Gertrude knew less about the royal harem, who would spend the rest of their days inside the walls of the palace, than she did about the lives of Bedouin warriors. She asked questions, which Turkiyyeh was delighted to answer. According to a judgement handed down from the fourteenth century, a woman should leave her house on only three occasions: when conducted to the house of her bridegroom, on the deaths of her parents, and when she went to her own grave. Ordinary women in Hayyil did venture out at night, completely veiled, but only to see female members of their families. The more powerful the family, the more strictly did it interpret the rules. Every woman should have a male guardian, even if this was a boy half her age, and it would be he who contracted her marriage. A husband could have up to four wives, provided he behaved with equal generosity to all, and as many concubines as he wanted. He could divorce a wife without giving a reason, by speaking a simple form of words in the presence of witnesses.
Overseeing the harem were the eunuchs, brought from Mecca or Constantinople. Some had important outside duties: the eunuch Salih, for instance, was also the watchman of Hayyil. Then there were the male slaves, whose importance was far greater than the word suggests. These men, taken in raids along with horses and camels, were divided into two categories. If they were judged ugly or stupid, they would spend the rest of their lives making themselves useful to their owners. If they were intelligent, handsome, and presentable, they would be taken into the wealthiest families and given trusted positions. Charles Doughty had called them the “slave-brothers.” Of these, the elite would become part of the royal household, living in the palace. They were allowed to carry arms. Turkiyyeh led Gertrude to understand that she would do well to make allies of these men if she could. Chief of the slave-brothers was Sayyid, who was also a eunuch, and a direct conduit to the Amir or his deputy Ibrahim. Such was the closed political world that Gertrude had entered; and as she sat there, smoking and listening to the gossip, she reflected that she had never talked to a woman like this before. She concluded that Turkiyyeh was “a merry lady,” and that she would enjoy her company while finding her advice extremely useful.
After the midday meal, the arrival of an even more important guest was announced by one of Turkiyyeh’s slaves. Gertrude straightened her skirt, pinned up her hair, and hurried back to the reception room where she sat expectantly on a divan, while her guide Muhammad positioned himself at a respectful distance. A slave appeared in the doorway, moved to one side, then a strong scent of attar of rose filled the room as Ibrahim swept in. He arrived “in state and all smiles,” wearing a brilliantly dyed keffiyeh bound with a gold cord, or agal, and carrying a sword in a silver scabbard. She noticed his thin face, his feverish black eyes rimmed with kohl, his straggly imperial beard, and discoloured teeth. But most of all she noted his “nervous manner and restless eye.” He uttered the conventional forms of greeting and struck her as well educated—“for Arabia.” She thanked him, told him her first impressions of Hayyil, and briefly described her journey. He stayed until the call to afternoon prayer, but as he left the room came a first note of warning. Pausing at the door, he whispered to Muhammad that there was some discontent among the Muslim clerics at the arrival of a woman alone, and that she would have to be a little discreet—“In short, I was not to come further into the town till I was invited.”
The next day she regretfully sold some of her camels, in a wretched condition from crossing the Nefud desert, and sent the best back some distance to water and greenery where they could recover their health. Two little bejewelled and brocaded Rashid princes were brought to visit her, hand in hand and accompanied by their slave-boys. They sat silently staring at her with their brilliant kohl-rimmed eyes, eating the apples and biscuits that she gave them. They were, she noted drily, the “two of the six male descendants who are all that remain of the Rashid stock, so relentlessly have they slaughtered one another.” Over the last eight years, Turkiyyeh had told her, three Amirs had been assassinated. She concluded: “In Hayil, murder is like the spilling of milk.”
She was longing to explore the city, but having been asked to remain at the house, she could go no further than the courtyard, to visit her men. She felt frustrated. Her habitual strategy in a new place was to walk about, make contacts, pick up the latest news, and work her way into the echelons of the community that could be of help to her.
