incredible. We waded . . . for an hour at a time knee deep, the mules fell down, the donkeys almost disappeared, and the horses grew wearier and wearier.” Fever delayed her, then ice. She had her fur jacket from Paris, but otherwise only two small trunks. In the Jordan Valley the hundred-foot ravines of mud, washed by falling rain, became so slippery that she nearly lost a horse. She arrived twenty miles north of the Dead Sea, in Salt, so saturated that she took shelter in a house: “My host,” she wrote home, “. . . his nephew and his small boys held it a point of hospitality not to leave me for a moment, and they assisted with much interest while I changed my boots and gaiters and even my petticoat, for I was deeply coated in mud.”

  Her declared intention was to revisit the Jebel Druze without contacting the Turkish authorities, who would remember how she had slipped through their fingers before. They would have heard that she was in the area and insist on giving her a military escort, which would herald the end of her plans to travel from sheikh to sheikh and site to site in western Syria. Her now sound knowledge of the language was the only key she needed. Her host in Salt passed her on to his brother-in-law Namoud, a well-to-do merchant east of Madeba, who would take good care of her. To reach him, she would be moving a day’s march east, and beyond the Turkish authorities.

  Poring over her map with her, Namoud was able to tell her exactly how to get to the Jebel Druze and avoid the Turks. But now came a delay in the form of a phenomenal storm. Like castaways on an island shore, a group of Bedouins of the Beni Sakhr tribe, plus three of the Sherarat, were washed out of their tents and joined Gertrude and her crew, all taking shelter in the enormous cave where Namoud and his people lived with their twenty-three cows. It was a group of Beni Sakhr who had menaced Gertrude on her trip to Petra, before she had learnt how to enlist their friendship and help. Now they made her one of themselves. “Mashallah! Bint Arab,” they declared—“As God has willed: a daughter of the desert.”

  In the desert, word travels almost by magic. Now a kinsman of the sheikh of the Daja arrived, to act as escort (rafiq) for Gertrude over the four days’ journey into Druze territory. As warm as she could make herself in her fur, and smoking Egyptian cigarettes, Gertrude sat by the fire in the damp cave and observed the shades of difference between the three tribes and the complexities of their politics. After a few subsequent questions to Namoud and her crew, she was able to summarize the information in the clearest way. She noted that the Sherarat, though generally considered by the others to be base-born, sold the best camels in Arabia; that there was blood between the Sherarat and the Sakhr, that the Sakhr were allied to the Howeitat tribe, and that both were enemies of the Druze and the Beni Hassan, who were allied in their turn to the Daja.

  She was soon the guest of the sheikh of the Daja, and was struck, in the course of conversation, by the tribe’s knowledge of current affairs and of poetry. The recitations accompanied the evening gossip concerning the latest ghazzus—tribal raids—and tales of Turkish oppression. Sitting in Sheikh Fellah’s goat-hair tent, with his harem curtained off on the far side, she became more than a guest—she became an equal.

  I produced the Muallakat [pre-Muhammadan poems] and three or four examples for the use of various words. This excited much interest, and we bent over the fire to read the text which was passed from hand to hand . . . I spent a most enjoyable evening . . . telling them how things are in Egypt. Egypt is a sort of Promised Land, you have no idea what an impression our government there has made on the Oriental mind.

  A day further on, her Daja guide led her to a camp of Beni Hassan, where they found despondency. They had just missed a ghazzu by five hundred riders of combined Sakhr and Howeitat tribesmen, who had carried off two thousand head of cattle and many tents—“I could not help regretting a little,” she wrote, “that the ghazu had not waited till today that we might have seen it.” Meanwhile, it was the Feast of Sacrifice. Gertrude drew a veil over the killing of three camels, but joined in with the firing of guns at sunset: “I too contributed—by request—in a modest way, with my revolver, the first, and I expect the only, time I shall use it.”

  A grim ruined castle at Salkhad, a town of black lava built into the southern slope of a volcano, provided compensation for missing the excitement in the Beni Hassan camp. Dining on the evening of her arrival, she heard wild singing and gunfire outside in the darkness. Stepping out of her tent, she saw a fire burning on the castle tower. So she left her supper, scrambled up the mountainside, and came upon a ghazzu in the making, a retaliation for a Sakhr raid that had recently carried off five thousand sheep belonging to the Druze. She described the scene:

  Tomorrow the Druzes are going forth, 2000 horsemen, to recapture their flocks, and to kill every man, woman and child of the Sakhr that they may come across. The bonfire was a signal to the countryside. There at the top we found a group of Druzes, men and boys, standing in a circle and singing a terrible song. They were all armed and most of them carried bare swords . . .

