Desert Queen (24 page)

That night she could hardly sleep, his words rushing through her mind. She thought of the trip and how she had to break with the world. Her camels were ready, her men and goods were packed; in another day she would be on her way to the Nejd and the vast Arabian unknown.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Toward Hayil

G
ray clouds cloaked the sky as Gertrude set off to the east of Damascus, leaving behind the world of shops and friends and spoken English, riding away without permission from the Turks. It would take three months’ time to reach Hayil, headquarters of Ibn Rashid; from there she hoped to visit Ibn Saud,
inshallah
, God willing. “I feel like an Arab sheikh,” she wrote, with her caravan of twenty camels laden with goods; three camel drivers—Ali, Abdullah and Fellah; her cook, Selim; her elderly guide, Muhammad Murawi; and her
rafiq
, the paid escort Hamad. Sitting high on the camel saddle, she held the loosely tied halter in her gloved hands and tapped the animal with a switch, sending it to the left or the right as she rode across miles of marshy land. Pockets of truffles lay underfoot, wild fowl occasionally flew overhead, wild boar rushed past, and an hour outside Dumeir, the last outpost of civilization between Damascus to the Euphrates, she stopped to camp.

Her men had never traveled with a European before, and she watched impatiently as they struggled to set up her canvas tents—a small one for her, two larger ones for themselves, and a separate one for the cooking—fumbling with the poles and the furniture. Eventually, they adjusted the wooden dining table and the canvas chairs, stationed the canvas bathtub and the folding bed. It was all so strange to them, compared with the Bedouin tents made of goat hair, furnished with cushions and woven rugs. Without Fattuh, who had packed her belongings, she had difficulty sorting through the boxes, searching for bed linens, pots and pans, and the sponges for her bath. Worse, she discovered, her new cook did not even know how to boil an egg for breakfast.

Nevertheless, the men seemed willing to learn, and dinner that night, with meat from Damascus, she pronounced “quite good.”

Relieved finally to be under way, she slept well. But during the night the wind and the rains came. The downpour continued all the next day, making it muddy and impossible for the camels to walk. With little choice, she stayed in the camp and, shivering, wrapped herself in her wool jacket and fur coat. Fleeting thoughts of Turkish authorities trailing from Damascus made her tremble slightly more, and although she tried to concentrate on her last issue of the
Weekly Times
from home, she could not keep her mind from wandering to the Balkans and Dick.

Work was the only cure, she knew, and while the men chopped wood for the fire and straw for the camels, she sewed, as she had been taught by her childhood nanny, diligently stitching cotton bags to hold the provisions. When the skies finally cleared two days later, the ground was so soaked that the camels slipped when they marched, moaning as they fell helplessly in the muck. Within a few hours, however, the caravan had reached the open desert. She rode across the hills of black volcanic earth, contented by the feel of the solid stones crunching beneath her camel’s hoofs.

The cook fried tender mushrooms for dinner, and in the afterglow of a brilliant sunset Gertrude joined the men in their tent for coffee and a smoke. Later, when the endless land was eerily quiet, she snuggled in her bed, a hot water bottle warming the sheets, the blankets pulled around her. A candle flickered on the table as she wrote a letter home:

“Already I have dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place; silence and solitude fall round you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon, the bustle of getting into camp, the talk round Muhammad’s coffee fire after dinner, profounder sleep than civilization contrives, and then the road again. And as usual one feels as secure and confident in this lawless country as one does in one’s own village.” Within five days of the outset, she had been lulled into a soothing routine, reaching her first goal of Jebel Sais, a large, dormant volcano. “Content reigns in my camp and all goes smoothly,” she said.

The following morning they moved past the black hills onto the flat and yellow plain, but soon the men caught sight of rising smoke and a camel flock, signs of the Jebel Druze. Gertrude spotted a horseman galloping toward them, firing shots into the air. He wheeled his horse around them, shouting that they were foes and ordering them not to use their guns. With that, he aimed his rifle at Gertrude and demanded that Ali, her helper, hand over his rifle and his fur cloak.

Within seconds, more of the tribesmen appeared. Terrified, Gertrude found herself surrounded by a dozen Druze, shrieking insanely, matted black hair flying in their faces as they leapt into the air, their bodies half-naked except for one, who had no clothes at all. Shouting crazily, one of them grabbed Muhammad’s camel, drew the sword hanging behind the saddle, and danced around the group, slashing the air and hitting Gertrude’s camel on the neck to make it kneel. As the animal struggled to get up, Gertrude could only watch in silence while the thieves stripped her men of their revolvers, cartridge belts and cloaks.

A week out, and already her hopes were scorched. There was no way they could continue without guns and bullets; they would have to return to Damascus. Suddenly one of the ruffians recognized one of Gertrude’s men, and just as abruptly, two sheikhs arrived who knew Muhammad and Ali. With great relief, Gertrude invited the sheikhs to drink coffee in her tent, and after the stolen goods were returned, she paid off the pair with
baksheesh.
The caravan was soon on its way again, but her voyage carried heavier baggage now—the weight of ominous portents.

