Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  Meanwhile, she discussed her route with Muhammad. As her chief of staff and the man who would keep her crew in order, he would lead them through the Hamad desert and an uncharted region of the Nefud. In a photograph she took of him, with his moustache and curly Sinbad beard, he sits cross-legged on the ground holding a folded telescope and looking keenly into the camera lens from under his white keffiyeh. This was “the man of all others who I should have chosen,” she decided. That evening he accompanied her to dinner in the Maidan, the native bazaar quarter, to meet the Rashid agent who would collect Gertrude’s £200. In her description of him there is almost a suggestion of ill omen, as if she had a passing premonition of danger awaiting her in Hayyil:

  A curious figure, young, very tall and slight, wrapped in a gold embroidered cloak and his head covered with an immense gold bound camel’s hair robe which shadowed his crafty narrow face. He leant back among his cushions and scarcely lifted his eyes, talking in a soft slow voice . . . and told marvellous tales of hidden treasure and ancient wealth and mysterious writings . . . The men on either side of me murmured from time to time “Oh Beneficent, oh Ever Present!” as they listened . . . Finally we ate together and then—why then we all came back together on the electric tram!

  While she waited for the money from home, she bought camels and hired camel drivers with Muhammad, adding to her staff a smiling black African, Fellah, and the first rafiq of the trip, an escort from the Ghiyadh tribe. By employing a rafiq, travellers gained an ally whose paid companionship would protect them from attack by his own particular tribe. She would hire a score or more, one by one, as she encountered different tribes along the way.

  She toured the bazaars, haggling for cheap presents to smooth her way across the desert, and worried about Fattuh, who she had begun to realize was unwell. She hated the thought of starting without him, but suspected that he had malaria. She delayed a few days, by which time he was so much worse that she feared it was typhoid. Leaving him in the care of his wife, she decided to start without him. He could join her along the way. It was the arrangement to meet up with Fattuh that made her alter her planned route. Now she would skirt the Druze mountains north-east of the Dead Sea and make her way to the station at Aziz where, she hoped, he would meet her. It would give him three weeks to recover his health.

  Before she left, she received mail from Dick. “I wonder where in the great desert you might be?” he asked, not knowing she had had to delay. “I shall miss you more than ever when I get back to London . . . I shall go to see Lady Bell.” As always, he blew hot and cold alternately, writing in his familiar rhetorical manner and prevaricating in a way that must have tortured her. “Might we have been man and woman as God made us and been happy? I know what you felt, what you would do and why not—but still and after all you don’t know—that way lies a great and splendid thing, but for you all sorts of dangers.” He had told her he would burn all of her letters—“one might die, or something”—and she knew that he had. But she would keep all of his.

  And so on Tuesday 16 December 1913 she set off, through orchards of apricots and olives, to meet her party at their staging ground. The cordage complete—the tying onto the camels and donkeys of all the tents, equipment, and baggage—the stately procession moved off in the direction of Adhra. The first day’s ride was a short one, just to the edge of the Damascus oasis. The next day brought torrential rain and bitter winds and took them across icy volcanic ground—far removed from the baking yellow sand and shimmering mirages of popular imagination. She wrote: “We struggled on . . . through the mud and irrigation canals—a horrible business with the camels slipping and falling . . . It was horribly cold last night . . . impossible to keep warm in bed. I am not cut out for Arctic exploration. The men’s big tent was frozen hard and they had to light fires under it to unfreeze the canvas.”

  It was an inauspicious beginning, and about to get worse. Starting at 9:15 a.m. on the twenty-first, the party soon spotted smoke rising in a thin column on the horizon. The camel drivers became nervous. As Hamad, the new rafiq, remarked, “Every Arab in the desert fears the other.” Full of her usual confidence, Gertrude scoffed and marched to the top of a nearby tor, extending her telescope for a better view. What she saw was a collection of tents surrounded by sheep: just shepherds, she concluded. But she was wrong, and she had been spotted. Nearly half an hour passed, and then, like a whirlwind, a Druze horseman came galloping towards them, firing as he came.

