Gertrude Bell (21 page)

Escorted by travelling Kurds and a couple of handcuffed prisoners, she moved on to Aleppo and the Anatolian border, where floods and broken bridges awaited her. She paused to explore the place where the Syrian hermit Simeon Stylites lived for the last thirty-seven years of his life upon the tops of a series of pillars, and considered how different he must have been from her. In pouring rain she tried to copy carvings, using her cloak to protect her notebook. “The devil take all Syrian inscriptions!”

The weather suddenly changed. It became so hot that the ground steamed, and mosquitoes plagued her tent. Her new Turkish muleteers were sulky and quarrelsome. For the first time she wished she were a man:

There was nothing for it but to hold one's tongue, do the work oneself, and having seen that the horses were fed, I went to bed supperless because no one would own that it was his duty to light the fire! . . . there are moments when being a woman increases one's difficulties. What my servants needed was a good beating and that's what they would have got if I had been a man—I seldom remember being in such a state of suppressed rage!

A short while later, after a day spent trying to copy inscriptions and take photographs in ruins lying deep in snake-infested grass, she came back to another supperless and tentless camp, lost her temper, and lashed out at her muleteers with her riding crop. They infuriated her even more by smiling and sitting down on another tent pack. She reached Adana and, as if by Providence, she was recommended a new servant: Fattuh, an Armenian Catholic with a wife in Aleppo. Fattuh was destined to become her Jeeves, the man she described as “the alpha and omega of all.” She hired him as a cook, and it became a shared joke between the two of them that it was the one skill he never mastered—but she never again had to wait for her tent to be put up. He accompanied her on all her travels thereafter. He was clever, a superb manager of muleteers, brave, humorous, and devoted to her. She would repay the compliment by her care of him when he fell ill at Binbirkilisse in 1907. Once only, after a most exhausting day's travelling, did she vent her fury on him. Most uncharacteristically, she sought him out a little later and humbly apologized. Two weeks after he had joined her crew, she was writing: “Fattuh, bless him! The best servant I have ever had, ready to cook my dinner or push a mule or dig out an inscription with equal alacrity . . . and to tell me endless tales of travel as we ride, for he began life as a muleteer at the age of ten and knows every inch of ground from Aleppo to Van and Bagdad.”

From Konya, with great relief, she took the train to Binbirkilisse. Her attention had been drawn to this fortress city of ruined churches and monasteries by Strzygowski's 1903 book
Kleinasien
(“Asia Minor”), in which he concentrated on the early Byzantine monuments. She had brought the book in her saddle-bag all the way from Beirut. Her own explorations there could be undertaken daily, commuting from Konya. Returning one evening to her hotel, she ran into the great ecclesiastical archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, whose books on the Church and the
Roman Empire stood on the shelves of her study at home. “We fell into each other's arms and made great friends,” she told her parents. She had spotted something in a half-obliterated inscription in a cave in Binbirkilisse which she believed was a date. Together, and with Mrs. Ramsay, they caught the train and she was able to show it to him. She was correct, and it was not long before they made a pact to return in a year or two to make a thorough investigation of the ruins and to try and date them with the help of the inscription.

The deeper she penetrated into the East, the greater became her respect for the people:

Race, culture, art, religion, pick them up at any point you please down the long course of history, and you shall find them to be essentially Asiatic . . . Some day I hope the East will be strong again and develop its own civilization, not imitate ours, and then perhaps it will teach us a few things we once learnt from it and have now forgotten, to our great loss.

On her return to Rounton in June, she would write to Valentine Chirol: “Did I tell you I was writing a travel book? Well I am. It's the greatest fun . . . It's Syria from underneath, what they think of it, the talk I hear round my camp fires, the tales they tell me as they ride with me, the gossip of the bazaar.”
The Desert and the Sown
, published in 1907, is still a classic of travel writing.