It was time to present her gifts to Ibrahim and she asked Muhammad to take him a message together with robes, rolls of silk, and boxes of sweetmeats. Might she return his call? she asked Ibrahim courteously. He sent back an invitation, but told her not to come before dark: he would send a mare for her, and slaves to guide her. She waited restlessly until nightfall, when the horse arrived with a couple of men, one to lead it and one to carry a lantern and walk in front. She put on her evening dress, slipped a cigarette case and her ivory holder into a purse, and rode side-saddle through winding lanes between blind walls. The horse’s hooves made no sound on the dirt lanes. In the light from the lantern, drainpipes and doorways fluttered past and sank again into the velvety blackness. She would never be able to find her way through this maze again by daylight. It was a starlit night, but the huge sparkling heavens of the open desert had been replaced by a narrow channel of sky between the roofs. She passed just a couple of women scurrying along the walls, looking neither left nor right.
They came to a halt in front of a stout wooden gate, which was unlocked from inside with much scraping and groaning of hinges. She was taken past a fountain and the mosque, and dismounted before a second locked gate, finally entering a screened antechamber. Here, she heard murmured conversation from the reception gallery ahead, and entered. Blinking in the light of half a dozen hanging lamps, she now found herself in a large colonnaded hall with a central fire, surrounded with cushions and carpets. “[It was] a very splendid place with great stone columns supporting an immensely lofty roof, the walls white-washed, the floor of white juss [sic], beaten hard and shining as if it were polished.”
The room was filled with men, who now fell silent. They rose to their feet as she entered, looking at her curiously. Ibrahim advanced to meet her, and she was ceremonially seated on a cushion to his right. The conversation was formal and impersonal. He spoke to her of the history of the Shammar, the tribe of which the Rashids were the leaders, and then talked of the royal family themselves. As Gertrude listened, and responded with descriptions of the archaeological sites she had passed, slave-boys served them with glasses of tea and small sweet lemons to squeeze into them, followed by what she called “most excellent” strong coffee. Then, swinging sweet-smelling censers in front of each guest, the slaves—very soon, it seemed to her—signalled that the reception was over. Gertrude rose and left.
She felt frustrated. This brief meeting had not allowed her to address any of the issues she wanted to discuss, particularly her need of money. In Damascus she had given £200 to the Rashid agent and had expected to be repaid without delay when she reached Hayyil. The agent had given her the usual letter of credit, and she had carried it with her to present to the Rashids on her arrival. This time-honoured method saved desert travellers from having to carry on them large amounts of money, which might be stolen on the way. She was by now almost penniless. How long should she, could she, wait for an opportunity to present the document?
“And then followed day after weary day with nothing whatever to do,” she wrote in her other diary. Now that the novelty was over, and unable to be her usual active self, Gertrude found the time passed slowly. She was woken every morning before sunrise by the haunting chant of her gate-keeper, Chesb—“God is great. There is no God but God”—and at midday and evening prayers she went up to the roof to listen to the muezzin calling from the mosque. The mornings dragged, she ate too many sweetmeats, and wrote furiously in her diary that women in Hayyil “do absolutely nothing all day.” She mapped her route to Baghdad, and when that was done she put the finishing touches to her archaeological drawings.
L
ike the Arabian king who waited every day for Scheherazade’s next tale, her only entertainment was listening to Turkiyyeh’s extraordinary and vivid life story. She had been sold as a child and parted from her beloved baby brother, whom she was still trying to locate. When she was of marriageable age, she was sold again and carried off on an overcrowded ship rife with disease. As one by one the passengers died, the crew came on deck, kicked the supine ones so as to check they were dead, then threw them overboard. Gertrude picked up her camera and took photographs as Turkiyyeh talked. Ending up in Mecca, she said, toying with her rubies, she was married to a young Persian that she had grown to love, but all too soon she was abducted again, this time by an agent of the Rashid Amir, and was dragged off screaming while her young husband ran wailing after them. At first she would not look at Muhammad, but he was patient and gentle, she said, and soon she was pleased to make him happy. When Muhammad wanted a younger wife, he followed custom by marrying Turkiyyeh off to a respectable man. But now she was a widow. Her greatest sorrow, she told Gertrude with tears in her dark eyes, was that she had no children alive. Of the seven babies she had borne, six had died at birth and the seventh at one year old. “Turkiyyeh says the people here think of women as dogs and so treat them,” Gertrude wrote.