  Hamad advanced with his hands in the air; the horseman aimed the rifle at him. Muhammad came forward shouting, “Stay! God guide you! We are Shawam and Agail and Qanasil,” naming three tribes not likely to be enemies. The rider, his long matted hair flying around him, circled the caravan at a gallop, whirling his rifle above his head. Riding up at full speed to Ali, one of the camel drivers, he demanded his gun and fur cloak. Backing away from the stamping horse, Ali threw them to the ground. Now the lone rider was joined by a larger group of equally wild-looking Bedouin, some riding, some running, and firing in all directions. One of them, aiming his gun at Muhammad, seized the guide’s sword and hit him across the chest with the flat of the blade. Then, turning, he charged at Gertrude on her camel, hitting the animal across the head in the same way that he had hit Muhammad. He seized the reins and forced the frightened animal to crouch, while a couple of boys pushed Gertrude aside and ransacked her saddle-bags. At the same time the other men, all half-dressed and one “stark naked except for a handkerchief,” all shouting, began systematically to strip her men of their arms and cartridges while she watched helplessly. It was at this moment that the day was saved by Fellah, the black boy who looked after the men’s tents. Bursting into theatrical tears, he yelled out that he knew them and they knew him: he had been a guest amongst them only a year ago, buying camels. There was a sudden silence, a tense moment of hesitation, and then the traditional etiquette of the desert swung slowly into play. Piece by piece, the booty was returned. Before they were finished, a couple of sheikhs rode up, took stock of the situation, and greeted Gertrude and her party. They continued, however, to behave menacingly. Gertrude proceeded to pitch camp, and followed the usual custom by paying for a local rafiq. But the sheikhs remained immovable until, reluctantly, she handed over more money. At night they returned to her camp, yelling and singing.

  In fact, anything could have happened: had her rifles and other possessions been stolen, she would have had to turn back to Damascus. As she had always done when thrown on the hunting field, she remounted and continued, but the experience had come close to the bone. Not a week into the trip she had been forced to confront her own vulnerability. But she did not admit it, particularly when writing to her parents. All she said was, “A preposterous and provoking episode has delayed us today.”

  Late the next day, and with the sullen new rafiq in tow, the caravan moved off into a desert turned into “a sticky sop” from heavy overnight rain. Jagged black volcanic rock rose above them, and a black sky above that. She wrote: “The stony hills draw together in front of us like the gates of an abandoned Hades. A desolate world, cold and grey . . . Ibrahim lighted a fire. It smoked abominably and he was rebuked by Ali. ‘Smoke is seen far in the morning and sound is heard far.’ ”

  Wrapped in fur, Gertrude sat by the fire drinking pints of coffee and listened to the men as they talked of theft, raid and murder, ghosts and superstitions. From the several tribes represented among her crew, she heard of grudges and old scores unsettled, and began to draw in her mind a map of liaisons and enmities that would be crucial to her later. “The foes of Sukhur are the Fed’an, the Sba and all the Jebehiyyeh except the Isa and the Serdiyyeh,” she wrote one night before she went to bed; another time, she noted the rumour that the Ottoman government had sent seventy camel-loads of arms to Ibn Rashid to help him fight Ibn Saud.

  By Christmas Day they were at Burqu, little more than a jumble of rocks surmounted by the ruins of a Roman fort. The weather was icy. Gertrude made her way through freezing f
og to copy a Kufic inscription, stepping carefully round a half-eaten human body to do so. She thought of Rounton and of the very different kind of day her family would be having. They wound on in raging winds, the camels slipping on the icy stones, moaning as they went. They were now in the camping grounds of the Ruwalla, one of the Wahabi tribes led by Ibn Saud and one of the largest desert groupings in Arabia, with between five and six thousand tents. Constantly looking over their shoulders, her men pitched camp where they would be hidden from view. As chance would have it, they encountered a group of Beni Sakhr, enemies of the Ruwalla, and she dined in the tent of one Sheikh Ibn Mitab. She wrote home: “Extremely nasty dinner . . . sheep and bread in a greasy stew which he mixed up for me with his fingers, saying ‘It is all good. I made it with my hand.’ ”

  She completed the formalities by comparing rifles with him, and presented him with a silk under-robe, coffee, and sugar. The water they found there was pure mud, caking the men’s beards as it dried. Gertrude had to give up washing, as well as the longed-for luxury of sitting down to dinner clean and fresh. Sitting outside her tent, she could hear the silence. At night, Arab fires twinkled in the far distance, and were answered by the stars.