By the time of her 1909 journey to the Middle East, Gertrude's copious diaries had become virtually unreadable. They are a mixture of exhaustive archaeological detail, abbreviated notes about people and anything they said to her of a political or economic nature, and myriad details of daily desert life occasionally laced with flashes of adventure.
*
They sometimes slip into Turkish or Arabic. It would often happen that she
wrote these notes around midnight after ten or twelve hours' travel and an evening of multi-lingual conversation in a desert tent or gilded embassy.

Why did she do so? Why did this wealthy young woman spend years of her prime learning some of the most difficult languages in the world and make great efforts in order to pit herself against truly appalling conditions and great dangers and go to places so obscure that they did not figure on any contemporary map? An independent woman of great ability, she inherited the purposeful curiosity of Lowthian Bell, acknowledged worldwide for his scientific breakthroughs and technological achievements. For Gertrude, at first, curiosity predominated over purpose. She was well aware that climbing, for instance, was not an adequate aim in life. Conquering a mountain belonged in the category of human achievement, but it helped no one but yourself. Usually, as soon as she excelled in one project, she moved on to the next. Driven by her need to test herself, she veered towards challenges tinged with danger and excitement.

When she discovered desert travel, the challenges suddenly proliferated into an all-embracing personal experiment of which she would never reach the end. There were languages to perfect, customs to learn, new kinds of human being to plumb, archaeology and history to explore, the techniques of surveying and navigation, photography and cartography to acquire. There was the risky business of staying alive and reaching her goal; and the intoxication of asserting her own identity far from the world where she would have been recognized first and foremost as a Bell, the spinster daughter of Hugh, heiress granddaughter of Lowthian.

Her adventures were not an attempt to make herself famous, or elevate herself into high society. All her life she rejected publicity, and had less and less interest in the aristocracy unless it came with a high degree of ability. Hugh, while maintaining the respect of government and business, had deliberately decided not to make the conventional follow-up moves—buying a country estate, spending time in London clubs, acquiring a peerage—to take the Bells from successful leaders of industry to members of the upper class. He had no time for men who acquired prestige only through their titles and the privileges that went with them. In an era when he would have counted more as a lord than as a man of achievement, he wanted to be recognized for his expertise, his business
acumen, and his civil leadership. Similarly, as a member of the third Bell generation, Gertrude was not using her inherited power and position in the enterprises she took on. The only help she accepted was the family money that funded her exploits. For everything else she depended on her intellect, her courage, and her thirst for learning.

As the prospect of marriage and children receded, she felt an everincreasing need for self-fulfilment in diversionary activities. At a certain point, even this would not be enough, but when that moment came, life would present her with a purpose of world importance. For the time being, she was beginning to make her name in the world of affairs. Up to the First World War, affairs of state, domestic and foreign, were conducted as comprehensively at dinner parties, soirées, and embassy receptions as in government offices. She accessed this world, and was becoming recognized in it, as an expert in her areas of interest.

When she travelled, she had no hesitation in making herself immediately known to the consulate, or in calling on the ambassador,
mudir
, or governor (
vali
) of the district. Wherever she went—Bucharest, Paris, Homs, Antioch—she would announce her arrival. There would follow dinner invitations, lunch parties, receptions, pressure to conduct her affairs from a room in the consulate rather than from a small tent. If you were a “Person” as she now was—a person who mattered—you knew that it would be discourteous not to call and leave your card. If you were not a duke or an earl you could maintain this position only if you continued to merit it, and if you could prove that you mattered in the milieu of ambassadors and other notables. When Gertrude talked of her discussions with Dr. So and So about the plight of the persecuted citizens in Armenia, or the importance of Aqaba as a supply route for oil, or the reasons for extending the railway to Mecca, or the fact that ten regiments were to be sent from Damascus to bring the Druze of the Hauran to order, the table grew silent. People listened to her, and repeated what she said. Gertrude was not trying to enter the world of men—she was already part of it.

