Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  And so she made every effort to appear normal, putting up as good a show as she could muster over the family dinner, when the Bells renounced gossip for discussion of politics, agriculture, industry, books, and plays. Then she would wish them good night and go up to her room, where she chain-smoked, sometimes sitting on her bed with her head in her hands, or pacing the floor until the early hours. If there had been another way—if in her loneliness she could have overcome her resistance, dented her pride enough to consent to be Dick’s mistress—she might have borne it, but in the end she would tell herself, “Not in my father’s lifetime.” She would put the pain behind her, the only way she could.

  She had waited, hoping perhaps that something would change, until Dick left for Albania; and then she acted. She would escape into “wild travel” again, get away from the kind, half-comprehending regard of family and friends that made it all the harder. Damascus would be her jumping-off point. Again she spoke to herself the lines of Hafiz that had so well expressed her anguish over that earlier, slighter love affair with Henry Cadogan:

  Ah! When he found it easy to depart,

  He left the harder pilgrimage to me!

  Oh Camel-driver, though the cordage start,

  For God’s sake help me lift my fallen load,

  And Pity be my comrade of the road!

  She did not really care where she went. It was more important to get away; but her state of mind dictated that this should be an epic, momentous journey, and that she should be away a long time. She did not, at the moment, care very much whether she came back at all.

  How changed was her mood in this August of 1913 from the way she had felt in the spring—and how different were her shopping expeditions. She would take plenty of luggage this time and be ready for anything. First, there were her two English-made tents, one for bathing and sleeping in, one for eating and writing, both with a loose flap that could be tied back, laced shut, or used as a shady canopy. She ordered more of the skirts that she had designed with her tailor for riding horses in the Middle East: neither side-saddle habit nor breeches, but an ankle-length divided skirt with an apron panel. In the saddle, she would sweep this backward and gather the surplus material behind her and to one side, where it looked in profile like a bustle. When she dismounted, the panel fell around her like an apron and concealed the division. She bought lace and tucked-lawn evening gowns for dinners with consuls and sheikhs, for sitting at a dining-table at an embassy or cross-legged on a carpet in a tent. She would take her cigarette holders, silver cigarette cases, evening purses, a score of white or striped cotton shirts with mutton-chop shoulders and high rounded collars, tucked or frilled, with pearl buttons and tight cuffs. At the neck she would wear a man’s tie, or an oval pin.

  The list was a long one: she would take a dozen linen skirts stopping short of the ankle, nipped in to release fabric from her small waist; an entire caseful of shoes and boots for scrambling about amongst ruins and rocks—leather ones to the knees, canvas-laced ankle-boots; strap-and-button low-heeled shoes for evening; beige lisle stockings, silk underwear, and parasols; Purdy revolvers and a crate of rifles; theodolites; and some boxes of the Zeiss telescopes she would give as special gifts to sheikhs who helped her along the way. She bought a dozen shady linen and straw hats: if one blew off it would hardly be worth the trouble of descending from the camel to chase after it. As the temperature soared, a locally bought cotton keffiyeh could be substituted, caught round her head with a bright silk rope and fluttering out behind her to protect her shoulders from the sun.

  This time it would be winter in the desert, and she folded a fur coat and jacket into her Wolsey valise. The list continued: tweed travelling costumes, woollen cardigans, and a set of five-foot muslin bags with elastic drawstring necks, like big shoe bags, into which she would climb beneath the blankets in bed to protect herself from fleas and other insects; then the multiple little leather notebooks which she would use for her archaeological notes and as diaries; her two cameras and her film, reams of writing paper, compasses, cartography paper, pencils, pens, and ink; lavender soaps and bottles of eau de toilette, silver hairbrushes and candlesticks, linen sheets, and embroidered tablecloths; the surveying and map-projection instruments provided for her by the Royal Geographical Society; the specially made folding canvas bed and chair that would furnish her bedroom tent, and the canvas bath—“my luxury”—that before the end of the trip would double as a drinking trough for the camels; finally, medical supplies, cosmetics, and the all-important cartridges which she wrapped in white silk evening stockings and hid, pushing them down into the pointed toes of her shoes and boots.

  The journey she was undertaking began at last to excite her, not least because she had been seriously warned against it, but also because of the physical demands and geographical difficulties it posed. Her destination would be Hayyil, the almost mythical city at the centre of Arabia described by Charles M. Doughty, Dick’s intrepid geologist uncle, in his 1888 book Arabia Deserta, the book she had taken with her on every one of her expeditions. He had written grimly of two ill-starred visits there during a daunting two years travelling the border between the Arabian and Syrian deserts. At Hayyil he had been detained and nearly lost his life.

  In choosing Hayyil, she would be travelling to one of the most volatile and least known parts of the world. The ostensible purpose of the visit was to provide information for the Foreign Office. War with Germany was increasingly likely, and the attention of the British government was turning to the political situation in central Arabia, where Germany was cementing its ties with the Ottoman Empire by training their army, supplying them with arms and building railways.

