Gertrude Bell (14 page)

F
rom childhood, Gertrude had possessed an extraordinary vitality of both mind and body. Though small, she was strong and athletic; she needed quantities of exercise, the harder the better. She hunted, she danced, she bicycled, shot, fished, gardened, and skated, and on holiday she was a tireless sightseer. She could not bear to be thought self-indulgent, and by the time she was thirty, with most of her contemporaries committed to marriage and motherhood, she was ready for a new challenge that would prove that she was not just drifting. And then she discovered climbing. Of her first important mountain ascent, in 1899, she wrote: “It was awful—perfectly fearful! It was absolutely sheer down and I had practically never been on a rock before. I think if I had known exactly what was before me I should not have faced it . . . However, I didn't let on.”

On a family holiday in the French Alps two years previously, she had promised that she would come back to climb the Meije, whose snow-covered ridge towered above the village of La Grave and the little mountain inn where the Bells had been staying. The family had looked at her askance. The mountain was the reserve of serious climbers, a very different proposition from anything she had yet encountered. And when she came to ascend this 13,068-foot mountain, she found it most convenient to do so in her underclothes. There were then no “right clothes” for women mountaineers, and she would take off her skirt at the point where she and her guides roped
up, then put it on again as soon as they descended back onto the glacier.

For wealthy late-Victorian families, a summer holiday in the Alps represented a romantic and exotic interlude comparable to today's winter break on a celebrity island such as Barbados or St. Bart's. Healthy mountain walks, healthy meals, hard cycling, boat trips on the lakes, and card games before bed were all on the agenda. The Bells, well travelled as they were, were no different from everyone else in this respect, and although Gertrude took mountain walking to its limits, that is all the Alps meant to her until almost the end of their fortnight at La Grave.

It was 1897, the Queen's Diamond Jubilee year, marked more solemnly for the Bells by the death of Mary Lascelles, Florence's sister. Mary had been a witness to every stage of Gertrude's adolescence, had attempted to feminize the “Oxfordy” young woman in the intensely social milieu of Bucharest, and had been the worried observer of her love affair with Henry Cadogan. Her death came barely a month after Gertrude had been staying with them again, this time in Berlin, where Sir Frank was the British ambassador. Four months of mourning had scarcely transformed their distress into resignation, and Hugh and Florence decided they all needed a holiday. They would assemble in force in August. Florence had been in Potsdam visiting the Lascelleses and would meet them in Paris. Hugh, Gertrude, Hugo, Elsa, and Molly would gather in London, join Florence, and then they would all travel in carefully staged cultural steps to the Massif des Écrins in the Dauphiné, visiting the galleries of Lyon and the churches of Grenoble en route.

Once there, Hugh and Gertrude got up early and bicycled or walked. Florence at first retired to bed with a bad chill. The others liked to sit in the sun and drink hot chocolate. Father and daughter were ideally suited for the gentler excursions, enjoying the views and the flowers, talking and getting agreeably lost together. Hugh decided to join Gertrude in half-walking, half-climbing a local peak, the Bec de l'Homme. They scrambled up a steep, edelweiss-covered slope to the foot of the glacier, then roped themselves together and climbed for half an hour. They breakfasted on the arête, admiring the view, then descended. This was enough for Hugh, but Gertrude was soon venturing further and coming
back later. She arranged her own expedition with the local mountain guides Mathon and Marius, up a minor peak (3,669 feet) about 400 feet below the Meije summit, and almost all of it a far easier climb than the Meije presented. Gertrude wrote in her diary on 7 August: “Elsa and Papa stayed on the Col while the guides and I went up the Pic de la Grave, cutting steps in the ice for 3½ hours . . . Papa and Elsa started away back to the Refuge by themselves.”

Just before the end of the holiday she went over the Brèche, the guides steering her away from the extreme rock and ice route. She slept the night up at the mountain refuge, two hours' walk from the inn. The next morning, in high spirits, she ran down the last slope back into La Grave. “She proudly strode back into the village . . . between her guides, well pleased with herself,” wrote Florence, wrapped in coats and shawls on the terrace on her first day up. At thirty, Gertrude had discovered the thrill and danger of climbing, and the die was cast. When the Bells followed their luggage out of the little hotel, she knew she would be back.

