Gertrude Bell (19 page)

Her days in the saddle stretched to ten or twelve hours, and she took to passing the time by reading and sleeping as she rode. She would change to a sideways position on the saddle—built for riding astride—and let go of the reins in order to hold her parasol, map, and book. When one day her horse suddenly began to trot, she fell off, much to the amusement of the soldiers. She sat in the sand for a moment, wondering whether to be annoyed, and then threw back her head and joined in the laughter. For the last hour or two of these long days, she would sometimes transfer to one of her men's camels:

It's the greatest relief after you have been riding a horse for 8 or 9 hours to feel the long comfy swing and the wide soft saddle of a camel beneath you . . . You ride a camel with only a halter which you mostly tie loosely round the peak of your saddle. A tap with your camel switch on one side of her neck or the other tells her the direction you want her to go, a touch with your heels sends her on, but when you wish her to sit down you have to hit her lightly and often on the neck saying at the same time: “Kh kh kh kh” . . . The big soft saddle, the “shedad,” is so easy and comfortable that you never tire. You loll about and eat your lunch and observe the landscape through your glasses . . . My camel . . . is the most charming of animals.

In a letter she had collected in Damascus, Florence had asked if she were ever lonely. Gertrude replied that she often wanted her family, particularly her father; then she tried to ameliorate any hurt this might occasion to her stepmother:

It is at times a very odd sensation to be out in the world quite by myself, but mostly I take it as a matter of course . . . I don't think I ever feel lonely,
though the one person I often wish for is Papa . . . I keep wanting to compare notes with him. You, I want to talk to, but not in a tent with earwigs and black beetles around and muddy water to drink! I don't think you would be your true self under such conditions.

As they climbed into the hills, she had to abandon the muslin sleeping bag and wrap herself at night in knickerbockers, gaiters, two coats, and a blanket. She slept on the ground: later on her desert travels, she would take a collapsible canvas bed. The going got harder, and the way drier, as they neared Palmyra. On the last day they rose at midnight and rode until sunrise, when on the horizon appeared Palmyra's castle set in its pale bed of sand and salt, ghostly dust clouds whirling over it, and still five thirsty hours away. The towers, the avenues of columns, and the immense Temple of Baal were, she thought, the loveliest things she had seen since Petra. She took twenty-four hours to explore the town and pay courtesy calls to its worthies, then turned back, for once, along the tourist route.

On the way back to Damascus, she was joined by a large caravan of camels being brought from the Nejd region to market in the city by a group of ferocious-looking Agail tribesmen, led by their sheikh. Fearing a raid on their camels en route, they wanted the extra protection of Gertrude's three soldiers as witnesses from the Turkish military, should the need arise. She, in turn, wanted to talk to the sheikh and find out more about the feared desert of the Nejd, where she intended to travel one day. Also, she had learnt that in the desert one good turn deserves another: it was no bad thing for the Agail to owe her a favour.

On the way back she happened to meet up with a carriage containing a couple of tourists, pleasant Englishwomen whom she had met at the consulate in Jerusalem, both very fresh and tidy. The ladies looked askance at her dirty clothes and straggling hair, and shrank back from her escort of scowling Agail with their cartridge belts, knives, and twelve-foot lances. Gertrude, however, was delighted to see Miss Blount and Miss Grieve again. She jumped off her horse and swung herself cheerfully into their carriage for a very proper English tea, with Earl Grey and ginger biscuits. “I wish I could manage to travel on the approved lines,” she wrote afterwards, “but the fates are against me. I had laid all my plans for coming back from Palmyra like a lady, but no! it was not to be.”