  For a century the enmity between the two major forces in central Arabia, the Sauds and the Rashids, had been pivotal to the history of the peninsula. Britain was principally supplying arms and money to the charismatic but ferocious chieftain Abdul Aziz Abdurrahman al Saud, Hakim of Nejd—usually known as Ibn Saud.* This leader of the fanatical puritan Wahabi sect of Islam operated from the Saud capital, Riyadh, his authority growing as he won back the territories his forefathers had lost. The Ottoman government supported the opposing dynasty of Ibn Rashid of the Shammar federation, perhaps the cruellest, most violent tribe of Arabia. Now the Sauds were poised to strike at the Rashids, and it was to the Rashid stronghold Hayyil that Gertrude determined to go to first. At this stage, she harboured a second plan, to travel further south, to Riyadh, to collect further information that would be of interest, perhaps to the Foreign Office. Captain William Shakespear, setting out for Riyadh almost neck and neck with Gertrude, would get caught up in a battle between the Sauds and the Rashids fifteen months later, and be killed.

  The scope of the journey Gertrude was planning was extraordinary. She proposed to travel sixteen hundred miles by camel, taking a circular route south from Damascus, then east across the northern third of the Arabian peninsula, the landmass bounded by the Red Sea, the Gulf, and the Arabian Sea. Geographically and politically, a journey such as this was enough to daunt the most experienced of travellers. On a comparable expedition Charles Huber, most distinguished of Arabian explorers, had lost heart and turned back on his tracks only to be murdered by his own guides; and the Austrian Baron Nolde had been driven to suicide. Reaching Hayyil had become the desert traveller’s ultimate challenge. To penetrate this barren country would have been hazardous enough even if the Bedouin could have been relied upon to be friendly. Gertrude was proposing to travel into the arena of Saud–Rashid conflict at a time when events were moving to a climax.

  The first part of the journey would take her south to central Arabia and across the vast interior highland of Nejd, which stretches from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south. Then she would cross the shifting sands of the Nefud, becoming the first Westerner to cross that angle of the desert. She would leave the Nefud via the Misma mountains, a strange and unearthly place not unlike the Gothic visions of Gustave Doré, the nineteenth-century illustrator of Dante’s
Inferno. A landscape littered with rock pinnacles as high as ten-storey buildings, it had another extraordinary property: because of the flint in the rock formations, it was as black as night. She would then descend into the featureless dry plateau of granite and basalt grit, at the heart of which the snow-white medieval city of Hayyil floated like a mirage.

  Gertrude had thought about this expedition, and put it off, for a long time. She was by now so experienced a desert voyager that there was little she had not done. This time, for personal reasons, she wanted not only an escape, but a challenge that would test her to the limit—an adventure that would impress Dick Doughty-Wylie, cause him anxiety on her behalf, fix his attention. She wanted his admiration, even if she was never to return. She told her parents that she would leave her destination open and get advice in Damascus, but David Hogarth wrote to remind her that she already had reason to know that her project would not be approved, either by the Ottoman authorities or by the chief representative of Great Britain in Turkey, Sir Louis Mallet. This new ambassador in Constantinople (and friend of the Bell family) had advised her strongly against the journey while he was working at the Foreign Office in London. Four years previously a friend, Richmond Ritchie, had arranged for Gertrude to meet the Indian government’s Resident in the Persian Gulf while he was in England, to discuss the route to Hayyil. The Resident was Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Cox, a name that would come to mean much to her later. He too warned her against the journey, and especially against a southern route.

  In the book bag, along with the maps, her travelling set of pocket Shakespeare, and her well-thumbed copy of Arabia Deserta, she packed Pilgrimage to Nejd by Anne Blunt, who had visited Hayyil with her husband, Wilfrid, and had fallen foul of the Rashids. Gertrude had met her once at her stables in Cairo, wearing Bedouin costume and surrounded by wolves. She would have perused the book many times, noting Anne Blunt’s oracular “It was a lesson and a warning . . . that we were Europeans still among Asiatics, a warning that [Hayyil] was a lions’ den.”

  In her present state of mind, it was all one to Gertrude. She almost welcomed the danger and the warnings. This was to be a portentous journey. She did not know it, but it was to be her last desert expedition. Before it was all over she would have learnt the meaning of fear, wonderingly identifying this new sensation. The trip would allow her to provide the Foreign Office with detailed new information at a critical moment, essential data for imperial administrators, policymakers, and military geographers. It would also be the hardest and longest she had ever undertaken, bringing her face-to-face with thieves and murderers. She would come to wonder whether the game was worth the candle.

  For now, she wrote to Dick only of her intention of reaching Hayyil, and he was as worried as she could wish. An experienced traveller himself, and although fully comprehending her reasons for going, he was troubled by this perverse choice of destination and the length of time she would be outside the sphere of British influence. His anxiety comes through clearly in letters she received at her first port of call, Damascus. Resonant with the understatement that was de rigueur for a man of his class and profession, his letter went: “God go with you—and the luck of the world . . . I am nervous about you somehow, lest things should go wrong . . . south of Maan and from there to Hayil is surely a colossal trek. For your palaces your road your Baghdad your Persia I do not feel so nervous—but Hail from Maan—Inshallah!”