  The journey continued full of spooks and portents. At one point, a mob of aggressive villagers stopped her from making a plan of a castle; at another, she came upon a dead man—the second she had encountered on this trip—whose “horrible presence is not easily forgotten.” Other villagers insisted she treat a man with gangrene. Around the fire her men talked of jinnehs, witches who walk alongside travellers, their eyes set lengthwise in their faces. Sometimes the drinking water was alive with energetic red insects; once her tent pole cracked and broke in the night, bringing wet canvas down on her bed. In the diary she was writing for Dick she noted that she had liked this part of the journey so little that she almost turned back. It had become “a mountain of evils . . . I do not feel at all like the daughter of kings, which I am supposed to be here. It’s a bore being a woman when you are in Arabia.”

  On 8 January they arrived at Ziza, the end of the railway and the place where she would wait for Fattuh and more of her luggage. She was happy to see him earlier than expected—still convalescent, but bringing her delicious things to eat and the longed-for mail. Dick had just received a copy of The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir. “The book I have read all day,” he said. “It’s perfectly wonderful and I love it and you. I can’t write about it yet—and it would take the book of my soul, never written, to answer it. I kiss your hands and your feet, dear woman of my heart.”

  She now had to be wary of Turkish military patrols. The Sultan, the head of the Ottoman Empire, did not encourage non-Muslims in his provinces, and his governors-general held the power to grant or refuse permits. Gertrude had so far dodged the bureaucracy and, having no permission from either the British or the Turks, intended to ride on quickly. She could not, however, resist making what turned out to be a fruitless diversion in order to find and photograph an ancient stone niche decorated with a carved shell, said to exist in some ruins at a place called Mshetta. On her return, she saw in the distance three figures moving rapidly towards her tents. Her heart sank. She knew she had been found out.

  By the time she got back, Turkish soldiers were installed around her fire, shouting and laughing and generally behaving in a loutish and threatening manner. They were soon joined by more—now ten in all—under the command of an angry captain and his staff sergeant. The authorities had been alerted when Fattuh had applied for a permit to join her. Telegraphs had been sent from Constantinople, and now the soldiers had orders to stop her expedition and take her to Amman. “I was an idiot to come in so close to the railway,” she commented, “. . . but I was like an ostrich with its head in the sand and didn’t know all the fuss there had been about me.”

  She was in trouble. Her first impulse was to send her camel driver Abdullah off to Madeba some twenty miles away to telegraph the consuls at Beirut and Damascus. He slipped quietly out of camp but was followed, intercepted en route, and by nightfall was imprisoned at Ziza. Gertrude, head high, maintained her usual aloofness. But there came a moment when she had cause to take herself off a little distance from camp: she had to relieve herself. When she was doggedly followed by an officious soldier, Fattuh put himself between the two of them and told the Turk to allow the lady some privacy. In spite of all that Gertrude could do, Fattuh was arrested and taken away under escort to join Abdullah. It was a wild night. The sky darkened, the wind thundered, and sentries were posted around the camp. “The night was as icy as my demeanour.”

  She had to watch while the contents of her luggage were turned out on the ground, and all her arms were confiscated. The soldiers were now awaiting the arrival of the district governor, the vali, whose proper title was the Qaimmaqam of Salt. Much depended on this figure, who could grant her a permit. If he did not, she would probably have to turn back under armed guard into Turkish territory. Having summoned this important personage, the captain began to feel alarmed at what he had done and lost a little of his bravado.

