Gertrude Bell (28 page)

Their affair, although unconsummated, had given her days of ecstatic happiness such as she had never known. There was the euphoria of sexual attraction that they both felt; and the novelty of being with a man who was not wary of her, nor alienated by her exploits, nor anxious to hide his ignorance of the subjects she discussed so knowledgeably. She had long outgrown the complacent English milieu in which she now swam like a rainbow fish among tadpoles. At forty-five, she was annoyed to find that despite the achievements for which she was internationally renowned, the society she inhabited in London and Yorkshire retained its stolidly Edwardian view of her as maiden aunt cum frightening intellectual. It was thirteen years since she had written, in a burst of exuberance, “I have become a Person!” but outside her large circle of family and friends she was merely a spinster oddity, albeit a beautifully dressed one trailing clouds of glory. Was it for this, she must have asked herself, that she had rocketed through a high-powered education, pioneered travels that would have been exceptional even for a man, and mastered archaeology, cartography, mountaineering, and six foreign languages? Dick, on the other hand, was critically aware of the significance of her
expeditions and, knowing the Middle East as well as she did, could match her, story for story, adventure for adventure.

Now that he had left for Albania, Gertrude was left utterly desolate. Her family would not be able to countenance her affair with a married man—there could be no doubt about that. Her society friends knew nothing of it. At any moment the name of Dick Doughty-Wylie could come up in the course of conversation, to twist the knife in the wound. Even worse, there was always a chance that at some London charity event or concert party she might suddenly come face-to-face with his wife. Forthright to the point of eccentricity, Gertrude hated the thought of evasion or subterfuge. She wrote to Chirol: “If you knew the way I had paced backwards and forwards along the floor of hell for the last few months, you would think me right to try any way out. I want to cut all links with the world . . . This is the best and wisest thing to do . . . I want the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind and the rain, the camp fire under the stars, and sleep, and the road again.”

The last eighteen months had shaken her profoundly. Now there were only Dick's letters to look forward to. Mentally and spiritually she sank into the deepest state of despair, one which might have caused a breakdown in a less robust individual. Now whenever she heard a piece of melancholy music, or read one of the aching poems of Hafiz, or remembered how she would look for him across a crowded drawing-room and count the moments until he reached her side, tears would blur her vision. Castigate herself as she might for behaving like the kind of “silly little woman” she so despised, she had to admit she couldn't get him out of her mind. The last bastion of her self-respect lay in keeping from her father and Florence just how far she had allowed herself to drift into dependence on a man she could not have. Hugh, a most unusual Victorian, adored her for her independence, intellect, courage, and good Geordie sense. Those were the characteristics he most admired in a woman; and if in Mary Shield, Gertrude's mother, he had chosen a beautiful local girl, he had picked for his second wife a woman whose intelligence and thoughtfulness far outweighed her plainer looks and unassertive nature. Gertrude's entire life had been predicated on pleasing him and winning his support for her adventures. God forbid that he should see just how this affair had brought her to her knees.

And so she made every effort to appear normal, putting up as good a
show as she could muster over the family dinner, when the Bells renounced gossip for discussion of politics, agriculture, industry, books, and plays. Then she would wish them good night and go up to her room, where she chain-smoked, sometimes sitting on her bed with her head in her hands, or pacing the floor until the early hours. If there had been another way—if in her loneliness she could have overcome her resistance, dented her pride enough to consent to be Dick's mistress—she might have borne it, but in the end she would tell herself, “Not in my father's lifetime.” She would put the pain behind her, the only way she could.

She had waited, hoping perhaps that something would change, until Dick left for Albania; and then she acted. She would escape into “wild travel” again, get away from the kind, half-comprehending regard of family and friends that made it all the harder. Damascus would be her jumping-off point. Again she spoke to herself the lines of Hafiz that had so well expressed her anguish over that earlier, slighter love affair with Henry Cadogan:

Ah! When he found it easy to depart,
He left the harder pilgrimage to me!
Oh Camel-driver, though the cordage start,
For God's sake help me lift my fallen load,
And Pity be my comrade of the road!