  On 27 November 1913 Gertrude arrived by boat, then train, in the Syrian capital of Damascus. She had travelled straight from Beirut. Because she was accompanied by such a pyramid of luggage, she omitted to visit T. E. Lawrence, spying on the Germans from Carchemish. “Miss Bell passed straight through,” he wrote to his brother with some disappointment. “[She] will not visit us till Spring.”

  Gertrude’s arrival at her favourite Damascus Palace Hotel caused the usual stir. She was the most famous British traveller of her day, male or female. Her new and sixth book, The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir, was soon to be published to much attention from archaeologists and historians of the Middle East. No one had yet heard of T. E. Lawrence, whose reputation did not eclipse hers until 1920, and then only because of a somewhat sensational biography. The hotel manager welcomed her with deep bows, champagne, and a basket of apricots in her suite. As the bellboys carried in trunk after trunk, she would have thrown open the windows and looked down on the teeming streets, late-flowering gardens, and all-night bazaars. Her melancholy was kept at bay for a while in this familiar city, now pleasantly red and gold in the mellow November sunlight.

  There were people to visit, things to do. She would have ordered black coffee and then started to unpack a few of her boxes on the bed and carpets, the room rapidly acquiring a familiar jumble and a miasma of cigarette smoke. As soon as she was settled, she contacted Muhammad al-Bessam, a wily and very wealthy wheeler-dealer currently buying up land around the line of the future Baghdad railway. She knew him, and she knew that he could locate for her the best riding camels and the best guide. He introduced her to Muhammad al-Marawi, who came highly recommended. He had travelled with Douglas Carruthers, the man who was to draw up her maps for the Royal Geographical Society when she returned to London. She had written from England for Fattuh, her old companion of the road, to meet her there. She was delighted to see him again when, on her second day, he arrived from Aleppo. As before, he would be responsible for her personal comfort on the road, putting up her tents, carrying the water for her bath, making up her complicated bed with the muslin bag, cheerfully unpacking her linen, silver, and china and setting her candlelit table for dinner before retiring to a respectful and ever-vigilant distance.

  Leaving him to continue her unpacking, she began at once to take up her contacts and to find out everything she could about the current state of tribal affairs around Hayyil. Almost immediately, she began writing home to reassure her parents, and almost immediately, the shade of a divergence from the truth began to creep into her letters. She wrote glibly to Florence on 27 November: “Muhammad says that it is perfectly easy to go to Nejd this year. It looks as though I have fallen on an exceedingly lucky moment and . . . the desert is almost preternaturally quiet . . . If I found it so I should certainly go. I will let you know anyhow from Madeba.”

  If Muhammad al-Marawi had in fact said this to Gertrude, he must have known better. Perhaps, like Bessam, whose advice she had also sought, he was too ready to pocket her money. Perhaps both believed that she would be certain to turn back long before she got to Nejd. It would have been extremely difficult to deter her, of course, but she appealed, next, to Hugh, as the spoilt daughter she had always been. She wrote as though his refusal would have brought her home on the next boat, but knowing that she could always twist him round her little finger: “I hope you will not say No. It is unlikely that you will because you are such a beloved father that you never say No to the most outrageous demands . . . Dearest beloved Father, don’t think me very mad or very unreasonable and remember always that I love you more than words can say.”

  Gertrude knew just how to go about organizing a caravan, but this would be the most elaborate she had ever undertaken. She needed seventeen camels, costing an average of £13 each with their saddles and cordage. “I must reckon to spend £50 on food,” she scribbled in her diary, “. . . £50 for presents such as cloaks, keffeyehs for the head, cotton cloth, etc.” Following the advice of Bessam, she would take £80 with her, and give £200 to the Rashid agent for a letter of credit which would permit her to draw the sum in Hayyil. Adding up her expenses, she was surprised to find them making a total of £601. She would need twice as much as she had brought, and would have to ask her father to telegraph the money through the Ottoman Bank. On 28 November, she wired him for £400—a not inconsiderable sum, the equivalent of £23,000 in today’s money—then hurried back to the hotel to write him a long letter of explanation: “This is not a gift for which I am asking. I am practically using all my next year’s income for this journey, but if I sit very
quiet and write the book of it . . . I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to pay it all back . . . The desert is absolutely tranquil and there should be no difficulty whatever in getting to Hayyil, that is Ibn al Rashid’s capital.”

  The fact that she had to explain the significance of Hayyil shows just how little she had told her father. Hugh, as always, poring over maps in the Rounton library with her latest letter in his hand, knew only what Gertrude wished him to know.

  As usual, she bared her soul to her friend Domnul, one of the few people she felt able to write to about her relationship with Doughty-Wylie: “I don’t know that it is an ultimate way out, but it is worth trying. As I have told you before it is mostly my fault, but that does not prevent it from being an irretrievable misfortune—for both of us. But I am turning away from it now, and time deadens even the keenest things.” In claiming most of the responsibility for her misery she may have been being disingenuous. It is more likely, given Domnul’s affection and respect for her, that she was putting a spin on the facts. It would have been awkward for her to explain that the love of her life would rather live with his wife. She might have preferred to stress what was after all no less than the truth—that she was the one to draw back from adultery.