Since the eighteenth century, women such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who engineered the success of the Liberal Party—or in America, much more recently, Mrs. Harriman, who resurrected the fortunes of the Democrats—had exercised “salon power” through dinners and house parties. Gertrude was a new and modern phenomenon, a person
who exercised influence by delivering first-hand knowledge and opinions based on that knowledge. At home and abroad, she conferred with the greatest men of her day. She was definitively different from other Englishwomen who travelled in the East before and after her: Freya Stark, who said that it was wonderful to be a woman traveller there because you could pretend to be more stupid than you were; Lady Anne Blunt, who accompanied her husband, Wilfrid; and the several romantic women profiled in Lesley Blanch's
The Wilder Shores of Love
, such as Lady Burton and Jane Digby.

As a person of affairs, her up-to-the-minute information about what was going on, as well as her perspective on it, was a vital tool. Her diaries stored, in abbreviated form, everything that a computer memory would now encompass. She would jot down what was being said in one circle, and perhaps find later that it threw light on what she heard elsewhere. She would pass her information on to her journalist friend Chirol, and, from home or abroad, face-to-face or in correspondence, to the statesmen of the day. As with many another archaeologist reporting on local politics in the Middle East, it has been said that she was a “spy.” She would have regarded the label as both sensational and demeaning. She was a gatherer and disseminator of information, who lost nothing by doing the work without pay, gaining entry into the corridors of power—entry as a fully fledged “Person.”

As already mentioned, her mode of travelling, from 1909, was nothing short of majestic. It was not only that she liked to travel in style, but she knew that the sheikhs would judge her status by her possessions and her gifts, and treat her accordingly. She did not forget the Druze Yahya Beg's questioning the local villagers, “Have you seen a queen travelling?” She packed couture evening dresses, lawn blouses and linen riding skirts, cotton shirts and fur coats, sweaters and scarves, canvas and leather boots. Beneath layers of lacy petticoats she hid guns, cameras, and film, and wrapped up many pairs of binoculars and pistols as gifts for the more important sheikhs. She carried hats, veils, parasols, lavender soap, Egyptian cigarettes in a silver case, insect powder, maps, books, a Wedgwood dinner service, silver candlesticks and hairbrushes, crystal glasses, linen and blankets, folding tables, and a comfortable chair—as well as her travelling canvas bed and bath. She took two tents, one for Fattuh to put up the moment they pitched camp, so that she had a table to write on, the
other with her bath, to be filled with hot water once there was a fire, and her bed, to be made up with the muslin sleeping bag laid out under the blankets. “I need not have hidden the cartridges in my boots!” she wrote home in January 1909. “We got through customs without having a single box opened.”

Mapping the Euphrates in 1909, Gertrude examined sites for 450 miles along its banks before arriving in the area of Najaf and her destination, Karbala. Here, at Ukhaidir, she found an immense and beautiful palace in a remarkable state of repair. She would never forget her amazement at first gazing on its formidable walls and vaulted ceilings. For a time, when it was confirmed that her plan of the palace was the first to be made, she believed that she had discovered an unknown citadel: “No one knows of it, no one has seen it . . . It's the greatest piece of luck that has ever happened to me . . . A subject so enchanting and so suggestive as the Palace of Ukhaidir is not likely to present itself more than once in a lifetime.”

In 1910 she was to publish a preliminary paper on Ukhaidir in the
Journal of Hellenic Studies
, as well as giving a painstaking account of the building in her fifth book, covering her great expeditions of 1909 and 1910,
Amurath to Amurath
, which she copiously illustrated with her own photographs. But returning to the site in 1911, this time straight across the desert from Damascus to Hit, she found to her bitter disappointment that the long monograph she was about to publish, 168 pages of skilfully drawn plans and 166 photographs, would not be the first. In Babylon she discovered that some German archaeologists had been to the site during the two years of her absence, and were about to publish their own book. Her attitude to this setback demonstrated grace under pressure: she wrote in the preface to her book,
The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir
, of her admiration for the “masterly” German volume, and apologized for offering a second version while explaining why she did so: “. . . my work, which was almost completed when the German volume came out, covers not only the ground traversed by my learned friends in Babylon, but also ground which they had neither leisure nor opportunity to explore . . . With this I must take leave of a field of study which formed for four years my principal occupation, as well as my chief delight.”