Gertrude Bell (33 page)

This morning we reached the barren sandstone crags of Jebel Misma, which bound here the Nefud, and passed beyond them into Nejd . . . the landscape which opened before us was more terrifyingly dead and empty than anything I have ever seen. The blackened rocks of Misma drop steeply on the E. side into a wilderness of jagged peaks . . . and beyond and beyond, more pallid lifeless plain and more great crags of sandstone mountains rising abruptly out of it. And over it all, the bitter wind whipped the cloud shadows.

From behind her came Muhammad's voice: “We have come to the gates of hell.” On those words she departed the Nefud, giving the Shammars and Sherarat her last gifts of money and food, and descended into the blackened landscape and the plain.

It was on 22 February, eleven days since entering the Nefud, that she came to a village, the first she had seen since Ziza. Two days later, the caravan finally came to rest within a couple of hours' ride of Hayyil. Early on the twenty-fifth she sent Muhammad and Ali on ahead to announce her coming, and then rode the last part of the clean granite and basalt plain to the picturesque towers of the icing-sugar city as slowly and easily as if she had been “strolling through Piccadilly.” She had done it, and after all she had been through over the last six hundred miles, it was almost an anticlimax.

Ahead of her, visible now to the naked eye, was the singularly beautiful fortress city washed in the rose pink of the morning sunlight, its mud walls whitened with plaster and crowned with dog-tooth battlements, the green fronds of palm trees waving gently over them, and its encircling gardens breaking into pink almond and white plum blossom. Behind the skyline of tall towers ringed with machicolations, distant peaks of azure mountains soared like clouds on the horizon. Nothing could have looked more inviting, innocent, or peaceful. Steeped in
Arabia Deserta
as she was, she felt she was on a pilgrimage to a sacred site.

*
Ibn Saud—“son of Saud.”

*
This diary will be referred to as her “other” diary.

A
mile or so from Hayyil, Gertrude was met by three Rashid envoys accompanying her camel driver Ali, and three more outriders, one carrying a lance and all of them mounted on magnificent horses. Coming to a jingling stop, pennants flying, tassels swinging, they welcomed her, surrounded her caravan, and guided it to the south gate of the city. Gertrude, flanked by her own armed men and then by Hayyil's sword-bearers, rode into Hayyil feeling for once exactly like “the daughter of kings.”

As they circled the clay-brick walls, she glanced up at the towers and found them just as Charles Doughty had described them thirty-seven years before, like embattled windmills without sails. The procession turned in through a plain square gate. Gertrude, dismounting, found herself all at once in the world of the
Arabian Nights
. At a white doorway in a windowless inner wall, her guide Muhammad al-Marawi was waiting for her. Inside, she climbed up a dark, steep ramp to an inner court and a shadowy, carpeted columned hall. The pillars were whitened palm trunks, and the ceiling was made of palm fronds. The whitewashed walls were decorated with a high band of intricate, geometrical patterns in red and blue. This summer dwelling of the royal family, reserved for important visitors, was where she was to lodge. Here, in the reception hall, she greeted the two bowing female slaves who had been put at her disposal. She glanced into the coffee rooms and the courtyard with its three little trees—a quince, a lemon, and an apple—then ran up another ramp to
the roof to look over the city. Below, her men were unloading all the camels and pitching their tents in the great bleak courtyard, where every year the Haj would pause on its seven-hundred-mile journey south. On the other side of the house, the white tower of the castle seemed suspended in the blue air above the town. But immediately she was called below to meet her first visitors.

Two women awaited her. Lulua, an old woman in crimson and black, was the caretaker. The other, with her handsome broad face and darkened eyes hooded by a black and gold embroidered scarf, wore a black visiting robe parting over magenta and violet cotton skirts. From a centre parting, four thick plaits fell to her waist, and around her neck hung “strings and strings of rough pearls,” tangling with a fringed necklace of emeralds and rubies. This was Turkiyyeh, a talkative Circassian, sent by Ibrahim, the Amir of Hayyil's deputy, to greet her.