Nearly halfway back to Damascus, beyond Karyatein, she pitched camp and watched a company of Hasineh, with their black tents, come in from their winter quarters. “Their sheikh, Muhammad, came to call on me, a boy of 20 or younger, handsome, rather thick lipped, solemn, his hair hanging in thick plaits from under his keffiyeh. He carried an enormous sword, the sheath inlaid with silver . . . He owns 500 tents and a house in Damascus, and Heaven knows how many horses and camels.” Later she repaid the call, seating herself on a cushion in his tent to join the circle around the sheikh. As coffee was served, a musician started to play the rubaba, a single-stringed instrument:

He sang to it long melancholy songs, monotonous, each line of the verse being set to the same time and ending with a drop of the voice which was almost a groan . . . weird and sad and beautiful in its way. All the silent people sat round looking at me, unkempt, half-naked, their keffiyehs drawn up over their faces, nothing alive in them but their eyes . . . Sometimes one would come into the open tent . . . and standing on the edge of the circle, he greeted the Sheikh with a “Ya Muhammad!” his hand lifted to his forehead and the company with “Peace be upon you” to which we all answered “And upon you peace!”

After a while, Gertrude got up and said goodbye. The moment she got back to her tent, her soldiers told her that she had committed a dangerous solecism. A sheep had been killed in her honour and was being prepared. To walk out before the meal was virtually an insult. And she should have taken the sheikh an offering. What was more, one of Muhammad's standing required to be placated with a gift of considerable value. You can give an Arab nothing, they told her, but a horse or a gun. Perturbed, she took the pistol from one of her crew, wrapped it in a pocket handkerchief, and sent it with a soldier to Muhammad with the message that she had not known that he was intending to honour her by providing meat. The soldier returned with a pressing invitation from the sheikh for her to rejoin the tribesmen. “Back I went . . . We waited till 9:30! I wasn't bored . . . the talk went round—the politics of the desert: who had sold horses, who owned camels, who had been killed in a raid, how much the blood money would be or where the next battle. It was very difficult to understand, but I followed it more or less . . .”

At last, a slave came round with a long-spouted jug and poured a little water over the hands of all the participants, after which an enormous dish of mutton was carried in. After the meal, hands were washed once more, and Gertrude bowed herself out. It had been, she thought, an expensive dinner; but the evening had been a blueprint for encounters with important sheikhs. In future she would travel with gifts, she would know what to give, how to behave, what to discuss, and when to leave. In the morning, she watched the Hasineh move off, and found it an impressive and majestic sight: “Sheikh Muhammad had only twenty or thirty of his five hundred tents with him, yet the camels filled the plain like the regiments of an army, each household marching with its own detachment of camels . . .”

She returned to Damascus a tried and tested desert traveller. She stayed on in Jerusalem with the Rosens, making further expeditions, and arrived back in England in June. As she left, she wrote a final letter to Hugh, prophetic in its message: “You know, dearest Father, I shall be back here before long! One doesn't keep away from the East when one has got into it this far.”

Two years after her first adventures, Gertrude went to Haifa, where she spent two months on her own, perfecting her Arabic. It was already nine years since she had started to learn the language. She rented a house on Mount Carmel, filled the rooms with mimosa, jasmine, and wild flowers, and did her lessons on the dining-room table under a chandelier in which there was a nest, the birds constantly flying in and out of the open window. Four hours of Arabic a day and two and a half hours of Persian occupied all of her time between riding about the local countryside and involving herself, through her growing circle of contacts, in the politics of the day. She wrote home: “I am so wildly interested in Arabic that I can think of nothing else. You can understand the joy of at last being able to learn this language that I have been struggling with for so long.” She found, to her surprise, that her first solo expeditions had made her rather famous—a Person with a capital “P,” as she was quick to assure her family: “I am much entertained to find that I am a Person in this country—they all think I am a Person! . . . Renown is not very difficult to acquire here.”

Once she could speak the language easily, she undertook the first of five extraordinary Middle Eastern expeditions. Her four-month journey on horseback in 1905 started from Jerusalem, traversed the Jebel Druze mountains, then skirted the Syrian desert to Damascus and on north to Aleppo. She crossed Turkey from Antioch in the south through Anatolia to Constantinople, covering only the last few hundred miles by train. In 1907 she landed at Smyrna on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey and travelled on horseback again from one major archaeological site to another, with stops to join her hired railway carriage bringing her luggage. Going gradually eastwards she reached Binbirkilisse, where she worked with Professor Ramsay until taking the train homewards through Constantinople.

