Gertrude Bell

by Georgina Howell

  An hour later, she was sitting in the coffee room she used as her bedroom when a slave beckoned her into the reception hall. This time she did not bother to straighten her clothes or brush her hair. There in the doorway stood Sayyid, impassive as ever, holding a bag in his hand. He told her that she had full permission to go where she liked and when she liked. Wonderingly, she took the bag from him and found it full of gold. “And why they have now given way, or why they did not give way before, I cannot guess,” she wrote. “But anyhow I am free and my heart is at rest—it is widened.”

  She would never know the reason for her unexpected freedom, and she would always wonder. Turning it over in her mind, a new idea came to her. Where Ali’s uncles had interceded and failed, where Ibrahim had lied, and where Fatima had refused to give up the money, had a nobler spirit interceded on her behalf? Doubtless there were ways in which even harem women could influence male dictates and events. Was it Mudi, effectively the queen of Hayyil, who had unlocked the door of the cage and given her back the liberty she would never have herself?

  Anyone else would have packed up and left while the going was good, preferably before dawn. It was characteristic of Gertrude that, having asked so many times to leave, she now asked permission to stay an extra day, pushing her luck, spending eight more hours looking into every corner of Hayyil and taking many photographs. One imagines her request coming by messenger to Ibrahim, cloistered perhaps with Fatima or drinking coffee with his slaves, then their exclamations of surprise giving way to amusement at the pure effrontery of this demand. The lighter mood seems to have reached the city outside. Certainly Gertrude, flaunting herself unveiled in the sunshine despite the disapproval of the clerics, found herself the object of friendly curiosity wherever she walked. “Everyone was smiling and affable . . . all the people crowded out to see me, but they seemed to take nothing but a benevolent interest in my doings.”

  She circled the palace towers that crowned the massive defences, walked through the Medina gate guarded by slaves, delved into the palace kitchens, climbed to the rooftops, then descended to the plain, to take pictures of the fortifications. When she returned there was a message from Turkiyyeh inviting her to tea: “I went, and took an affectionate farewell of her. She and I are now, I imagine, parted for ever, except in remembrance. And thus it was that my strange visit to Hayyil ended, after 11 days’ imprisonment, in a sort of apotheosis!”

  The next day, 7 March, she was up before dawn, and was surprised to receive another visitor as she was packing up. He was a palace slave, a man of sinister aspect with henna-dyed beard and blackened eyes, come to tell her to take the western road out of Hayyil as it would be safer for her. She knew she had to follow his instructions because she would be watched, but she was immediately suspicious. “I fancy they meant to send me to the Amir and thinking he was certain to be on the western road they issued their order,” she noted. The intrigue back-fired, for by the time she reached the place where the Amir was expected, he had fortunately passed east of them. She had still not shaken the dust of Hayyil from her feet: on the second day out, Rashid messengers arrived at her tents to say that the Amir was expecting her. They told her that he had taken Jof and driven out the Ruwalla, sparing her few of the details about the capture. They left, and she set off again. Keeping steadfastly to her road, she marched nine or ten hours a day, turning north-west to Baghdad by way of Hayianiya and Najaf: “[The journey is] so wearying to the spirit in this immense monotony that I come into camp every evening giddy with fatigue . . . I am beginning to feel the effects of rather hard camp fare; anyway I shall be glad to reach civilization again.”

  She was amused to receive an entirely different version of the “capture” of Jof from a new rafiq who had come to her directly from the Amir’s campaign. This innocent, unaware of the official spin that had been issued to her by the Amir’s messengers, reported that the Rashids had stopped short of the city, to be turned back by the Ruwalla without even setting eyes on Jof. Mulling over her experiences as she rode, this last lie convinced her that the Rashids were “moving towards their close”:

  Not one grown man of their house remains alive—the Amir is only 16 or 17, and all the others are little more than babes, so deadly has been the family strife . . . Their history is one long tale of treachery and murder. I should say that the future lies with Ibn Sa’ud. He is a formidable adversary . . . I think that his star is in the ascendant and if he combines with Ibn Sha’lan [of the Ruwalla Anazeh tribe] they will have Ibn Rashid between the hammer and the anvil . . . So there! My next Arabian journey shall be to him.

