Gertrude Bell (34 page)

“And then followed day after weary day with nothing whatever to do,” she wrote in her other diary. Now that the novelty was over, and unable to be her usual active self, Gertrude found the time passed slowly. She was woken every morning before sunrise by the haunting chant of her gate-keeper, Chesb—“God is great. There is no God but God”—and at midday and evening prayers she went up to the roof to listen to the muezzin calling from the mosque. The mornings dragged, she ate too many sweetmeats, and wrote furiously in her diary that women in Hayyil “do absolutely nothing all day.” She mapped her route to Baghdad, and when that was done she put the finishing touches to her archaeological drawings.

Like the Arabian king who waited every day for Scheherazade's next tale, her only entertainment was listening to Turkiyyeh's extraordinary and vivid life story. She had been sold as a child and parted from her beloved baby brother, whom she was still trying to locate. When she was of marriageable age, she was sold again and carried off on an overcrowded ship rife with disease. As one by one the passengers died, the crew came on deck, kicked the supine ones so as to check they were dead, then threw them overboard. Gertrude picked up her camera and took photographs as Turkiyyeh talked. Ending up in Mecca, she said, toying with her rubies, she was married to a young Persian that she had grown to love, but all too soon she was abducted again, this time by an agent of the Rashid Amir, and was dragged off screaming while her young husband ran wailing after them. At first she would not look at Muhammad, but he was patient and gentle, she said, and soon she was pleased to make him happy. When Muhammad wanted a younger wife, he followed custom by marrying Turkiyyeh off to a respectable man. But now she was a widow. Her greatest sorrow, she told Gertrude with tears in her dark eyes, was that she had no children alive. Of the seven babies she had borne, six had died at birth and the seventh at one year old. “Turkiyyeh says the people here think of women as dogs and so treat them,” Gertrude wrote.

Occasionally her men dropped by to tell her of the chatter in the market-place. The whole town was waiting to hear the outcome of the Amir's latest raid. There was nothing to do but talk, and Gertrude had never been fond of gossip. She was unable to think of anything for her slaves to do, so they sat about on cushions, chewing the ends of their plaits and recounting domestic dramas until she lost her temper and sent them packing. She had several migraines, and hated the warm wind that ran around the courtyard, raising wisps of sand as it passed. She was not sleeping well: “Wind and dust, a little rain . . . At night a little owl cries softly.”

Ever more impatient, she sent a message about her letter of credit to Ibrahim, but his reply, when it arrived, dashed her hopes. He had been with the Amir's grandmother, the tight-fisted Fatima, when her message was delivered, and the reply came back that they had no knowledge of the transaction. “It is clear they won't give it up,” she concluded bitterly. In any case, they would give her no money until the Amir's return, and who knew when that would be? Was she to remain here indefinitely? she fretted. She had tried to make personal contact with Fatima by every means she could devise, but being deprived of the opportunity to seek out useful intermediaries, she received no response. In the strange, antiquated society of this edgy city, was the silence to be interpreted as a personal rejection? When Ibrahim's men brought back her presents, she was more worried than ever. Was this an insult or, as her men tried to reassure her, excessive courtesy?

She did what she could. She counted what money she had left, sent for her remaining camels, and sold as many as she could spare. She planned to leave Hayyil with a much reduced caravan. She paid off all the men she had taken on in Damascus. They would depart as the opportunity arose for them to join caravans, and leave her with a party of three: Fattuh, Ali—her guide from Hamad—and Fellah. She would have to cross the far side of the embattled Nefud, and she did not like to think how she would manage with so small a caravan. “I have just £40, enough if Ibrahim lets us go. I am to see him tonight. An anxious day.”

There was one ray of hope, in the form of Ali. Ali's uncles, presently guests in Hayyil, were Anazeh tribesmen and sheikhs. They were needed as allies by the Rashids, who hoped they would help capture the city of Jof, where the Amir was heading. These uncles, Ali told Gertrude, were
negotiating for her behind the scenes, and had protested vigorously against the treatment that Ibrahim had meted out to her concerning the letter of credit. Privately, said Ali, his uncles were calling Fatima
kelbeh
—the bitch.