A slave-girl brought coffee, and Turkiyyeh and Gertrude sat on the cushions to talk. The Circassian's story was extraordinary. She had been a gift from the Sultan in Constantinople to the late Muhammad ibn Rashid, then the Amir, whose favourite wife she had quickly become. With another of his wives, Mudi, he was the father of the present Amir. She began to explain to Gertrude the Hayyil hierarchy. The present Amir, sixteen years old, had been absent for two months now, raiding the Ruwalla camping grounds with eight hundred men. He already had four wives and two baby sons. The highest authority in the Amir's absence was his deputy Ibrahim, brother of the chief adviser and Regent, Zamil ibn Subhan. Ibrahim was nonetheless in awe of the Amir's powerful grandmother, Fatima. This old matriarch could read and write, said Turkiyyeh, and she held the royal purse-strings. The power behind the throne, she had the Amir's ear, and people were terrified of what she might tell him when he returned. She had favourites—and Allah help those who incurred her displeasure! Gertrude made a mental note to visit Fatima as soon as she could. She prompted her companion to further revelations. The jewels she wore, Turkiyyeh explained, belonged communally to the harem and were lent to favoured wives or borrowed for special events—rather like the Bell tiara, thought Gertrude. Turkiyyeh promised to take her to visit Mudi and the other women of the harem.

Gertrude knew less about the royal harem, who would spend the rest
of their days inside the walls of the palace, than she did about the lives of Bedouin warriors. She asked questions, which Turkiyyeh was delighted to answer. According to a judgement handed down from the fourteenth century, a woman should leave her house on only three occasions: when conducted to the house of her bridegroom, on the deaths of her parents, and when she went to her own grave. Ordinary women in Hayyil did venture out at night, completely veiled, but only to see female members of their families. The more powerful the family, the more strictly did it interpret the rules. Every woman should have a male guardian, even if this was a boy half her age, and it would be he who contracted her marriage. A husband could have up to four wives, provided he behaved with equal generosity to all, and as many concubines as he wanted. He could divorce a wife without giving a reason, by speaking a simple form of words in the presence of witnesses.

Overseeing the harem were the eunuchs, brought from Mecca or Constantinople. Some had important outside duties: the eunuch Salih, for instance, was also the watchman of Hayyil. Then there were the male slaves, whose importance was far greater than the word suggests. These men, taken in raids along with horses and camels, were divided into two categories. If they were judged ugly or stupid, they would spend the rest of their lives making themselves useful to their owners. If they were intelligent, handsome, and presentable, they would be taken into the wealthiest families and given trusted positions. Charles Doughty had called them the “slave-brothers.” Of these, the elite would become part of the royal household, living in the palace. They were allowed to carry arms. Turkiyyeh led Gertrude to understand that she would do well to make allies of these men if she could. Chief of the slave-brothers was Sayyid, who was also a eunuch, and a direct conduit to the Amir or his deputy Ibrahim. Such was the closed political world that Gertrude had entered; and as she sat there, smoking and listening to the gossip, she reflected that she had never talked to a woman like this before. She concluded that Turkiyyeh was “a merry lady,” and that she would enjoy her company while finding her advice extremely useful.

After the midday meal, the arrival of an even more important guest was announced by one of Turkiyyeh's slaves. Gertrude straightened her skirt, pinned up her hair, and hurried back to the reception room where she sat expectantly on a divan, while her guide Muhammad positioned
himself at a respectful distance. A slave appeared in the doorway, moved to one side, then a strong scent of attar of rose filled the room as Ibrahim swept in. He arrived “in state and all smiles,” wearing a brilliantly dyed keffiyeh bound with a gold cord, or
agal
, and carrying a sword in a silver scabbard. She noticed his thin face, his feverish black eyes rimmed with kohl, his straggly imperial beard, and discoloured teeth. But most of all she noted his “nervous manner and restless eye.” He uttered the conventional forms of greeting and struck her as well educated—“for Arabia.” She thanked him, told him her first impressions of Hayyil, and briefly described her journey. He stayed until the call to afternoon prayer, but as he left the room came a first note of warning. Pausing at the door, he whispered to Muhammad that there was some discontent among the Muslim clerics at the arrival of a woman alone, and that she would have to be a little discreet—“In short, I was not to come further into the town till I was invited.”

