Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  She made her presentation of gifts to both sheikhs, and Muhammad reciprocated. The first present he sent over with his men was exotic, but she found that she was meant to pay for it: an ostrich skin and an egg, “the price of which I must insinuate delicately into their palms.” The second was even less welcome, the next day’s dinner in the form of a charming black and white lamb “with whom I have come into terms of such intimate friendship that I can scarcely bear the thought of sacrificing it, yet I cannot well carry it with me like Byron’s goose.” Seeing her fondness for animals, Muhammad offered her his Arabian oryx, a pet calf that ran around in his tents and that she described as “the most enchanting little beast.” She sensibly refused it. While she appreciated animals, and would make pets of them when she was settled, she did not allow herself to become sentimental about them. She loved to see the “preposterous” baby camels, all legs and neck, as she passed the breeding herds, and would join the men in feeding her own animals, three by three, at the end of the day. It was a habit she had learnt in childhood, when at Rounton, after a day’s hunting, she and Maurice would help the grooms clean and feed their ponies before having their own baths and suppers. When Fattuh told her that one of her own camels had sat down and would not move, she went back to bring it water and food. They found it rolling and kicking with pain and, diagnosing a disease called al tair, Muhammad asked whether he should finish its life. Tight-lipped, Gertrude nodded and watched him draw his knife and cut the camel’s throat. “I am deeply attached to all my camels,” she wrote that night. “I grieve over her death.”

  She stayed a week with the hospitable sheikhs, giving a dinner for them in her own tents before she left. Perhaps Muhammad had a liking for Gertrude himself. He detained her a couple of days in order to show her an only mildly interesting archaeological site seven hours distant: she wanted to get on with her journey, but felt it would be discourteous to refuse.

  Her week’s sojourn with the Howeitat had allowed her to absorb another dimension of Arab life, until now a mystery to her: she had learnt about the life of the wives. She spent many hours in the harem tents with her camera, and took some of her best photographs. In one, Sheikh Harb, with striped sashes and a belt of cartridges, holds back a tent flap to reveal his women huddled together in the dark with their children, hiding their faces. Although Gertrude was not particularly interested in women’s lives, she could not help but be impressed by their stories. One of the four wives of Muhammad, Hilah, told her how women suffered from the heavy physical work and constant moving, especially during and immediately after childbirth. “We do not rest an hour,” she said: each of her four babies had died while she had carried on with her strenuous work of putting up and taking down the tents, collecting camel dung for the fires, and preparing the food. As Gertrude sat at the door of her tent on the frosty night of 30 January, committing Hilah’s tale to paper and reflecting on the difference between their fates, she looked up to see an immense falling star—“it fell across half heaven.”

  Muhammad warned her to avoid the Shammar, who he said would rob her and kill her men, and to go east instead of south, with Harb’s brother Awwad and a Sherarat rafiq, Musuid, to see her safe into the river valley some days ahead. In the manner of a chess game, the strategy changed again when news came to the Howeitat that their enemies the Ruwalla were camped not far away. Gertrude did not care whether she fell in with Ruwalla or Howeitat, but a substitute was found for Awwad, who would certainly have been the Ruwalla’s first victim. And so, on 2 February, she set off south as originally planned. “Everyone goes in fear except only I, who have nothing to lose that matters . . . Occasionally I wonder whether I shall come out of this adventure alive. But the doubt has no shadow of anxiety in it—I am so profoundly indifferent.”

  In traditional desert manner, her caravan had grown as it travelled. She was now the sheikh of the largest expedition she had ever led: some thirty nomads swathed and cloaked to the eyes, her men carrying rifles, all filing silently through the barren landscape and accompanied by a few sheep and goats. She had fallen in with a family of Shammar who begged her protection on their way home out of Howeitat country. The benefit was mutual, as they would not have dared to take the road alone, and they would be useful allies in case of a Shammar raid. She had also picked up two miserable tents of Sherarat with a tiny flock of goats. The inhabitants of these ragged tents were “as near starvation as can be.” Touchingly, they arrived each evening at her tent with the gift of a small bowl of goat’s milk, which she did not like but felt obliged to drink, and in return she gave them small amounts of meat and flour.