  She saw the impossibility, on this journey, of continuing south from Hayyil to gather information at Riyadh, the Saud capital. Disappointed as she was, she recognized that the road would be impassable for a traveller coming straight from the Rashids. In her exhaustion of body and spirit, she did not know what she had accomplished, and wrote bitterly in her diary to Dick: “I fear when I look back I shall say: it was a waste of time.”

  In March 1914, there was so much that she could not know. The exploration of tribal life that she had undertaken, the mapping of the terrains, the networks of tribal affiliations and enmities that she had uncovered, had culminated in a unique body of knowledge. Her fluency in the language had given her a clear picture of the centuries-old Arab system of government, the ruling cabals of favoured families and tribes. In the years ahead, the knowledge acquired on this, her last expedition, was to prove invaluable. Now, wearily covering the ground to Baghdad, she was treading the boundary line between the future Iraq and the future Saudi Arabia. Her long years of preparation had ended, and the career that was to be her destiny had already begun.

  For now, her recognition that the future of Central Arabia lay with Ibn Saud would carry immense weight when she communicated it, in context and with the facts that she had discovered, to the British ambassador in Constantinople. She would confirm the powerful Saud as the worthy recipient of British aid. She had not been able to meet Ibn Saud, and that disappointed her. How astounded she would have been to know that when he took the unprecedented step of visiting the British administration in his quest for arms a couple of years later, he would be travelling to meet her.

  With Hayyil now ten days behind her, she reached the borderlands of the Euphrates and there passed out of Bedouin territory. Now her caravan of camels was particularly conspicuous in a terrain of donkey-riding Shia shepherds of the Riu tribe. There were the usual alarms: approaching camps whose sheikh might decide to welcome them or, equally, rob them; having to hide in hollows with rifles at the ready; having to find replacements for frightened rafiqs along the way. At one point they ran out of water and walked into a group of thieves at the filthy watering hole: here their poker-faced Ghazalat rafiq stepped in and averted disaster. Several times they were fired on. She wondered if what she was experiencing was fear—and decided that she could at last identify the feeling. Hayyil had taught her that. She wrote in her other diary:

  On a careful analysis of my feelings I have come to the conclusion that I’m afraid at these times. That must be fear, that little restiveness of the mind, like a very fresh horse that keeps on straining at the reins and then letting them go abruptly—you know the feeling in your hands, like an irregular pulse. One of my horses at home does it, a very mad one. And then the profound desire to be safely through the next hour! Yes, it’s fear.

  She was exhausted. At Najaf, Fattuh hired her a carriage. Ahead lay the high road into Baghdad which would be accomplished much more quickly by horse. She followed her personal luggage into the cart, and jolted the six hours to Karbala, with two changes of horses at the posting stations. Arriving after dark, she left her baggage at the posting inn and visited an old friend, Muhammad Hussain Khan. Over dinner, they talked in English, the first time she had done so for ten weeks. She was amused to write to Dick about what Khan had said concerning a forthcoming holiday he was to take in Britain. When she had asked what he would do with his family,
he replied that he would leave them behind, divorcing his wife before he left. She expressed her feelings about this with a row of exclamation marks.

  For the last leg of the journey, she had to be seated in the post carriage by 3 a.m. She slept for only a couple of hours. Now that her letters from home were almost within her grasp, she began to fret about her family. Anything could have happened in the ten weeks since she had heard from them. She rattled off again across this last stretch to Baghdad, passed the new railway, and arrived in the city at lunchtime. Tired and anxious, she found herself snapping at the faithful Fattuh, then asked him to forgive her. She always tried hard to be patient, recalling the words of one of her rafiqs in the Nefud:

  “In all the years when we come to this place we shall say ‘Here we came with her, here she camped.’ ” I expect they will, and it makes me dreadfully anxious that they should tell nothing but good, since they will judge my whole race by me. That recollection very often checks the hasty word when I am tired, and feeling cross, or bored—heavens! How bored, cross and tired sometimes!

