Desert Queen (26 page)

Together they enjoyed a dessert of dates and buttermilk, but over the coffee, made with cardamom, the conversation turned sour. Had she come with or without Turkish permission? the Turkish agent wanted to know. Feeling uneasy, Gertrude got up to go, leaving her men behind to calm the atmosphere. As she lay in her tent, she could hear shouting and arguing. In the morning she learned it was over some private matter, and she sighed with relief.

In the Bedouin custom she stayed three days with Harb. Then, accompanied by a new
rafiq
and Muhammad Abu Tayyi, she went on to the territory of the Ruwallah tribe. The fierce Muhammad slept in the tents of Gertrude’s men and dined with her by candlelight at her gleaming table. He brought her gifts of an ostrich skin and a lamb. “I can scarcely bear the thought of sacrificing it,” she wrote of the baby sheep. “Yet I cannot well carry it with me like Byron’s goose.”

They rode toward the hills of the Jebel Tubaiq and, at Muhammad’s suggestion, stopped at a ruin, which she photographed. They reached the camp of Audah Abu Tayyi. He was not there, but Muhammad, an important man on his own, offered her hospitality. She was eager to get on to Hayil, but, intrigued by the great camp, the largest she had ever seen, and allured by his charm, she agreed to stay. He showed her into the harem and introduced her to his wives, their bodies covered in blue cloth, their dark faces tattooed in blue, their lips dyed with indigo. Privately, they complained to Gertrude of “the burden of woman” in nomadic life. The Bedouin women were expected to rise with the early morning light and begin their chores at once: to feed the sheep, milk the camels, bake the bread, repair the tents, spin the sheeps’ wool and weave the camels’ hair, all the while taking care of their babies. And when it was time to move on, it was their job to strike the tents, pack up the belongings and, babies held tight, march on. Gertrude listened attentively to their woeful stories, photographing their painted faces as they spoke.

In the evenings she dined with Muhammad. Sitting on fine woven rugs spread across the soft sand, she, in her French gown and fur coat, puffed cigarettes through her ivory holder, while he, wrapped in a sheepskin cloak, a white linen
kafeeyah
over his dark brows, smoked a
narghile
between his thick lips. Men of all ages joined them around the big fire, and with pungent smoke filling the air, they talked for hours about the politics of the desert and the daring exploits of Audah Abu Tayyi. As Muhammad’s black eyes flashed, he told her romantic adventures of the princes of the Nejd.

Long after sunset, when the
nagas
, the camel mothers, had come home, Muhammad rose, drew his fur cloak around him, went out into the dark night with a huge wooden bowl and filled it to the brim with camel’s milk. He brought it to Gertrude, who drank it with relish. “I fancy that when you have drunk the milk of the
naga
over the campfire of Abu Tayyi, you are baptised of the desert and there is no other salvation for you,” she wrote to Dick. When she walked back to her tent in the frosty night, a falling star whizzed by.

On the following day it was time to leave; Muhammad Abu Tayyi gave her a gift of half a load of corn, and she gave him a pair of Zeiss binoculars. She had observed him act as a judge before his tribe. “He is a man, and a good fellow; you can lay your head down in his tents, and sleep at night and have no fear,” she said. “I learnt much of the desert and its people. The Howeitat are great people.” He had showered her with kindness and over the course of three days she and Muhammad had become “great friends.” It was a friendship that would be highly valuable later, when she worked with T. E. Lawrence to organize the revolt against the Turks.

T
hey were twenty nights from Hayil. The land had turned reddish-gold and sandy, and the gray-green shrubs of the desert blossomed with pale flowers. Gertrude met up with a rich Shammar family wanting to return to the Nejd. In exchange for acting as her safeguard against the Shammar, they asked for protection against the local tribes. Now, along with her own men, her party included Arab aristocrats with their camels and flocks of sheep, plus members of the Sherarat tribe; all, she noted, trekking across a world of “incredible desolation, abandoned of God and man.” In her diary to Doughty-Wylie she wrote:

“I think no one can travel here and come back the same. It sets its seal upon you, for good or ill.… I wish you were here to see this wide desolate landscape, and breathe an air which is like a breath from the very fountain of life.” This was the real desert, vacillating sand heaped in long low hills or spilling in shallow valleys: “In spite of the desolation, and the emptiness, it is beautiful—or is it beautiful partly because of the emptiness? At any rate I love it, and though the camels pace so slowly, eating as they go, I feel no impatience, and no desire to get anywhere.”