  She approached and listened, spellbound, to the words of the war song:

  “Oh Lord our God! Upon them! Upon them!” Then half a dozen or so stepped into the circle, each shaking his club or his drawn sword in the face of those standing round. “Are you a true man? Are you valiant?” . . . the swords glistened and quivered in the moonlight. Then several came up to me and saluted me: “Upon thee be peace!” they said. “The English and the Druze are one!” I said: “Praise be to God! We too are a fighting race.”

  And if you had listened to that song you would know that the finest thing in the world is to go out and kill your enemy.

  The ceremony ended with a headlong rush down the mountainside. Gertrude, carried away by the thrill of it all, ran with them. In the valley she stopped, let them pass, and stood listening for a few minutes before returning slowly to her tent. She was the first woman who had ever been to the Safeh, that wild territory continually swept at the time by tribal raids from both north and south. For the rest of the journey she would ride fully armed.

  Bad as had been the weather throughout, it worsened. Soon they were fighting their way through deep snow and ten degrees of frost:

  . . . it was more abominable than words can say. The mules fell down in snow drifts, the horses reared and bucked, and if I had been on a side-saddle we should have been down half a dozen times, but on this beloved saddle one can sit straight and close. So we plunged
on . . . till at last we came out on to a world entirely white. The last hour I walked and led my horse for he broke through the deep snow at every step.

  At the Druze village of Saleh where she took shelter, she found that the male inhabitants knew the name of the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and were interested in Lord Salisbury, the former Prime Minister, expressing polite regret to hear that he had died. “The real triumph of eloquence was when I explained to them the fiscal question, and they all became Free Traders on the spot.”

  Leaving Druze territory, she sheltered for two nights with some Ghiath tribesmen, whose tents were smoky and full of fleas. She wrote to Florence that the bath that followed, back in her own tent, was one of the most delightful she had ever had. Arriving in Damascus, she was greeted by an invitation from the Governor, and learnt that there had been three telegrams a day from Salkhad about her disappearance. She had become a Person in Syria too.

  She entered the great mosque, leaving her shoes at the door, and was much moved by the evening prayers: “Islam is the greatest republic in the world, there is neither class nor race inside the creed . . . I begin to see dimly what the civilization of a great Eastern city means—how they live, what they think; and I have got on to terms with them.”

  Being a Person, she soon saw, was not always an advantage. Later in her journey she was to discover that she had been followed in Damascus, unaware, by a police “minder.” She arrived in Homs, a hundred miles further on, a celebrity, to find that she could not even take a casual walk through the bazaar because of the interest she excited—“Tiresome, for I was never without the company of fifty or sixty people. It’s one of the most difficult things I know to keep one’s temper when one is constantly surrounded and mobbed . . . I hereby renounce in despair the hope of ever again being a simple, happy traveller.” She had to employ a soldier to keep the crowd at bay, and then to fend off the authorities who wanted to give her eight watchmen for the night, when she refused to have more than two.

  Escorted by travelling Kurds and a couple of handcuffed prisoners, she moved on to Aleppo and the Anatolian border, where floods and broken bridges awaited her. She paused to explore the place where the Syrian hermit Simeon Stylites lived for the last thirty-seven years of his life upon the tops of a series of pillars, and considered how different he must have been from her. In pouring rain she tried to copy carvings, using her cloak to protect her notebook. “The devil take all Syrian inscriptions!”

  The weather suddenly changed. It became so hot that the ground steamed, and mosquitoes plagued her tent. Her new Turkish muleteers were sulky and quarrelsome. For the first time she wished she were a man:

  There was nothing for it but to hold one’s tongue, do the work oneself, and having seen that the horses were fed, I went to bed supperless because no one would own that it was his duty to light the fire! . . . there are moments when being a woman increases one’s difficulties. What my servants needed was a good beating and that’s what they would have got if I had been a man—I seldom remember being in such a state of suppressed rage!

  A short while later, after a day spent trying to copy inscriptions and take photographs in ruins lying deep in snake-infested grass, she came back to another supperless and tentless camp, lost her temper, and lashed out at her muleteers with her riding crop. They infuriated her even more by smiling and sitting down on another tent pack. She reached Adana and, as if by Providence, she was recommended a new servant: Fattuh, an Armenian Catholic with a wife in Aleppo. Fattuh was destined to become her Jeeves, the man she described as “the alpha and omega of all.” She hired him as a cook, and it became a shared joke between the two of them that it was the one skill he never mastered—but she never again had to wait for her tent to be put up. He accompanied her on all her travels thereafter. He was clever, a superb manager of muleteers, brave, humorous, and devoted to her. She would repay the compliment by her care of him when he fell ill at Binbirkilisse in 1907. Once only, after a most exhausting day’s travelling, did she vent her fury on him. Most uncharacteristically, she sought him out a little later and humbly apologized. Two weeks after he had joined her crew, she was writing: “Fattuh, bless him! The best servant I have ever had, ready to cook my dinner or push a mule or dig out an inscription with equal alacrity . . . and to tell me endless tales of travel as we ride, for he began life as a muleteer at the age of ten and knows every inch of ground from Aleppo to Van and Bagdad.”