“W
hat sort of Xmas Day have you been spending?” she asked her parents. “I have thought of you all unwrapping presents in the Common Room and playing with the children.” She could picture the family at home in Rounton, gathered in the splendid stone house. In the big room with its William Morris furnishings and hand-blocked chintz, a tall tree would be decorated to the brim, and the air would be rich with the smell of pine needles and logs crackling in the fireplace. The little ones, having tiptoed down early from the nursery, would be bubbling with excitement over the goodies they had found in their stockings.

She pictured her father, Sir Hugh, tall, slim, with curly red hair and a straight sharp nose, his gold spectacles rimming his blue-gray eyes and lighting up his handsome bearded face, telling an amusing story about his latest speech for Labour; her mother, Florence, hair piled high, wearing a long black lace gown from Paris, keeping a stern eye on the manners of the grandchildren. Her brother Maurice would be talking of hunting, shooting and fishing, his favorite ways to spend his time; her sisters, Molly and Elsa, as pretty and charming as Virginia Woolf had commented when they were all vying for the same young men, now married and with children of their own; her brother Hugo, foolishly, Gertrude thought, now a minister in the church, was off, living in South Africa.

The six-story house would be filled with guests, as always, making the place lively, the conversation as spirited as Florence enjoyed. There would be diplomats, politicians, journalists, writers and actors; some would be upstairs playing billiards or chatting privately in Hugh’s red-carpeted study; others would be outdoors, at the squash courts or taking a brisk walk down the avenue of tall trees.

While the servants prepared dinner, family and friends would walk to the church in the village, some of them singing Christmas carols, some of them talking to Hugh while he pointed out a tree here and flowers newly planted there. Home again for lunch, they would take their places in the dining room, admiring the great tapestry on the wall,
ooh
ing and
aah
ing as the cook sent out the most delicious food: an enormous dinner of roast turkey, warm plum pudding and mince pies. Later that day, masses of cousins would arrive for tea, and while the grown-ups gossiped, Hugh would give out his special presents to the children, a leather case filled with three different sizes of scissors for his granddaughter Valentine (named after Domnul, their good family friend), a scrapbook for this child, a diary for that one; Gertrude still kept her own diaries from childhood.

F
ar away in Burqa, Syria, Gertrude rose early on Christmas Day, and while the mercury edged its way up from 28 degrees Fahrenheit, she breakfasted outdoors next to her tent. At the Byzantine outpost, she spent the day doing archaeological work: finding evidence of Roman occupation, taking rubbings of Greek, Safaitic and Kufic inscriptions, measuring and planning out the ancient fortress, reconstructing it from the rocks that remained. After tea, she returned to the site to photograph the stones and take a latitude for her mapping. “I have had a profitable day,” she wrote home. “I have not had time to think whether it has been merry.”

The ruined castle at Qasr Azraq was the setting for her New Year’s Eve. “Who lived in this site?” she asked her guide Hamad. “We would learn from you. Who knows?” he replied. Instead of attending the formal ball her parents gave at home in England, she sat with her men around the campfire sipping bitter coffee; and while Faris, her new
rafiq
, told tales from the
Arabian Nights
, she looked at the men’s faces and saw, in the flickering light of the fire, the dreamy eyes of one man, the laughing face of another, the gleaming white teeth of a third. Her own blue-green eyes were filled with sadness. At last, when she rose to go, they all stood and sent her away to her tent with a blessing. Outside the tent a sliver of moon shone on the camels, lighting the palm trees and the black walls. “So the year ends,” she wrote in her diary, “with Arabs, Druze and the shades of Roman emperors and Mamluks. Heaven send a better one.”

There was no bathing for the new year of 1914, nor for several days after: the water supply was too low. Her hair and her clothes layered with dust, she felt as though she would never be clean again. But by the end of the first week in January she announced she was pleased with the way the journey had progressed: she had done some good archaeological studies, among them, an important castle at Kharaneh; she had taken bearings for her mapping for the Royal Geographical Society; and by now she had trekked some two hundred miles, coming as far as the railway line at Ziza. When she arrived at Ziza, to her delight, along with a stack of mail from home, she found Fattuh, pale and thin. She greeted him excitedly and welcomed him to her camp; she had “missed him dreadfully,” she said. He, too, was happy with the reunion.

Supplies were running short. Hours earlier Gertrude had sent four of her men to town to buy food and water and whatever else was needed. They had not yet returned, and she worried, briefly, but her thoughts were distracted by a delicious lunch brought by Fattuh from Damascus. Afterward, she and Ali rode for an hour to Mashetta to examine the ruins of the seventh-century winter palace built by the Persian King Khosroes II. On the way back, her guide spotted something moving across the empty landscape. “Are those horsemen or camel riders going to our tents?” Ali asked. Gertrude lifted her binoculars and scanned the horizon. “Horsemen,” she answered warily, now making out the uniforms of soldiers.