Gertrude's longest journey began in February 1909 at Aleppo, taking the northern desert route to meet the Euphrates River in what is now north-western Iraq. She travelled its length to Baghdad. In the nearby desert, and in some danger, she measured and photographed the great palace of Ukhaidir south of the city, then went on to the sites of Babylon and Ctesiphon before joining the Tigris. She followed this river northwards past the western mountains of Iran and over the Turkish border to its source in the high plateau of the Tur Abdin. Reaching Mardin after five months in the saddle, she headed once more for Constantinople.

In February 1911, she set off from Damascus in bad weather. At first camping in deep snow and having to contend with the camels slipping and falling on the frozen ground, she crossed the empty Syrian desert eastwards then south to Ukhaidir. After completing the measurements of the palace that she had first taken in 1909, and visiting Najaf, she started north again, resting in Baghdad and then taking the Tigris valley route into southern Turkey and the Tur Abdin once more. Returning south into Syria, stopping at Carchemish, she arrived in Aleppo at the end of May, going home through Beirut.

Beginning in November 1913, Gertrude made an epic camel journey crossing and recrossing the Arabian desert, with her largest ever caravan complete with servants, crew, pack animals, and hangers-on. She passed through the Nejd, the vast waterless desert of gravel and lava, to the feared city of Hayyil at its centre. Once free of the city, she continued on to Baghdad for a short rest, before facing the desert once more. Crossing the Syrian desert for the second time, she reached Damascus in late
May, arriving home with little time for recovery before the First World War broke out.

To list these desert journeys one after another does little to convey their phenomenal length and hardship. Taken together, her journeys encompassed most of Syria, Turkey, and Mesopotamia—roughly, the broad territory containing Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. She covered more than ten thousand miles on the map, but she went over hills and mountains, searched for fords, and took detours to ancient sites to make contact with sheikhs. Over six hundred days she must have journeyed at least twenty thousand miles in the saddle.

Her visits were timed at more or less two-year intervals, between which she travelled to other places and pursued her mountain climbing. In 1901, when her grandfather Sir Lowthian, at the age of eighty-five, had decided to amalgamate the Bell companies with Dorman Long, she had a bigger income at her disposal. The six-month journeys for which she would once have needed the funding of her father were now affordable.

Journey by journey, she targeted her Middle Eastern travels on archaeological sites in unmapped territories. Methodically covering the ground, these expeditions resulted in five books, some readable, some indigestibly packed with information. She dreamed that one day she might bring to light a secret citadel, a jewel in the wilderness; meanwhile, she left no ruin along her route unvisited. After journeys endured for the most part in appalling weather, and across territories swept by marauding tribes, often suffering from lack of water and food, she would fastidiously record the day's events by candlelight on the folding table in her tent.

She was very conscious that she lacked the qualifications of an archaeologist—for instance, a knowledge of epigraphy. Between these carefully planned expeditions, she therefore set out to learn new practical skills, so that, passing through uncharted territories, she would be able to pinpoint the sites, make maps, and finally recognize what she found and fit it into the historical and archaeological context as she recorded it. She attended courses that taught her how to measure and draw up accounts of her finds; she became a skilled photographer and a member of the Royal Photographic Society. As such, she was able to have her film professionally printed. She carried two cameras wherever she went. One was a hand camera that took glass plates 6.5 inches high by 4.25 inches wide, the other designed for panoramic views. When she returned from her travels
she used a technique adopted more recently by David Hockney, to scan an entire horizon by combining five or six carefully angled shots. The School of Historical Studies at Newcastle University, which holds seven thousand of her photographs, particularly values her panoramas as of considerable archaeological value to this day, showing as they do precisely how the different monuments relate to each other across the landscape. Her documentary records of the monuments and churches themselves are no less important, depicting the buildings as they were when she photographed them, before twentieth-century erosion and pilfering caused further damage. In view of the scarcity of photographs of Gertrude herself, her shadow, often visible in the foreground of her pictures as she bent over her camera to get the best light on the object, with the sunrise or sunset behind her, holds a particular fascination.