  She went straight to the British Residency and collected her letters from the new incumbent, one Colonel Erskine. She was as sharp as a knife in her dismissal of him:

  He does not get up till 12 and he is found playing patience in his room after lunch. He knows no language, not even French and his mind is a complete blank as regards Turkey in general and Turkish Arabia in particular. And this is the man who we send here at the moment when the Baghdad Railway on the one hand and our irrigation schemes on the other are passing . . . into realities. We are an odd nation.

  And then she retreated to an inn, smoked cigarette after cigarette, and spent the rest of the day and night reading her letters. Nothing had changed, after all. Her family had survived intact, and so had Dick’s cruel and maddening ability, filtered through pages of rhetoric, to raise her expectations one minute and dash them the next. The further off she had been, the fonder he became—on paper. Starved of his love and companionship, she found nothing to comfort her, and yet he could work away at her sensibilities until she could almost convince herself they might have a future together. The agony began again as she read his words: “I love you—does it do any good out there in the desert? Is it less vast, less lonely, like the far edge of life?” And finally, from Addis Ababa in Abyssinia, where he was now the British representative to the International Boundaries Commission, “What wouldn’t I give to have you sitting opposite in this all-alone house?”

  She felt, at the end of it all, worn out and disillusioned. She had tried to remind herself that this sense of “dust and ashes in my hand” was something she always experienced at the end of an adventure. Here she was, asking herself why she had subjected herself to the last three months, when they had made no difference either to her feelings or to the world in general.

  Dick had written of a visit to Sloane Street, where he met her father, referring to the master industrialist as a “dear old man.” He was full of his own affairs, due to leave for meetings with Lord Kitchener, then Resident in Khartoum, and Sir Reginald Wingate, the High Commissioner in Cairo. He had something to ask of Gertrude: that she would wire him a message to Addis Ababa. He wanted her to send only two words—“Safe Baghdad”—and to leave them anonymous. She did so from the post office the next morning, and followed it with a package—that other diary that she had kept just for him, which would tell him everything that the telegram would not. She reread it quickly, and found it unaccountably impersonal:

  I think the only things that are worth saying are those that I can’t say—my own self in it, how it looked to the eyes of the human being, weak and ignorant and wondering, weary and disappointed, who was in the midst of it. I can’t say them because they are too intimate, and also because I haven’t the skill . . . One doesn’t put those things into one’s own diary because one is not trying to draw the picture—it is there before one.

  Old friends welcomed her back to Baghdad, incredulous about her journey, astonished to find that she was alive, and congratulating her “in a way which warmed my heart.” These included a figure who would be crucial to the future of Iraq, Sir Sayyid Abdul Rahman. He was known by his title, the Naqib—the figurehead of the Sunnis—and was a religious leader so important that he would receive no woman but Gertrude into his august presence. “He is too holy to shake hands with me,” she noted, “but . . . I was vastly amused, as ever, by his talk.”

  New friends included Arthur Tod, a director of Lynch Brothers who ran the Tigris ferries, and his “darling little Italian wife” who, when she saw how tired Gertrude was, immediately invited her to stay with them. Aurelia Tod, who would become one of Gertrude’s great friends, saw that the voyager’s clothes were laundered and pressed while she slept and before she began to bustle around the town again. This was a much needed holiday break for Gertrude, and she spent much of it sightseeing like any tourist, in spite of temperatures of up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. She visited the new German-built Turkish railway, so soon to become a threat to Britain’s control of the Gulf. From the banks of the Tigris she watched wooden sleepers arriving from Hamburg and being swung ashore from a flotilla of ancient lateen-sailed boats. The efficiency and the scope of the project excited and impressed the ironmaster’s daughter. The famous German engineer Heinrich August Meissner, in charge of the railway construction, explained the difficulties. They did not only have to import the sleepers. To make the concrete they needed, they first had to filter the salt out of the water, then crush tons of pebbles for lack of stone and sand; and they had to bring in the necessary wood. “The muddy waters of Tigris flood, the palms, the ragged singing Arabs—these were the ancient East,” Gertrude noted, “and in their midst stood the shining faultless engines, the blue-eyed, close-cropped Germans with smart military bearing—the soldiery of the West, come out to conquer . . .”

