Desert Queen (11 page)

In Germany, Gertrude enjoyed the round of balls, banquets, concerts and operas in celebration of the Queen’s Jubilee, but despite the royal ties, the British were viewed with some doubt. In South Africa, the two countries were fighting the Boer War; in the East, Germany lusted after India and hungered for the remains of the collapsing Ottoman Empire; and in Europe, Germany and England vied for commerce and communications.

When, as a guest of the court, Gertrude attended a play with her Aunt Mary and Uncle Frank, she watched as a sheaf of telegrams was delivered to the Emperor. A heated conversation ensued between the German ruler and her uncle, the British Ambassador. Gertrude caught scraps of the Emperor’s remarks: “Crete,” “Bulgaria,” “Serbia,” “mobilizing”; he was convinced that Europe was on the brink of war. The Russians, the French and the Germans were all eager to grab the spoils that would come with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. When war came, the Germans and the British would fight on opposite sides.

Talk of war sent a shiver of excitement through Gertrude, but the rest of her stay in Germany was boring, and by the beginning of March she was glad to be back in England. Four weeks later she learned, to her dismay, that Mary Lascelles, her favorite aunt, the one who had brought her to Persia and enabled her to meet Henry Cadogan, had died. Gertrude’s emotions rocked like a seesaw when good news followed: Mary Talbot, her closest friend, had given birth to twins. Then came word that, after suffering from complications of childbirth, Mary Talbot was dead.

It was overwhelming: the deaths, the sorrow, the grieving; a dark cloud showering her with tears. Save for the Queen’s Jubilee, which put an eerie glow on her sadness, there was little reason to stay in England. By autumn, when the sun had stopped baking the London streets, and the brisk winds returned with her gloom, she could hardly help fleeing. Yet, still a traditional woman, she took the traditional course: she and her brother Maurice signed up for a Cook’s tour around the world. They left in December 1897 on a steamship voyage that was more a rest period than an adventure.

They sailed from Southampton, across the Atlantic, wrote home from Guatemala and sailed the Pacific Ocean. They docked in Tokyo and Hong Kong, and on the way home she stopped in the French Alps for mountain climbing. The physical challenge of the climb itself, the test of endurance and strength, the quest of conquering something new and difficult attracted her. “Obstacles were made to be overcome,” her father had often said, and she believed him. After six months away from home, she came back to England in early summer.

Life was vacuous, a series of parties and fittings for clothes; and once in a while, using lantern slides, she gave a lecture on Persia. She celebrated her thirtieth birthday at home with her family; no prospects of marriage seemed near. She yearned to bury her pain with serious work, yet she could not let go of Cadogan and, seeking his spirit in the East, for most of the following year she studied Persian and Arabic. She hoped to visit Friedrich Rosen, now consul to Jerusalem. But studies took up only so much time; she filled her empty hours in London drawing rooms, where the gossip was laced with talk of the Dreyfus Affair, the case of the Jewish officer court-martialed for treason in France.

Now for Gertrude life was little more than a round of social calls. In Rome she visited Mrs. Humphrey Ward; in Athens she joined her father and watched while David Hogarth worked at a dig, extracting six-thousand-year-old vessels from the earth. She met a colleague of his, the handsome Mr. Dorpfield, and hung on his words as the archaeologist re-created the ancient world from his excavations: with pots and shards pulled from the earth, and with rocks strewn on the ground, he brought antiquity to life. It made her “brain reel,” she exclaimed, as the seeds of her interest in archaeology were planted. She returned home through Constantinople and Prague and then Berlin, where her uncle was still the ambassador and the “endlessly cheerful” Domnul Chirol was based as correspondent for
The Times.
She listened to Domnul, who had been living in Berlin for five years, argue against the German Government and its aggressive young emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II; she confided in him about her loneliness, and she heard his cautionary words as she talked enthusiastically of her newest interest, mountain climbing.

From Germany she went to France to climb the Meije, 13,081 feet, her first big mountain and an undertaking far more difficult than she had imagined. By November 1899, she was off to Jerusalem; she would greet the new century in the part of the world where many people believed that life itself had begun, and where, despite the ghost of Cadogan, her own life would begin again.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

First Steps in the Desert

J
erusalem. To Christians it was the way to God, the site of Christ’s Crucifixion and Ascension, the scene of the Last Supper, the Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross, close to Bethlehem, where Christ was born. To Muslims it was the opening to Allah, the third holiest city in Islam, the place where Muhammad was carried from Mecca on his legendary steed and where he rose mystically to heaven. To Jews it was the symbol of their homeland, the capital of ancient Israel, created by King David when he united the Hebrew tribes, and the resting place of the Ark of the Law, their covenant with God. To some people, such as sixteenth-century German mapmakers, it was the center of the world. To the Ottoman Empire, which ruled it now, it was a prized possession.

She arrived in Jerusalem to study Arabic, her goal to enter the Arab world. She had come to Palestine by ship, sailing from Marseilles with her steamer trunks, a new fur coat and a camera, docking first at Athens, where a friend of David Hogarth’s escorted her to the Acropolis and dined with her at the Grande Bretagne Hotel, then on to Smyrna, where dependable Domnul Chirol had notified the British Consul, Mr. Cumberbatch, to smooth her way past Turkish customs. She had booked herself, the only passenger with a cabin, on a dirty Russian boat crossing to Beirut, and looked on with amazement at three hundred peasants of the Czar camped out on the deck, the women huddled in wadded coats and high boots, babushkas wrapped around their heads, the men in thick coats and boots, their heads topped with astrakhan hats. Like tens of thousands of others—Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, Sunnis, Shiites and Jews—they were making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to expiate their sins. She, an atheist, had faith only in her family and the British Empire. Her doctrine lay in the righteous destiny of England, her conviction in the belief that the British were chosen to lead the world. At thirty-one, she was seeking a purpose for her life.

Gertrude rented a suite with a verandah at the Hotel Jerusalem, two minutes’ walk from the German Colony, where Friedrich Rosen now served as the Consul. Her plan was to stay four months, until April 1899. The Rosens—Friedrich, Nina and their two young sons—welcomed her as a member of the family, and each day she shuttled back and forth to their house for lunch and dinner.

Almost as soon as she arrived, Gertrude rearranged the furniture in her suite, removing an extra cot from the bedroom, realigning the sitting room to hold two armchairs, a big writing desk and a table that she piled with books; on the walls she hung an enormous Kiepert map of Palestine and pinned up photographs of her family. A carpet covered the tiled floors, a small wood stove nestled in a corner of the sitting room, and all in all, she wrote home, the place was “cozy.” The only things that she needed were a horse, which she quickly found, and a teacher, whom she engaged.

Arabic, which had seemed to come easily at first, now stymied her. “I find it awfully difficult,” she confessed to her family. She could converse comfortably at a dinner party in French, Italian, German, Persian and even Turkish, switching back and forth animatedly from one to the other, yet Arabic was strange: “The worst I think is a very much aspirated H. I can only say it by holding down my tongue with one finger, but then one can’t carry on a conversation with your finger down your throat, can you?”

She hired another teacher and studied Arabic four hours each morning and an hour or two each night, and then, between meals at the Rosens’, she sauntered around the city in her straw boater and lace-trimmed white blouse pinched at the waist, lifting her petticoats and long cotton skirts as she leapt gracefully over the mud. Sixty thousand people now lived in Jerusalem, a majority of them Jews, and many were building their homes outside the Old City walls. But it was inside the sixteenth-century Turkish ramparts that Gertrude spent much of her time.

Entering one of the city’s eight gates, she saw medieval life as it was still being lived by Christians, Armenians, Muslims and Jews. At the Jaffa Gate, dedicated to Suleiman the Magnificent, who built it in 1527, she marched along the road, newly paved by the Ottoman administrators for Kaiser Wilhelm II on his visit to Jerusalem the year before, in 1898.

Near the Zion Gate she walked through the Jewish Quarter to the Western Wall, following the bearded men as they shuffled along the alleyways, dressed, even in the scorching summer heat, in long black woolen coats and beaver hats. The squalid streets were roughly paved and covered with filth, animal dung and food refuse decaying in cisterns and open holes. Two years earlier, Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, had visited the ancient wall, where Jews prayed in front and Muslims prayed at the mosque above, and decried the area for the “hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary pervading the place.” For Herzl the ugliness and desecration were heresy. But for Gertrude it was anthropology. She ignored the filth and saw only the customs and the people.

She took it all in, snapping her Kodak as she walked by herself one Sunday from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Mount of Olives, with its view of the Dead Sea and the hills of Moab on one side and, on the other, the city of Jerusalem. As an atheist, she stood apart from the multifarious crowds and watched in amazement as factions fought over inches of holy turf. Turkish soldiers were stationed to keep the Christians from attacking one another. “It is comfort,” she said, “to be in a cheerful irreligious family again!”

Despite her scorn, it thrilled her to be there, elated by the sights and the people and even the moon. “Such a moon!” she extolled. “I have not seen the moon shine since I was in Persia.”

Perhaps for the first time since being romanced by Henry Cadogan, seven years before, she was content. She concentrated on her studies, losing herself in her work. “I am extremely flourishing, and so wildly interested in Arabic that I think of nothing else,” she wrote home. “It’s like a good dream to be in a place where one can at last learn Arabic. I only fear I may wake up some morning and find it isn’t true.” She could now read the story of Aladdin without a dictionary and found it tremendously gratifying to be able to read Dr. Rosen’s volume of the
Arabian Nights
“just for fun.”

At night, snuggled in her room, a cigarette and a cup of thick Turkish coffee at her side, she munched pistachio nuts and studied. After several weeks, the language that had thwarted her seemed conquerable. The warm days flew by, and she certainly did not miss the bleak English winter. In the middle of January she wrote home delightedly, “These two days have been as hot as an English June and far brighter.” The Middle East weather invigorated her, so unlike the endlessly gray skies and the damp, enervating air at home.

The news from home was hardly cheerful: Maurice had volunteered to fight in the Boer War, the violent struggle between the Afrikaners and the British over diamonds and gold mines. She worried about his going to South Africa to join an army that was untrained and undersupplied. “I have borne the departure of everyone else’s brother with perfect equanimity,” she noted, “but when it comes to my own, I am full of terrors.”

Only briefly, she considered going home, but realized it would do no good to return to England, and knowing, as always, that the more she engaged in her work, the better she felt. “Arabic is a great rock in time of trouble! If it were not for that, I think I should have packed up and come home, but that would have been rather a silly proceeding,” she informed her parents. “An absorbing occupation is the best resource.” So, with subscriptions arriving from
The Times
and the
Daily Mail
, a Bible and two dozen rolls of film received from England, and a gray felt hat trimmed with black velvet bows on its way, she stayed in Jerusalem.

The rites and rituals of the pilgrims fascinated her, and on a January day she rode down to the Jordan River to find an enormous crowd of people waiting to be baptized. Desert Arabs, Arab peasants, workers and servants, Turkish soldiers, Greek priests, Russian priests and Russian peasants wearing fur coats and high boots, all standing in the hot sun, wearing chains of beads and crucifixes around their necks. Amazed by their fervor and their ability to ignore the thick garments even in the broiling heat, Gertrude walked among them, photographing as she went. Then, after half an hour, a procession of priests holding lighted candles filed to the water’s edge. The crowd of people clambered down the muddy river banks and stood in water up to their waists. When the priest laid the cross three times on the water, guns went off, and everyone baptized himself by dipping and rolling over in the water. “It was the strangest sight,” she observed.