  From Konya, with great relief, she took the train to Binbirkilisse. Her attention had been drawn to this fortress city of ruined churches and monasteries by Strzygowski’s 1903 book Kleinasien (“Asia Minor”), in which he concentrated on the early Byzantine monuments. She had brought the book in her saddle-bag all the way from Beirut. Her own explorations there could be undertaken daily, commuting from Konya. Returning one evening to her hotel, she ran into the great ecclesiastical archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, whose books on the Church and the Roman Empire stood on the shelves of her study at home. “We fell into each other’s arms and made great friends,” she told her parents. She had spotted something in a half-obliterated inscription in a cave in Binbirkilisse which she believed was a date. Together, and with Mrs. Ramsay, they caught the train and she was able to show it to him. She was correct, and it was not long before they made a pact to return in a year or two to make a thorough investigation of the ruins and to try and date them with the help of the inscription.

  The deeper she penetrated into the East, the greater became her respect for the people:

  Race, culture, art, religion, pick them up at any point you please down the long course of history, and you shall find them to be essentially Asiatic . . . Some day I hope the East will be strong again and develop its own civilization, not imitate ours, and then perhaps it will teach us a few things we once learnt from it and have now forgotten, to our great loss.

  On her return to Rounton in June, she would write to Valentine Chirol: “Did I tell you I was writing a travel book? Well I am. It’s the greatest fun . . . It’s Syria from underneath, what they think of it, the talk I hear round my camp fires, the tales they tell me as they ride with me, the gossip of the bazaar.” The Desert and the Sown, published in 1907, is still a classic of travel writing.

  By the time of her 1909 journey to the Middle East, Gertrude’s copious diaries had become virtually unreadable. They are a mixture of exhaustive archaeological detail, abbreviated notes about people and anything they said to her of a political or economic nature, and myriad details of daily desert life occasionally laced with flashes of adventure.* They sometimes slip into Turkish or Arabic. It would often happen that she wrote these notes around midnight after ten or twelve hours’ travel and an evening of multi-lingual conversation in a desert tent or gilded embassy.

  Why did she do so? Why did this wealthy young woman spend years of her prime learning some of the most difficult languages in the world and make great efforts in order to pit herself against truly appalling conditions and great dangers and go to places so obscure that they did not figure on any contemporary map? An independent woman of great ability, she inherited the purposeful curiosity of Lowthian Bell, acknowledged worldwide for his scientific breakthroughs and technological achievements. For Gertrude, at first, curiosity predominated over purpose. She was well aware that climbing, for instance, was not an adequate aim in life. Conquering a mountain belonged in the category of human achievement, but it helped no one but yourself. Usually, as soon as she excelled in one project, she moved on to the next. Driven by her need to test herself, she veered towards challenges tinged with danger and excitement.

  When she discovered desert travel, the challenges suddenly proliferated into an all-embracing personal experiment of which she would never reach the end. There were languages to perfect, customs to learn, new kinds of human being to plumb, archaeology and history to explore, the techniques of surveying and navigation, photography and cartography to acquire. There was the risky business of staying alive a
nd reaching her goal; and the intoxication of asserting her own identity far from the world where she would have been recognized first and foremost as a Bell, the spinster daughter of Hugh, heiress granddaughter of Lowthian.

  Her adventures were not an attempt to make herself famous, or elevate herself into high society. All her life she rejected publicity, and had less and less interest in the aristocracy unless it came with a high degree of ability. Hugh, while maintaining the respect of government and business, had deliberately decided not to make the conventional follow-up moves—buying a country estate, spending time in London clubs, acquiring a peerage—to take the Bells from successful leaders of industry to members of the upper class. He had no time for men who acquired prestige only through their titles and the privileges that went with them. In an era when he would have counted more as a lord than as a man of achievement, he wanted to be recognized for his expertise, his business acumen, and his civil leadership. Similarly, as a member of the third Bell generation, Gertrude was not using her inherited power and position in the enterprises she took on. The only help she accepted was the family money that funded her exploits. For everything else she depended on her intellect, her courage, and her thirst for learning.

  As the prospect of marriage and children receded, she felt an everincreasing need for self-fulfilment in diversionary activities. At a certain point, even this would not be enough, but when that moment came, life would present her with a purpose of world importance. For the time being, she was beginning to make her name in the world of affairs. Up to the First World War, affairs of state, domestic and foreign, were conducted as comprehensively at dinner parties, soirées, and embassy receptions as in government offices. She accessed this world, and was becoming recognized in it, as an expert in her areas of interest.