  They were lucky that the November rains had been plentiful where they were now on the march, and there were rain pools, bushes, and sweet-smelling plants. The camels could eat as they went along—a bonus, given that they could only carry sufficient dried grass for five days’ march. Soon she had to decide whether to make a detour to the city of Jof, where she could have bought more food, but she was beginning to feel that she would never get to Hayyil if there were any more diversions. And so the caravan wound on, through red sandstone and sand ridges the size of hills. “Abandoned of God and man, that is how it looks,” she wrote to Dick. “No one can travel here and come back the same. It sets its seal upon you, for good or ill.”

  One more event delayed them, on 9 February, in the form of a Howeitat party hunting oryx. They warned Gertrude of Wadi Sulaiman Arabs some five hours to the east. As she could be sure that the Sulaiman would already know of her caravan, it was politic to visit their tents and take on another rafiq. Gertrude’s caravan turned in to a mountain pass in a bitter wind and, sighing, she changed her clothes and set off reluctantly for the Sulaiman tents. As soon as she met their sheikh, she assessed the one-eyed Sayyid ibn Murted as “cursed of his two parents.”

  Over the first cup of coffee he was already pressing her rudely as to her route and purpose. When she left, he followed her like a shadow and, arriving at her tents, began to turn over and examine her possessions, while her men stood by powerless to stop him. As soon as he found her telescope, the sheikh demanded that she give it to him. She refused, but by nightfall, after hours of loud argument, it was agreed that she should give him a revolver in return for his nephew as a paid rafiq.

  The trouble had only begun. In the morning, before she was up, he arrived again and she heard him angrily telling Fattuh and Sayyd, her camel driver, that no Christian woman had ever travelled in this country before, and that none should travel there now. As she quickly dressed, she heard him trying to incite her crew to mutiny and asked herself how she would ever get rid of him. She hurried out to draw his fire and treated him to her iciest manner. After an hour of gradually mounting threats, he said that if he did not get a gun and the Zeiss glass, he would follow her in the night and take whatever he wanted. Her men took Gertrude aside and whispered that she had better give him what he demanded, for fear of reprisals, and she angrily capitulated. Sayyid ibn Murted grabbed both, and demanded further money from the Shammar family; the Sherarat were too poor for him to bother with. Rid of him at last, she reimbursed the Shammars and restored to them their one precious carpet, that they had entrusted to her for safe keeping.

  As she drew closer to Hayyil, she was starting to turn her mind to the uncertainties of her arrival in this most political of cities. What kind of reception would the Rashids—the ruling family of the Shammar tribe—give her? Would they welcome her, or would she be in danger of robbery, or worse? The British were, after all, aiding the Rashid enemy, Ibn Saud. Her well-being would depend entirely on finding favour with the royal family, and now she heard news which disturbed her, concerning the young ruler.

  The Amir, it seems is not at Hayyil, but camping to the north with his camel herds. I fear this may be tiresome for me; I would rather have dealt with him than with his representative. Also report says that he informed all men of my coming but whether to forward me or to stop me I do not know. Neither do I know whether the report is
true.

  On 11 February, nearly two months since she had set out from Damascus, they rode over a bleak pebbly plain and glimpsed, at last, in the distance, the first great sand hills of the Nefud. The huge unmapped dunes marched ahead of them across the horizon like a mountain range. She would have to take careful topographical measurements and bearings day by day, and would chart the water sources as she travelled.