The next day she regretfully sold some of her camels, in a wretched condition from crossing the Nefud desert, and sent the best back some distance to water and greenery where they could recover their health. Two little bejewelled and brocaded Rashid princes were brought to visit her, hand in hand and accompanied by their slave-boys. They sat silently staring at her with their brilliant kohl-rimmed eyes, eating the apples and biscuits that she gave them. They were, she noted drily, the “two of the six male descendants who are all that remain of the Rashid stock, so relentlessly have they slaughtered one another.” Over the last eight years, Turkiyyeh had told her, three Amirs had been assassinated. She concluded: “In Hayil, murder is like the spilling of milk.”

She was longing to explore the city, but having been asked to remain at the house, she could go no further than the courtyard, to visit her men. She felt frustrated. Her habitual strategy in a new place was to walk about, make contacts, pick up the latest news, and work her way into the echelons of the community that could be of help to her.

It was time to present her gifts to Ibrahim and she asked Muhammad to take him a message together with robes, rolls of silk, and boxes of sweetmeats. Might she return his call? she asked Ibrahim courteously. He sent back an invitation, but told her not to come before dark: he would send a mare for her, and slaves to guide her. She waited restlessly until nightfall, when the horse arrived with a couple of men, one to lead
it and one to carry a lantern and walk in front. She put on her evening dress, slipped a cigarette case and her ivory holder into a purse, and rode side-saddle through winding lanes between blind walls. The horse's hooves made no sound on the dirt lanes. In the light from the lantern, drainpipes and doorways fluttered past and sank again into the velvety blackness. She would never be able to find her way through this maze again by daylight. It was a starlit night, but the huge sparkling heavens of the open desert had been replaced by a narrow channel of sky between the roofs. She passed just a couple of women scurrying along the walls, looking neither left nor right.

They came to a halt in front of a stout wooden gate, which was unlocked from inside with much scraping and groaning of hinges. She was taken past a fountain and the mosque, and dismounted before a second locked gate, finally entering a screened antechamber. Here, she heard murmured conversation from the reception gallery ahead, and entered. Blinking in the light of half a dozen hanging lamps, she now found herself in a large colonnaded hall with a central fire, surrounded with cushions and carpets. “[It was] a very splendid place with great stone columns supporting an immensely lofty roof, the walls white-washed, the floor of white juss [
sic
], beaten hard and shining as if it were polished.”

The room was filled with men, who now fell silent. They rose to their feet as she entered, looking at her curiously. Ibrahim advanced to meet her, and she was ceremonially seated on a cushion to his right. The conversation was formal and impersonal. He spoke to her of the history of the Shammar, the tribe of which the Rashids were the leaders, and then talked of the royal family themselves. As Gertrude listened, and responded with descriptions of the archaeological sites she had passed, slave-boys served them with glasses of tea and small sweet lemons to squeeze into them, followed by what she called “most excellent” strong coffee. Then, swinging sweet-smelling censers in front of each guest, the slaves—very soon, it seemed to her—signalled that the reception was over. Gertrude rose and left.

She felt frustrated. This brief meeting had not allowed her to address any of the issues she wanted to discuss, particularly her need of money. In Damascus she had given £200 to the Rashid agent and had expected to be repaid without delay when she reached Hayyil. The agent had given her the usual letter of credit, and she had carried it with her to
present to the Rashids on her arrival. This time-honoured method saved desert travellers from having to carry on them large amounts of money, which might be stolen on the way. She was by now almost penniless. How long should she, could she, wait for an opportunity to present the document?