Occasionally her men dropped by to tell her of the chatter in the market-place. The whole town was waiting to hear the outcome of the Amir’s latest raid. There was nothing to do but talk, and Gertrude had never been fond of gossip. She was unable to think of anything for her slaves to do, so they sat about on cushions, chewing the ends of their plaits and recounting domestic dramas until she lost her temper and sent them packing. She had several migraines, and hated the warm wind that ran around the courtyard, raising wisps of sand as it passed. She was not sleeping well: “Wind and dust, a little rain . . . At night a little owl cries softly.”
Ever more impatient, she sent a message about her letter of credit to Ibrahim, but his reply, when it arrived, dashed her hopes. He had been with the Amir’s grandmother, the tight-fisted Fatima, when her message was delivered, and the reply came back that they had no knowledge of the transaction. “It is clear they won’t give it up,” she concluded bitterly. In any case, they would give her no money until the Amir’s return, and who knew when that would be? Was she to remain here indefinitely? she fretted. She had tried to make personal contact with Fatima by every means she could devise, but being deprived of the opportunity to seek out useful intermediaries, she received no response. In the strange, antiquated society of this edgy city, was the silence to be interpreted as a personal rejection? When Ibrahim’s men brought back her presents, she was more worried than ever. Was this an insult or, as her men tried to reassure her, excessive courtesy?
She did what she could. She counted what money she had left, sent for her remaining camels, and sold as many as she could spare. She planned to leave Hayyil with a much reduced caravan. She paid off all the men she had taken on in Damascus. They would depart as the opportunity arose for them to join caravans, and leave her with a party of three: Fattuh, Ali—her guide from Hamad—and Fellah. She would have to cross the far side of the embattled Nefud, and she did not like to think how she would manage with so small a caravan. “I have just £40, enough if Ibrahim lets us go. I am to see him tonight. An anxious day.”
There was one ray of hope, in the form of Ali. Ali’s uncles, presently guests in Hayyil, were Anazeh tribesmen and sheikhs. They were needed as allies by the Rashids, who hoped they would help capture the city of Jof, where the Amir was heading. These uncles, Ali told Gertrude, were negotiating for her behind the scenes, and had protested vigorously against the treatment that Ibrahim had meted out to her concerning the letter of credit. Privately, said Ali, his uncles were calling Fatima kelbeh—the bitch.
Night fell at last and she set out again, on the same mare, for the all-important second meeting with Ibrahim. Outside, a hot wind was rising. The dusty sand circled in the courtyard, and the particles were blown stinging against her face. She was shown to a smaller room than before, and waited some time for Ibrahim to join her. She had taken care to bring her presents back with her, and as soon as she had greeted him, she told him that she wanted him to keep them. Now she raised once again the issue of the money, and this time she did not pull her punches. She would stay in Hayyil no longer, she said. The withholding of her money had caused her great inconvenience, and she must now ask for a rafiq to go with her on the next stage of her journey. Ibrahim was civil in his response. He smiled and assured her that he was ready to supply her with a rafiq, but his eyes avoided her confrontational gaze. She was not reassured. Writing in her diary for Dick that night, for the first time she was close to admitting fear, and, stout atheist as she was, she concluded the letter with a prayer for safety:
I spent a long night contriving in my head schemes of escape if things went wrong . . . to the spiritual sense the place smells of blood . . . the tales round my camp fire are all of murder and the air whispers murder. It gets upon your nerves when you sit day after day between high mud walls and I thank heaven that my nerves are not very responsive . . . And good, please God! Please God nothing but good.
Her worst fears were realized the next morning, 3 March, with the appearance of the slave-brother Sayyid. Brilliantly dressed and accompanied by his own servant, he brought only a repetition of the information she had already received: that she could not travel, neither could they give her any money until a messenger arrived with permission from the Amir. It was the first confirmation that they were actually detaining her at Hayyil. Gertrude caught her breath, turned on her heel, ran down the ramp to the courtyard, and returned with Muhammad and Ali. She told Sayyid to repeat in front of them what he had said, word for word.