  They entered the Nefud a day later and immediately began to struggle through the deep, soft sand, the camels floundering and slowing. In the deep troughs and rises, they could go no faster than an exhausting one mile an hour. The driving wind had hollowed out huge cavities, perhaps half a mile wide, so that time and again the caravan would toil up a slope only to find itself poised on the brink of a hundred-foot precipice of sand, carved by the wind into a knife edge. The crew were full of stories about camels falling through sand crests like these, plummeting into the ravines below and breaking their legs. The caravan would skirt that horseshoe of sand, only to find itself having to climb up the next slope. And so it went on, burning hot in the midday sun, with freezing temperatures at night. Clambering up a particularly high dune on foot, Gertrude stood poised at its peak like a sailor at the prow of a tall ship, gazing out over these petrified waves of a turbulent ocean, and saw, still far ahead, the sandstone mountains of the Jebel Misma.

  After five days of this demoralizing landscape, the continual effort began to take its toll. The camels were exhausted, the men silent, and Gertrude most unusually succumbed to a severe bout of depression. She wrote to Dick:

  [It] springs from a profound doubt as to whether the adventure is after all worth the candle. Not because of the danger—I don’t mind that; but . . . It is nothing, the journey to Nejd, so far as any real advantage goes, or any real addition to knowledge . . . Here, if there is anything to record the probability is that you can’t find it or reach it, because a hostile tribe bars your way, or the road is waterless . . . I fear when I look back I shall say: it was a waste of time.

  Now another annoyance was added to their troubles: torrential rain, wrapping the landscape and hiding all landmarks. They could not move for fear of getting lost in the Nefud. Soaked, Gertrude attempted to dry her hair and her clothes with the men by the guttering fire. At a little distance, the Shammars and Sherarat huddled round their own tiny fires, almost invisible in the grey and watery night. Fattuh ran from tent to tent, trying to keep her bedding, now stiff with dirt, as dry as he was able. The tents were choked with baggage which was normally left outside, and the demoralized cameleers hurried to feed the animals and get back into their dripping tents. In the thunder and hail, Gertrude wrapped her furs around her and shivered in her tent, reading Hamlet from beginning to end. Shakespeare, as always, lifted her spirits a little. “Princes and powers of Arabia stepped down into their true place. There rose up above them the human soul conscious and answerable to itself, made with such large discourse, looking before and after.”

  February 20 brought them to the edge of the Nefud, where they sighted a collection of tents. Yet another new rafiq, the elderly and ragged Mhailam, was induced by Gertrude, on payment of £2 and new clothes, to see them through the last stage of their journey to Hayyil. Against his advice, and Muhammad’s, she determined to cut the rest of her journey short, leaving behind the comparative safety of the dunes and the desert, and strike out across the plain, where her caravan would be highly visible to any raiders in the vicinity. Ghazzus and hunger, she decided, were “as nothing to the possibility of a hard straight road.” From the last cliff of shifting sand, she stood and caught her breath as she looked upon the black and forbidding terrain to come, its pinnacles like the skeleton of a city gutted by fire. She wrote home:

  This morning we reached the barren sandstone crags of Jebel Misma, which bound here the Nefud, and passed beyond them into Nejd . . . the landscape which opened before us was more terrifyingly dead and empty than anything I have ever seen. The blackened rocks of Misma drop steeply on the E. side into a wilderness of jagged peaks . . . and beyond and beyond, more pallid lifeless plain and more great crags of sandstone mountains rising abruptly out of it. And over it all, the bitter wind whipped the cloud shadows.

  From behind her came Muhammad’s voice: “We have come to the gates of hell.” On those words she departed the Nefud, giving the Shammars and Sherarat her last gifts of money and food, and descended into the blackened landscape and the plain.

  It was on 22 February, eleven days since entering the Nefud, that she came to a village, the first she had seen since Ziza. Two days later, the caravan finally came to rest within a couple of hours’ ride of Hayyil. Early on the twenty-fifth she sent Muhammad and Ali on ahead to announce her coming, and then rode the last part of the clean granite and basalt plain to the picturesque towers of the icing-sugar city as slowly and easily as if she had been “strolling through Piccadilly.” She had done it, and after all she had been through over the last six hundred miles, it was almost an anticlimax.