There were fewer ruins now and less to photograph, but she continued to do her mapping, walking behind the caravan, taking her bearing with her compass. Traveling on, she heard from a passing Howeitat that Sheikh Sayah, a well-known ruffian of the Wad Suleiman, was camped a few hours to the east. It was better to approach and ask for his protection than hide and risk being robbed. She advanced toward his tent. The one-eyed sheikh received her cordially, offering her coffee and dates. But when he questioned her reasons for coming there, Gertrude became suspicious. A short while later he paid a visit to her camp: any hint of courtesy had disappeared. The rogue rifled through her belongings, examined all her possessions and demanded each item for himself. Bristling with anger, she refused; he moved on to the men’s tent. A few minutes later he came back, Muhammad in tow, swearing angrily that no Christian woman had ever been in this territory before and had no right to be there. He demanded her binoculars and pistol. Night was coming, and she yielded, handing over her revolver in exchange for the promise of a
rafiq.

In the morning he returned, this time threatening to send them away without an escort if she did not give up her own binoculars. A bitter wind blew, and as she sat anxiously on the side, shivering in the cold, her men negotiated the ransom. She could overhear the talk, and the waiting became more frightening when the one-eyed brute told two of her men that he planned to kill her. If they helped him, they could share the spoils. Her servants refused, but in the end she was forced to give up both her valuable binoculars and her gun. About to leave, she mounted her camel and glowered down at the thief. He had reverted to his friendlier ways. “Why do you not say
hal
[how are you]?” he asked with a smile. “I would say no word to you,” she snarled. In her diary she wrote, “May God deprive him of the other eye.”

S
till a week away from the Nejd, the harshest desert of all, she now felt perfectly safe. But at the wells of the Haizan, where she stopped to water the camels, she heard bad news. The Emir Ibn Rashid was not at Hayil. He was away in the northern desert, the Nefud, raiding the Shammar. The Emir had informed his men of her imminent arrival, but she would rather have dealt with the leader than with his deputies.

One of her camels refused to stir. Thinking the animal was weary, Gertrude brought it food and tried to coax it up. But the camel was writhing in the agony of death. “She is gone,” Muhammad said. “Shall we sacrifice her?” Animals had always meant much to her. Even as a child she had mourned the death of her pets, organizing their funerals, marching in solemn parades to their graves. She quivered at the sight of the dying animal. “It were best,” she answered. Muhammad slit the camel’s throat.

As they marched now across the empty wasteland of the Nefud, the days were tedious, the nights infinitely lonely. Except for the harrowing stories around the campfire told by her men, there was little conversation. She felt frustrated by the lack of work and isolated by the lack of friendly people. Overwhelmed with the monotony and still nine days away from Hayil, she wrote to Dick that she was suffering from bouts of severe depression. Was the adventure, she wondered:

worth the candle. Not because of the danger—I don’t mind that; but I am beginning to wonder what profit I shall get out of it all. A compass traverse over country which was more or less known, a few names added to the map.… The net result is that I think I should be more usefully employed in more civilised countries, where I know what to look for and how to record it. Here, if there is anything to record the probability is that you can’t find it or reach it, because a hostile tribe bars the way, or the road is waterless, or something of that kind.… I fear, when I come to the end, I shall say: “It was a waste of time.” It’s done now, and there is no remedy, but I think I was a fool to come.…

There is such a long way between me and letters, or between me and anything, and I don’t feel at all like the daughter of kings, which I am supposed to be. It’s a bore being a woman when you are in Arabia.

The heavens opened up, shaking thunder, pouring hail and rain. Gertrude sat in her tent reading
Hamlet
, and as she read the tragic story of greed and deceit in the royal house of Denmark, so much like the bitter rivalry in the desert, the world came into focus. “Princes and powers of Arabia stepped down into their true place,” she wrote to Dick, “and there rose up above them the human soul, conscious and answerable to itself.”

A few days’ more travel and she reached the end of the Nefud. At the top of the last sand bank she looked down. The desolate landscape was terrifying: black lifeless sand whipped by a bitter wind. This was the Nejd, the threatening desert of Central Arabia. “
Subhan Allah!
” said one of her men. “We have come to
Jehannum
; we have come to Hell.”

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

Prisoner in Arabia

T
he Nejd was empty and eerily silent, its flat plains hard and almost interminable. But on Tuesday, February 24, 1914, Gertrude and her men were in sight of Hayil. The ancient city, in medieval times a hub of commerce, had been a stop on the frankincense route between the Arabian Gulf and the Levantine coast. For hundreds of years Persians had paused there on the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the mid-nineteenth century, Hayil had become the headquarters for Ibn Rashid of the Shammar tribe; since then there had been constant strife with Ibn Saud of the Anazeh.

Ten years earlier, Ibn Saud had broken out of the exile imposed on his father by Ibn Rashid, and, with the help of fifteen men, scaled the walls of Riyadh in the dark of night, ready to seize it as soon as the doors were opened in the morning. This daring success had earned him a reputation as a desert warrior. Unbeknownst to Gertrude, as she reached Hayil, the Saudis and their Wahhabi army (Islamic fundamentalists) were on the warpath, carrying out a bloody revenge for their years in exile. As for the Rashids, they had become much weaker, sapped by internecine rivalries so brutal that the present Emir, the oldest surviving member of the ruling Rashid family, was only sixteen years of age.