She fulfilled her promise a couple of seasons later, having been round the world in the meantime. She came on alone to La Grave from Bayreuth, where she and the musical Hugo had been joined by Frank Lascelles and his daughter, Florence, as well as Gertrude's dear “Domnul” from Romania, now Sir Valentine Chirol, who did his level best to dissuade her from her dangerous new adventures. It was not unusual at the time for male climbers, often British university students on holiday, to tackle the Alps without experience even of rock climbing at home, as long as they could find good guides. Crampons would not be in use for nearly a decade, and even then would be thought seriously unsporting. Karabiners had not been invented, any more than had nylon. Ropes, to be of any use, had to be thick and heavy (and grew heavier when saturated with water). Without any modern aids, and no interim climbing experience, Gertrude was as much of a novice as she had been in '97. Still, perhaps, in an operatic frame of mind, she met up with Mathon and Marius and committed herself to climb the Meije with them, weather permitting, on 29 August.

They spent the preceding couple of nights in the refuge, and the first day on a practice climb. As it was getting dark, a young Englishman called Turner joined them with his guide, Rodier. Gertrude went out to watch the sunset and gazed with some awe at the Meije rearing above
them, a mass of sheer cliffs and forbidding shadows. By 8 p.m. all five were packed onto and under the sleeping shelf. With straw for a mattress and her cloak as a pillow, Gertrude declared herself “very comfortable,” but spent the four-hour night wide awake, no doubt speculating on her proximity to Turner, the two of them packed side by side “as tight as herrings.” Soon after midnight she was washing in the tumbling river under the stars, and then she and Marius followed Mathon's lantern up to the snow line. At one-thirty the moonlight was bright enough for them to rope up and start over the Glacier du Tabuchet. At this point, Gertrude divested herself of her skirt. She still had no climbing trousers—“I gave my skirt to Marius, Mathon having said that I couldn't possibly wear it. He was quite right, but I felt very indecent.”

Having crossed the Brèche from north to south, they reached the Promontoire, a table of rock on which they rested for ten minutes. After climbing—“most pleasantly”—a long chimney, they were on the steep Grand Pic ridge. At a couple of places Mathon and Marius simply pulled Gertrude up like a parcel.

So far it had been fairly easy, but now came the moment of initiation. “We had about two hours and a half of awfully difficult rock,” she wrote later, “. . . perfectly fearful. The first half hour I gave myself up for lost. It didn't seem possible that I could get up all that wall without ever making a slip . . . but presently it began to seem quite natural to be hanging by my eyelids over an abyss.”

By the time they reached the famously tricky Pas du Chat Gertrude was supporting her own weight and managing so well that she didn't realize she had completed one of the most difficult manoeuvres of the climb. They reached the Grand Pic at 8:45 a.m., which left just the Cheval Rouge to negotiate. Fifteen feet of almost perpendicular rock, its name derives from the necessity to climb it astride. That completed, there was a twenty-foot overhang, then the summit.

Mathon, ahead of her, suddenly snagged and broke the cord of the ice-axe that was tied to his wrist. Slicing the air as it flew past her, it winged its way into the eerie silence of the void below. And then they were on the summit of the 13,000-foot Meije in the hot sunshine, with an incomparable view all around them. There they were joined by Turner and Rodier.

In half an hour Mathon was shaking her awake. The way down was
longer than the way up, and the going would be just as hard. This time they would all do it together. Halfway down the Grand Pic, the guides fastened a double rope to an iron bolt and let Gertrude and Turner down onto a small ledge. Here they sat, side by side, their boots dangling over a vertiginous drop. The next bit—“very nasty,” Gertrude thought—had to be done without the double rope. She was now at the Brèche, another part of which she had climbed two years before, and was not expecting what turned out to be the worst moments of the entire venture. Mathon, roped to her and going on ahead, suddenly vanished around a corner of rock. She waited, and presently she felt a tug on the rope and heard his voice: “Allez, Mademoiselle.” In a letter to her parents: “There were two little lumps to hold on to on an overhanging rock and there was La Grave beneath and there was me in mid-air and Mathon round the corner holding the rope tight—but the rope was sideways of course—that's my general impression of those ten minutes.”