  She dined out on her tales of Hayyil, and her admiration for Ibn Saud increased when she was told how he had taken Hasa. He had turned the Turks out of the town without a single shot being fired, marched the garrisons down to the coast and appropriated their arms. On the Tods’ launch she floated up the river, passing one of the city’s palaces, drank tea under tamarisk trees, wandered in the rose gardens, and watched the sun set. “Baghdad shimmered through the heat haze like a fairy city.”

  It was, without doubt, her favourite city, built in the Persian style, and she loved the Euphrates. Baghdad epitomized for her the romance of the Arabian Nights, the famous cycle of stories that came to light during the eleventh century. A creation of the Abbasid dynasty, it was the survivor of a triad of cities built at the confluence of the Euphrates and the Tigris. Babylon and Ctesiphon had crumbled, but Baghdad had survived in all its rich and varied culture, despite the Mongol invasion of 1258 and the vicissitudes of two Ottoman Empires. It was built on the vast alluvial plain where a system of canals, now fallen into disrepair, channelled the melted snows of Anatolia and made cultivation possible. It was at the hub of the old strategic routes to Iran and thence to China, via Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, through Anatolia to Constantinople and Trebizond.

  Gertrude would have read the evocation of its glory by the historian al-Khatib al-Baghdadi (1002–71), and his description of the court of the Caliph al-Muqtadir in 917. This splendid court, with its halls and parks, chanceries and treasuries, eunuchs and soldiers, chamberlains and pages, was famous throughout the world. On one occasion a visiting Byzantine embassy was shown the Caliph’s famous lifesize treasure tree, its branches covered with leaves and birds, all made of silver and gold. The leaves of the tree moved as if in the wind, and the jewelled birds piped and sang. When the ambassadors were ushered into the presence of the Caliph, they found him enthroned between eighteen ropes of jewels, with his personal executioner standing beside him amongst the courtiers, ready to mete out summary justice.

  Gertrude deplored the all-night bars, the gambling dens, the prostitution and corruption of 1914, but saw in them a certain continuati
on of the exotic past: “Baghdad has taken to this kind of civilization so quickly and so wholeheartedly because it is a return to what she knew in the gorgeous days of the Khalifate,” she wrote in her other diary.

  The holiday over, Gertrude turned towards Damascus. She had 350 miles of Syrian desert still to cross. In her streamlined new caravan there were now eight camels and four people: herself, Fattuh, Fellah, and Sayyid the Sherari. They would travel north of the Fertile Crescent, past areas where the nomadic pastoralists had spread from Nejd. It would be a fascinating voyage across history, from the origins of Islam in the east to the margins of the Greek and Roman civilizations in the west. But she wanted this journey to come to an end. She would travel light, and travel hard. She left most of her luggage to be sent back by sea, taking only a new, native tent, smaller and lighter than the ones she had brought from London, and her folding chair; one bag of clothes; provisions for three weeks; and a minimum of cooking pots. She clung to her “one luxury,” her canvas bath, but resigned herself to two weeks on the thin roll of bedding that she had substituted for the bulky folding bed in Baghdad. “Out under the open sky again and at once my heart leaps to it. I shall soon weary of my bed on the ground, I know! Oh Dick! Our poor bones! When we lay them at last in our graves, how they will ache . . . The dust, no one can like . . . I wonder whether my hair will ever be clean again . . . Those who sit at home and think what fun it must be to explore waste places, they do not know the price for it which has to be reckoned in such days as these. Tut, tut! What a fuss I am making about a bad night!”

  Despite a dust storm on the third day, which heaped sand over the new tent, they made good progress to a ruined fort at Wizeh. There they discovered an “immense rocky hole” in the ground. Gertrude, you might think, would have had enough adventures for one journey. The hole, however, exerted the same fascination over her as unclimbed mountains had in previous years. Nothing would satisfy her but to descend into the black tunnel, and so she removed most of her clothing, put a handful of candles and matches in her pocket, and climbed down two hundred feet, accompanied by the no doubt reluctant Fattuh. She recounted: