Desert Queen (19 page)

T
he first committee meeting of the Women’s Anti-Suffrage League took place in London during the summer of 1908. Gertrude, happy to lend her support, wrote to her mother that “all went well.” But demands on her time were not so pleasing. “We have Lady Jersey as chairman,” she said, and then went on, “I have been obliged to become honorary secretary which is most horrible.”

Nevertheless, she rallied to the cause. If it seemed odd for one who lived such an unconventional life to take such a conventional position, it was not: Gertrude’s independence only masked her roots. She was a daughter of the Victorian Age, bred in a world dominated by men concerned with nothing less than aggrandizing the Empire, raised in an era graced by women considered to be no less than the bearers and guardians of the English race. As boldly as she behaved in the East, at home she remained within the boundaries of tradition, and her tradition was that of the upper class, privileged, protected and not to be challenged by the impoverished, uneducated working class.

Gertrude had spent hours with Florence helping the wives and mothers of the Bell Brothers’ ironworkers. It only confirmed her view that, though women had the right to work in local government, they were not yet equipped to run the country. In the industrial town of Clarence she had spent mornings reading aloud to members of the magazine club, visiting one or another of the dingy row houses. A knock on the door was often answered by a woman of thirty who looked twice that age, her haggard face lined with years of drudgery, her thick figure ravaged by constant childbirth and miscarriages, her arms filled with infants crying for milk, while screaming toddlers crawled underfoot, the children only a few years away from being sent to work in the coal mines. In the squalor of the crowded flats, the odor of disease clotted the air, and thick soot from the factories coated everything from the bedclothes to the kitchen table. Every day was a struggle to exist. Exhausted and illiterate, these women and tens of thousands like them were in need of education to better their lives at home; they were hardly qualified to make decisions of state, the anti-suffragists said.

Gertrude saw herself as the equal of any man, but most women, she was firmly convinced, were not. Their votes would certainly be questionable; they could even prove to be dangerous. Like her mother Florence, or her father Hugh, or their friends Lord Curzon, Lord Cromer and Lord Robert Cecil, Gertrude argued that the female role was fundamentally different from that of the male: women were meant to rear children; men were meant to run the country. Furthermore, they all believed, only men had the sound judgment to rule the colonies, to determine foreign policy and to decide matters of the constitution; therefore, only men should have the right to cast a ballot. Rare was the woman knowledgeable enough to make a contribution to the affairs of state. Yet even as she promoted the agenda of the Anti-Suffrage League, Gertrude worked on her book about Byzantine Anatolia and yearned to penetrate the mysterious regions of the Arabian desert.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

Lawrence

“T
here is a moment when one is newly arrived in the East, when one is conscious of the world shrinking at one end and growing at the other till all the perspective of life is changed,” Gertrude wrote as she started out, in the winter of 1909, on her first expedition from Syria to Mesopotamia. “Existence suddenly seems to be a very simple matter, and one wonders why we plan and scheme, when all we need do is to live and make sure of a succeeding generation.”

Her own ability to contribute to successive generations was becoming more doubtful as the possibility of marriage floated beyond her grasp. But as for planning and scheming, she could hardly resist, riding off onto dangerous paths, plunging into political whirlpools. Almost as soon as she arrived in Syria, she was swirling in local politics, promising to write to Domnul at
The Times
in London and keep him informed of the latest news, which, she hoped, he would publish. (In Constantinople a group of reformers, the Young Turks, were threatening the Sultan with nationalist ideas, and the winds of change were blowing in Syria, too.) But the real reason for her trip was to do research for another book. The success of
The Desert and the Sown
stirred her on.

She had taken time, the previous winter, to study at the Royal Geographical Society, learning how to do surveying, make astronomical observations and apply the techniques of mapmaking. She had hoped to be able to use her knowledge on a trip to Central Arabia, but a meeting with Percy Cox in London had pushed the journey aside. The British Resident in the Gulf had cautioned her that, besides the usual, perilous raids and brazen thievery, war had broken out among the tribes; it was far too dangerous for anyone to cross the desert.

Redirecting her attention, she decided to map the uncharted sands of Mesopotamia. She began her journey in Syria, once again, to study the Roman and Byzantine churches, and to help David Hogarth, who had asked her to take casts of the stones of the Hittites, the ancient iron smelters, progenitors of England’s ironmasters. From there she would go on to Iraq.

Her trunk once again packed with pistols and with Maurice’s rifle from the Boer War, her saddlebags crammed with books and cameras, the forty-year-old Gertrude laid out a journey from Aleppo, across the Syrian desert to Iraq, then down alongside the Euphrates River, five hundred miles southeast to Baghdad, where she would regroup and travel along the Tigris, northward to Turkey.

I
n Aleppo she met up with Fattuh, her highly capable Christian servant, and arranged her belongings: her tents, a folding bed, mosquito netting, a canvas bath, a canvas chair, rugs, table, pots and pans, enough provisions to last at least a month, and linens, china, tea service, crystal and silver cutlery for proper dining. They hired seven baggage animals, a dozen horses and three muleteers—Hajj Amr, Selim and Habib. There were two servants, the round-faced Fattuh, in his striped shirt and Turkish pants, and his young brother-in-law Jusef; two soldiers; and herself. Riding dawn till dusk for two full days across the sweeping grassy plains, she thrilled to being in the open, untamed, yawning ocean of desert, unbound by drawing room constraints, free to be, to do, to say, to feel as she wanted. She wrote to Florence that she could “scarcely believe it to be true.”

She reached the Euphrates, the narrow, shallow passage that once nursed the cradle of civilization and now divided Syria from Mesopotamia, “the land of two rivers” (Iraq, the Arabs called it). “A noble stream,” she pronounced the Euphrates, “as wide as the Thames at Chelsea”; a “turgid liquid,” infested with insects, algae, bacteria and ancient dust. She insisted that Fattuh boil her water, and he did, without a protest.

At the river’s edge, biblical transport waited to ferry her across: she climbed into one of the narrow, high-bowed boats and watched as the boatman mimicked the ancients, using a long pole to steer the vessel across to the opposite shore. She had reached the region of the Hittites and their city of Carchemish. Finding the mounds of stones that David Hogarth had asked her to inspect, she worked for several hours, her men helping to dig out the boulders with picks and spades. In the late afternoon, after casting the inscriptions, she returned to the mound above the river where her camp was pitched. Fattuh boiled some water and brewed a fresh pot of tea. Relaxing outside her tent, Gertrude sipped the English brace from her china cup and scrawled contentedly to her family: “The broad Euphrates sweeps slowly past the
tel
, and I have just watched the sun set beyond the white cliffs of his other bank. I doubt whether there is anyone in the world so happy.”

W
ithin several days she had left behind the villages of the plains and entered the empty sands, where treacherous Arab raiders roamed the desert preying upon each other’s flocks. “All this country is racked, as it has been for the past four thousand years, by the lawless Arab tribes,” she wrote home. No government had ever discovered a way to keep the tribes in check. When she asked her men to accompany her on a nighttime ride, they were so frightened of blood-feud enemies that not a single man would go alone. But if the Bedouin feared each other, she was afraid of no one. Instead, she dove into the wilderness, leading her men through heat that burned the evening air, across land so dry that the oases offered the animals only caked earth in place of drinking water. Her throat was parched and her body was coated with dust.

She had ridden more than four hundred miles toward Baghdad when, in the middle of March, she arrived at the town of Hit, known since ancient times to be a source of petroleum. The Babylonians, Assyrians and others had used its dark sticky fuel to light their lamps and fire their cooking stoves. Hit was an ugly place, the air choked with smoke and the ground pitted with refuse, not unlike the grim industrial English town that housed the Bell Brothers’ Ironworks. “Except for the palm groves,” she wrote, “there is very little difference between Hit and Clarence.” Oil oozed from the earth, and peril menaced the air as she and her men continued on, rifles strapped to their sides, through sinkholes of pitch and across black crusty land.

They rode warily, searching for Arabs to camp with. The rule of the desert prevailed—“Everyone is an enemy till you know him to be a friend”—and they could not risk setting up their tents alone. They could be murdered; robbed at best. But if they found a tribe to camp near, the hosts would protect them as though they were guests. This was the territory of the Dulaim, notorious fighters, but at the sight of their black tents, her men slowed their horses. Approaching carefully, she gave the
salaam.
The Dulaim chief, Sheikh Muhammad el Abdullah, “a handsome creature,” invited the Englishwoman inside his tent, and together they sat in front of the fire, drinking the bitter coffee of the Bedouin. A few hours later, inviting him to her tent, she offered him afternoon tea. “The bonds of friendship are firmly knit,” she declared in her letter home. At night, after Fattuh cooked her dinner, she rolled herself up in her rugs and fell soundly asleep.