Gertrude’s interests were of very minor importance to the Rashids at present. She had arrived in their city at a most inopportune moment. What she did not know—and Ibrahim himself did not know—was that at this very moment the Amir, the sixteen-year-old head of the family, was planning to murder Ibrahim’s brother Zamil ibn Subhan. As the Amir’s Regent, adviser, and uncle, Zamil was accompanying him in the desert at the head of their army of tribesmen. He was urging the Amir to make peace with Ibn Saud, but the Amir wanted absolute rule without interference. A short while later, at a desert post called Abu Ghar, the Amir would order a slave to shoot the Regent in the back. As Zamil toppled to the ground, his brothers and slaves would be massacred all around him. The Amir and his accomplices, according to reports, would ride past the murder scene without even bothering to turn their heads to look. Ibrahim was probably well aware that his family were out of favour with the Amir, and was especially reluctant to provoke him, either by giving Gertrude her money or by being responsible for her leaving.
Meanwhile, Turkiyyeh had made good her promise that Gertrude would be invited to meet the royal harem. The mother of the Amir, Mudi, sent a message inviting Gertrude to visit her, one evening after dark. Gertrude was deeply interested in the scene so often portrayed by orientalist painters and New Yorker cartoonists, with its lush beauties lying around on cushions and attended by slaves and eunuchs. She was particularly impressed by Mudi. In spite of having already been married to three amirs in turn, she was still young; Gertrude described her as very beautiful and charming, as well as intelligent and receptive:
I passed two hours taken straight from the Arabian Nights with the women of the palace. I imagine that there are few places left wherein you can see the unadulterated East in its habit as it has lived for centuries and centuries—of these few Hayyil is one. There they were, those women—wrapped in Indian brocades, hung with jewels, served by slaves. They pass from hand to hand—the victor takes them . . . and think of it! His hands are red with the blood of their husbands and children. Truly I still feel bewildered by it.
For Mudi, too, Gertrude was a distraction of unique interest. The two women gazed at each other, delighted, each experiencing in the other a new phenomenon. Avid for explanati
ons, full of questions, they talked with increasing intensity as the other wives looked on fascinated, absorbed in both Gertrude’s appearance—her pale skin, her green eyes, her red unhennaed hair, her lace evening dress, her buttoned shoes—and her breathtaking masculine freedoms. Here was a woman, undoubtedly a woman, who apparently lived the life of a sheikh and a warrior. Gertrude explained her present predicament; Mudi, with no experience of independence herself, understood that the traveller before her was trapped like a caged bird. The two hours passed in a moment. They looked at each other for the last time, representatives of opposite worlds perfectly understanding each other, and then it was time to part.
By 6 March, Gertrude had effectively been under house arrest for eleven days. There was no disguising it from herself any more. Without permission to leave, and a rafiq to ensure her safety, she was a prisoner. She had come to the end of her resources. As she sat biting her lip, half-listening to Turkiyyeh and the caretaker complaining about the price of slave-girls—“You used to be able to get a good girl for 200 Spanish reals,” complained Lulua, “now you could not buy one for 500”—a messenger arrived with another royal invitation, this one to visit cousins of the Amir in their garden that afternoon—in the light of day. Her hosts turned out to be five small children, dressed in embroidered gold robes and with painted faces. She sat with them in a summer-house on carpets “like all the drawings in Persian picture books.” Slaves and eunuchs brought plates of fruit, tea, and coffee, and the boys took her round the garden naming for her each tree and flower. Other adults were present, and she soon identified Sayyid sitting among them. Gertrude sat down next to him and spoke without the introductory courtesies. Tersely, she told him of her urgent desire to leave Hayyil. When he responded that “the going and coming are not in our power,” she lost her temper: “I spoke to him with much vigour and ended the interview abruptly by rising and leaving him . . . to tell you the truth I was bothered,” she wrote in her other diary.
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