She did not really care where she went. It was more important to get away; but her state of mind dictated that this should be an epic, momentous journey, and that she should be away a long time. She did not, at the moment, care very much whether she came back at all.

How changed was her mood in this August of 1913 from the way she had felt in the spring—and how different were her shopping expeditions. She would take plenty of luggage this time and be ready for anything. First, there were her two English-made tents, one for bathing and sleeping in, one for eating and writing, both with a loose flap that could be tied back, laced shut, or used as a shady canopy. She ordered more of the skirts that she had designed with her tailor for riding horses in the Middle East: neither side-saddle habit nor breeches, but an ankle-length divided skirt with an apron panel. In the saddle, she would sweep this backward and gather the surplus material behind her and to one side,
where it looked in profile like a bustle. When she dismounted, the panel fell around her like an apron and concealed the division. She bought lace and tucked-lawn evening gowns for dinners with consuls and sheikhs, for sitting at a dining-table at an embassy or cross-legged on a carpet in a tent. She would take her cigarette holders, silver cigarette cases, evening purses, a score of white or striped cotton shirts with mutton-chop shoulders and high rounded collars, tucked or frilled, with pearl buttons and tight cuffs. At the neck she would wear a man's tie, or an oval pin.

The list was a long one: she would take a dozen linen skirts stopping short of the ankle, nipped in to release fabric from her small waist; an entire caseful of shoes and boots for scrambling about amongst ruins and rocks—leather ones to the knees, canvas-laced ankle-boots; strap-and-button low-heeled shoes for evening; beige lisle stockings, silk underwear, and parasols; Purdy revolvers and a crate of rifles; theodolites; and some boxes of the Zeiss telescopes she would give as special gifts to sheikhs who helped her along the way. She bought a dozen shady linen and straw hats: if one blew off it would hardly be worth the trouble of descending from the camel to chase after it. As the temperature soared, a locally bought cotton keffiyeh could be substituted, caught round her head with a bright silk rope and fluttering out behind her to protect her shoulders from the sun.

This time it would be winter in the desert, and she folded a fur coat and jacket into her Wolsey valise. The list continued: tweed travelling costumes, woollen cardigans, and a set of five-foot muslin bags with elastic drawstring necks, like big shoe bags, into which she would climb beneath the blankets in bed to protect herself from fleas and other insects; then the multiple little leather notebooks which she would use for her archaeological notes and as diaries; her two cameras and her film, reams of writing paper, compasses, cartography paper, pencils, pens, and ink; lavender soaps and bottles of eau de toilette, silver hairbrushes and candlesticks, linen sheets, and embroidered tablecloths; the surveying and map-projection instruments provided for her by the Royal Geographical Society; the specially made folding canvas bed and chair that would furnish her bedroom tent, and the canvas bath—“my luxury”—that before the end of the trip would double as a drinking trough for the camels; finally, medical supplies, cosmetics, and the all-important cartridges
which she wrapped in white silk evening stockings and hid, pushing them down into the pointed toes of her shoes and boots.

The journey she was undertaking began at last to excite her, not least because she had been seriously warned against it, but also because of the physical demands and geographical difficulties it posed. Her destination would be Hayyil, the almost mythical city at the centre of Arabia described by Charles M. Doughty, Dick's intrepid geologist uncle, in his 1888 book
Arabia Deserta
, the book she had taken with her on every one of her expeditions. He had written grimly of two ill-starred visits there during a daunting two years travelling the border between the Arabian and Syrian deserts. At Hayyil he had been detained and nearly lost his life.

In choosing Hayyil, she would be travelling to one of the most volatile and least known parts of the world. The ostensible purpose of the visit was to provide information for the Foreign Office. War with Germany was increasingly likely, and the attention of the British government was turning to the political situation in central Arabia, where Germany was cementing its ties with the Ottoman Empire by training their army, supplying them with arms and building railways.