Three more hours of unrelenting concentration and she was safely down on the glacier again, being handed back her skirt. Mr. Turner, she slyly noted, was “awfully done.” Only climbers know how a long day on the mountain can reduce one to a mixture of tears and exultation, how one can at the same time ache for sleep and want to relive every moment of the danger just past. Shaking, no doubt, in every limb, and feeling a tumult of emotions, she trudged down into the village with Mathon and Marius. There, to her surprise, Gertrude found the guests and staff of the inn stamping their feet on the frozen doorstep, waiting to congratulate her. They slapped her on the back and let off a fusillade of firecrackers to celebrate this, her first ascent. She fell into bed and slept for eleven hours, drank five cups of tea on waking and sent a telegram to Red Barns: “Meije traversee.”

Gertrude always had to have a project. Now she had cut her teeth on the Meije, she went on, after a few days' practice on less challenging rocks, to tackle the highest summit of the southern French Alps, the Barre des Écrins. It was a huge challenge for a climber as inexperienced as she was, but she was sure she would prove herself on the 13,422-foot peak—officially categorized as
extrême
. As a concession to the risky endeavour, she had now acquired a pair of men's trousers, which she wore tightly belted under her skirt; so her diary account of each climbing day still started: “Skirts off and up the rock!”

Gertrude and her guides spent the night of 31 August in the refuge, together with another climber, Prince Louis of Orléans—“a nice little boy with a giggle”—and his porter, Faure, who cooked his dinner. She read Edward Whymper's account of his first ascent up the Écrins until it grew dark, then sat talking until bedtime with Prince Louis and some German late arrivals. They set off at 1:10 a.m. Accidents happened that day, perhaps due to the intense cold. Marius dropped his axe, and she sat on her hands to try to keep them warm while Faure went down to retrieve it. Once she slipped and fell on her back onto the ice, but was caught on the rope by Mathon: both cut their hands, he badly. She took some photographs, her numb fingers fumbling with the camera. Bitter winds drove clouds of snow around them at midday, delaying the descent from the peak. It was nearly three in the afternoon when they ate their lunch on the glacier—bread and jam, with sardines. On the way down from there, for a time, Mathon lost the way, and she twisted her foot painfully on some loose stones. She had ripped her trousers to bits on the climb, and by the time she got down she was frozen. “I was now in rags, so I put on my skirt for decency—at least Mathon did, for I couldn't feel at all with my fingers.” When they got back to the inn, they had been nineteen hours on the Écrins—rather too long, even for her.

This was not the end of her climbing for that year, but her lack of interest in personal publicity has led to some confusion among her biographers about her precise programme. After days starting soon after midnight and ending in mountain huts late in the evening, it is unlikely that she kept her diary consistently or wrote letters home. If she did, some are missing, and even the Alpine Club, the oldest climbing club of all, has no very accurate record of her achievements.

For the climbing season of 1900, Gertrude chose the Swiss Alps. She spent happy hours in Chamonix with her two new guides, Ulrich and his brother Heinrich Führer, studying charts and talking their way through her new project. She had decided to tackle Mont Blanc, at 15,771 feet the highest summit in the Alps. Its white dome, she explained, mocked her from across Lake Geneva. Although not the most difficult climb, it is a serious proposition and physically demanding. To date, more than a thousand climbers have been killed in the attempt. She climbed it only
a year after the Meije; a well-known contemporary mountaineer was to confide to the Alpine Club that his most vivid recollection of his ascent of Mont Blanc was the effort required to follow Miss Bell. Her fame as a mountaineer was beginning to spread. As she wrote home at about that time, “I am a Person! And one of the first questions everyone seems to ask everyone else is ‘Have you ever met Miss Gertrude Bell?' ”

During the seasons 1899–1904 she became one of the most prominent women climbers in the Alps. In conquering the classic peak of Mont Blanc, she was following in the footsteps of an extraordinary Frenchwoman, Marie Paradis, who had climbed it almost a hundred years earlier, in 1808. In fact, the history of women mountaineers had begun as early as 1799, when a Miss Parminter made several Alpine ascents, but no others climbed Mont Blanc until the 1880s, when Meta Brevoort and Lucy Walker competed to bag the maximum number of peaks and passes. Gertrude's contribution in the field of mountaineering was to notch up many achievements in a total of only five seasons—especially remarkable given that climbing was just one interest among so many. Seen in the context of her whole life, it was little more than a brief craze, a hobby she took up for a while, less important to her than travelling, learning languages, archaeology, or photography, but more important, perhaps, than her rock gardening, fencing, and hunting.