  Gertrude’s chilly restraint combined with her impressive wealth soon facilitated the return of Fattuh and Abdullah. Still, it was an awkward stand-off. She was able to relieve the tension by asking her crew to mend her broken tent pole: even the soldiers joined in. Sheltering at the table in her second tent, she calmly drew out a map of the ruined site of Kharaneh while inwardly resolving that, if permission was refused, she would return to Damascus and start again via the Palmyra route. Then she wrote up the last two days in light ironical vein for her diary and for her parents: “It’s all rather comic; I don’t much care. It’s a laughable episode in the adventure, but I don’t think the adventure is ended; only it must take another turn.” Resorting to the language of the Rounton nursery—“None of your fancy behaviour, Miss!”—she concluded with a truly Yorkshire “It is all rather fancy, I must say.”

  Her predicament was not in the least comic, of course, but she still ended the day on a light note, which—if they heard her laughter—must have surprised the sentries shivering outside her tents. The joke was Fattuh’s, who had remarked: “I spent the first night of the journey in the railway station, and the second in prison—where next?”

  The morning announced itself with driving sleet. Flanked by the staff sergeant and four of his soldiers, she rode to the station to collect the last of her baggage. On the way they spotted a distant group of soldiers. It seemed that the district governor and his party had arrived at last. Gertrude swapped her camel for the staff sergeant’s horse and cantered up to them, jumping off to shake hands. She would always rather deal with the man at the top, and immediately hit it off with the Qaimmaqam, describing him later in her letter home as “a charming, educated man, a Christian, willing and ready to let me go anywhere I like by any road I please . . . But there comes in a question of conscience.” She didn’t want to get this kind man into trouble by taking advantage of him, she told Hugh and Florence. That was the only reason, she said, that she had telegraphed Damascus for permission to visit some local ruins, in order to relieve him of all responsibility when she left.

  Clearly she was protecting her parents from anxiety on her behalf, as she always did. How different was the description of events that she wrote up in her diary, which reveals that she was told to telegraph for permission. Now she had to wait day after day for the response from Damascus and from Constantinople too, knowing all the time what it would be.

  Stuck fast for the time being, she spent her time meeting up with friends made on her earlier expedition into the terrain, including a nephew of Abu Namrud, the guide who had helped her on her journey into the Jebel Druze in 1905. Lunching with the Qaimmaqam in the house of Muhammad Beg, the richest inhabitant of Amman, she heard rumours of a Russian countess who had recently left Damascus with twenty camels. Amid much laughter, all three concluded that by a process of Chinese whispers and the usual distortions of verbal desert communication, t
his countess must be none other than Gertrude. She returned to her tent with a bunch of marigolds and garnet-red carnations.

  She had soon been waiting four days, and was getting restive. She busied herself with local affairs and attended a Circassian wedding. The bride was unveiled before her: “She stood like an image in a room crowded with women and very hot. She stood with downcast eyes looking very tired . . . a pasty heavy complexion, otherwise pretty.” She was a great object of curiosity herself. She noted without comment the remark of a man she met later in the day, about the rest of the men assembled: “They like to smell your smell.” Lavender water from Bond Street was new to them.

  At last she received the expected communication from an irritated Ambassador Mallet, who had warned her not to undertake this journey in the first place. HM Government would disclaim responsibility for her if she went one step further, he told her shortly. There was as yet no response from the Turkish side. She wrote in her diary on 14 January: “Decided to run away.”

  She was now writing parallel diary entries. One continued to be a cursory memorandum written daily while the memory was fresh. Reading these factual, ill-organized jottings, full of Arab words and phrases, gives a vivid picture of Gertrude, tired and dirty after a day’s march, her hair falling out of its pins, scribbling away at her folding desk while Fattuh put up her bedroom tent, unpacked, and arranged her possessions. These notes contained the information and positions she would pass on to the Foreign Office, and the raw material for her letters home. The second diary,* with entries written a few days apart, was a thoughtful and polished account of her journey and feelings, kept for Dick alone. Though by no means as euphemistic as her letters to her parents, it portrayed her as a shade more robust in her attitude to danger than was perhaps the case.