  Ahead of her, visible now to the naked eye, was the singularly beautiful fortress city washed in the rose pink of the morning sunlight, its mud walls whitened with plaster and crowned with dog-tooth battlements, the green fronds of palm trees waving gently over them, and its encircling gardens breaking into pink almond and white plum blossom. Behind the skyline of tall towers ringed with machicolations, distant peaks of azure mountains soared like clouds on the horizon. Nothing could have looked more inviting, innocent, or peaceful. Steeped in Arabia Deserta as she was, she felt she was on a pilgrimage to a sacred site.

  *Ibn Saud—“son of Saud.”

  *This diary will be referred to as her “other” diary.

  Nine

  ESCAPE

  A mile or so from Hayyil, Gertrude was met by three Rashid envoys accompanying her camel driver Ali, and three more outriders, one carrying a lance and all of them mounted on magnificent horses. Coming to a jingling stop, pennants flying, tassels swinging, they welcomed her, surrounded her caravan, and guided it to the south gate of the city. Gertrude, flanked by her own armed men and then by Hayyil’s sword-bearers, rode into Hayyil feeling for once exactly like “the daughter of kings.”

  As they circled the clay-brick walls, she glanced up at the towers and found them just as Charles Doughty had described them thirty-seven years before, like embattled windmills without sails. The procession turned in through a plain square gate. Gertrude, dismounting, found herself all at once in the world of the Arabian Nights. At a white doorway in a windowless inner wall, her guide Muhammad al-Marawi was waiting for her. Inside, she climbed up a dark, steep ramp to an inner court and a shadowy, carpeted columned hall. The pillars were whitened palm trunks, and the ceiling was made of palm fronds. The whitewashed walls were decorated with a high band of intricate, geometrical patterns in red and blue. This summer dwelling of the royal family, reserved for important visitors, was where she was to lodge. Here, in the reception hall, she greeted the two bowing female slaves who had been put at her disposal. She glanced into the coffee rooms and the courtyard with its three little trees—a quince, a lemon, and an apple—then ran up another ramp to the roof to look over the city. Below, her men were unloading all the camels and pitching their tents in the great bleak courtyard, where every year the Haj would pause on its seven-hundred-mile journey south. On the other side of the house, the white tower of the castle seemed suspended in the blue air above the town. But immediately she was called below to meet her first visitors.

  Two women awaited her. Lulua, an old woman in crimson and black, was the caretaker. The other, with her handsome broad face and darkened eyes hooded by a black and gold embroidered scarf, wore a black visiting robe parting over magenta and violet cotton skirts. From a centre parting, four thick plaits fell to her waist, and around her neck hung “strings and strings of rough pearls,” tangling with a fringed necklace of emeralds and rubies. This was Turkiyyeh, a talkative Circassian, sent by Ibrahim, the Amir of Hayyil’s deputy, to gr
eet her.

  A slave-girl brought coffee, and Turkiyyeh and Gertrude sat on the cushions to talk. The Circassian’s story was extraordinary. She had been a gift from the Sultan in Constantinople to the late Muhammad ibn Rashid, then the Amir, whose favourite wife she had quickly become. With another of his wives, Mudi, he was the father of the present Amir. She began to explain to Gertrude the Hayyil hierarchy. The present Amir, sixteen years old, had been absent for two months now, raiding the Ruwalla camping grounds with eight hundred men. He already had four wives and two baby sons. The highest authority in the Amir’s absence was his deputy Ibrahim, brother of the chief adviser and Regent, Zamil ibn Subhan. Ibrahim was nonetheless in awe of the Amir’s powerful grandmother, Fatima. This old matriarch could read and write, said Turkiyyeh, and she held the royal purse-strings. The power behind the throne, she had the Amir’s ear, and people were terrified of what she might tell him when he returned. She had favourites—and Allah help those who incurred her displeasure! Gertrude made a mental note to visit Fatima as soon as she could. She prompted her companion to further revelations. The jewels she wore, Turkiyyeh explained, belonged communally to the harem and were lent to favoured wives or borrowed for special events—rather like the Bell tiara, thought Gertrude. Turkiyyeh promised to take her to visit Mudi and the other women of the harem.