For a century the enmity between the two major forces in central Arabia, the Sauds and the Rashids, had been pivotal to the history of the peninsula. Britain was principally supplying arms and money to the charismatic but ferocious chieftain Abdul Aziz Abdurrahman al Saud, Hakim of Nejd—usually known as Ibn Saud.
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This leader of the fanatical puritan Wahabi sect of Islam operated from the Saud capital, Riyadh, his authority growing as he won back the territories his forefathers had lost. The Ottoman government supported the opposing dynasty of Ibn Rashid of the Shammar federation, perhaps the cruellest, most violent tribe of Arabia. Now the Sauds were poised to strike at the Rashids, and it was to the Rashid stronghold Hayyil that Gertrude determined to go to first. At this stage, she harboured a second plan, to travel further south, to Riyadh, to collect further information that would be of interest, perhaps to the Foreign Office. Captain William Shakespear, setting out for Riyadh almost neck and neck with Gertrude, would get caught up in a
battle between the Sauds and the Rashids fifteen months later, and be killed.

The scope of the journey Gertrude was planning was extraordinary. She proposed to travel sixteen hundred miles by camel, taking a circular route south from Damascus, then east across the northern third of the Arabian peninsula, the landmass bounded by the Red Sea, the Gulf, and the Arabian Sea. Geographically and politically, a journey such as this was enough to daunt the most experienced of travellers. On a comparable expedition Charles Huber, most distinguished of Arabian explorers, had lost heart and turned back on his tracks only to be murdered by his own guides; and the Austrian Baron Nolde had been driven to suicide. Reaching Hayyil had become the desert traveller's ultimate challenge. To penetrate this barren country would have been hazardous enough even if the Bedouin could have been relied upon to be friendly. Gertrude was proposing to travel into the arena of Saud–Rashid conflict at a time when events were moving to a climax.

The first part of the journey would take her south to central Arabia and across the vast interior highland of Nejd, which stretches from Syria in the north to Yemen in the south. Then she would cross the shifting sands of the Nefud, becoming the first Westerner to cross that angle of the desert. She would leave the Nefud via the Misma mountains, a strange and unearthly place not unlike the Gothic visions of Gustave Doré, the nineteenth-century illustrator of Dante's
Inferno
. A landscape littered with rock pinnacles as high as ten-storey buildings, it had another extraordinary property: because of the flint in the rock formations, it was as black as night. She would then descend into the featureless dry plateau of granite and basalt grit, at the heart of which the snow-white medieval city of Hayyil floated like a mirage.

Gertrude had thought about this expedition, and put it off, for a long time. She was by now so experienced a desert voyager that there was little she had not done. This time, for personal reasons, she wanted not only an escape, but a challenge that would test her to the limit—an adventure that would impress Dick Doughty-Wylie, cause him anxiety on her behalf, fix his attention. She wanted his admiration, even if she was never to return. She told her parents that she would leave her destination open and get advice in Damascus, but David Hogarth wrote to remind her that she already had reason to know that her project would not be approved,
either by the Ottoman authorities or by the chief representative of Great Britain in Turkey, Sir Louis Mallet. This new ambassador in Constantinople (and friend of the Bell family) had advised her strongly against the journey while he was working at the Foreign Office in London. Four years previously a friend, Richmond Ritchie, had arranged for Gertrude to meet the Indian government's Resident in the Persian Gulf while he was in England, to discuss the route to Hayyil. The Resident was Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Cox, a name that would come to mean much to her later. He too warned her against the journey, and especially against a southern route.

In the book bag, along with the maps, her travelling set of pocket Shakespeare, and her well-thumbed copy of
Arabia Deserta
, she packed
Pilgrimage to Nejd
by Anne Blunt, who had visited Hayyil with her husband, Wilfrid, and had fallen foul of the Rashids. Gertrude had met her once at her stables in Cairo, wearing Bedouin costume and surrounded by wolves. She would have perused the book many times, noting Anne Blunt's oracular “It was a lesson and a warning . . . that we were Europeans still among Asiatics, a warning that [Hayyil] was a lions' den.”