Night fell at last and she set out again, on the same mare, for the all-important second meeting with Ibrahim. Outside, a hot wind was rising. The dusty sand circled in the courtyard, and the particles were blown stinging against her face. She was shown to a smaller room than before, and waited some time for Ibrahim to join her. She had taken care to bring her presents back with her, and as soon as she had greeted him, she told him that she wanted him to keep them. Now she raised once again the issue of the money, and this time she did not pull her punches. She would stay in Hayyil no longer, she said. The withholding of her money had caused her great inconvenience, and she must now ask for a
rafiq
to go with her on the next stage of her journey. Ibrahim was civil in his response. He smiled and assured her that he was ready to supply her with a
rafiq
, but his eyes avoided her confrontational gaze. She was not reassured. Writing in her diary for Dick that night, for the first time she was close to admitting fear, and, stout atheist as she was, she concluded the letter with a prayer for safety:

I spent a long night contriving in my head schemes of escape if things went wrong . . . to the spiritual sense the place smells of blood . . . the tales round my camp fire are all of murder and the air whispers murder. It gets upon your nerves when you sit day after day between high mud walls and I thank heaven that my nerves are not very responsive . . . And good, please God! Please God nothing but good.

Her worst fears were realized the next morning, 3 March, with the appearance of the slave-brother Sayyid. Brilliantly dressed and accompanied by his own servant, he brought only a repetition of the information she had already received: that she could not travel, neither could they give her any money until a messenger arrived with permission from the Amir. It was the first confirmation that they were actually detaining her at Hayyil. Gertrude caught her breath, turned on her heel, ran down the ramp to the courtyard, and returned with Muhammad and Ali. She told Sayyid to repeat in front of them what he had said, word for word.

Gertrude's interests were of very minor importance to the Rashids at present. She had arrived in their city at a most inopportune moment. What she did not know—and Ibrahim himself did not know—was that at this very moment the Amir, the sixteen-year-old head of the family, was planning to murder Ibrahim's brother Zamil ibn Subhan. As the Amir's Regent, adviser, and uncle, Zamil was accompanying him in the desert at the head of their army of tribesmen. He was urging the Amir to make peace with Ibn Saud, but the Amir wanted absolute rule without interference. A short while later, at a desert post called Abu Ghar, the Amir would order a slave to shoot the Regent in the back. As Zamil toppled to the ground, his brothers and slaves would be massacred all around him. The Amir and his accomplices, according to reports, would ride past the murder scene without even bothering to turn their heads to look. Ibrahim was probably well aware that his family were out of favour with the Amir, and was especially reluctant to provoke him, either by giving Gertrude her money or by being responsible for her leaving.

Meanwhile, Turkiyyeh had made good her promise that Gertrude would be invited to meet the royal harem. The mother of the Amir, Mudi, sent a message inviting Gertrude to visit her, one evening after dark. Gertrude was deeply interested in the scene so often portrayed by orientalist painters and
New Yorker
cartoonists, with its lush beauties lying around on cushions and attended by slaves and eunuchs. She was particularly impressed by Mudi. In spite of having already been married to three amirs in turn, she was still young; Gertrude described her as very beautiful and charming, as well as intelligent and receptive:

I passed two hours taken straight from the Arabian Nights with the women of the palace. I imagine that there are few places left wherein you can see the unadulterated East in its habit as it has lived for centuries and centuries—of these few Hayyil is one. There they were, those women—wrapped in Indian brocades, hung with jewels, served by slaves. They pass from hand to hand—the victor takes them . . . and think of it! His hands are red with the blood of their husbands and children. Truly I still feel bewildered by it.

For Mudi, too, Gertrude was a distraction of unique interest. The two women gazed at each other, delighted, each experiencing in the other a
new phenomenon. Avid for explanations, full of questions, they talked with increasing intensity as the other wives looked on fascinated, absorbed in both Gertrude's appearance—her pale skin, her green eyes, her red unhennaed hair, her lace evening dress, her buttoned shoes—and her breathtaking masculine freedoms. Here was a woman, undoubtedly a woman, who apparently lived the life of a sheikh and a warrior. Gertrude explained her present predicament; Mudi, with no experience of independence herself, understood that the traveller before her was trapped like a caged bird. The two hours passed in a moment. They looked at each other for the last time, representatives of opposite worlds perfectly understanding each other, and then it was time to part.

By 6 March, Gertrude had effectively been under house arrest for eleven days. There was no disguising it from herself any more. Without permission to leave, and a
rafiq
to ensure her safety, she was a prisoner. She had come to the end of her resources. As she sat biting her lip, half-listening to Turkiyyeh and the caretaker complaining about the price of slave-girls—“You used to be able to get a good girl for 200 Spanish reals,” complained Lulua, “now you could not buy one for 500”—a messenger arrived with another royal invitation, this one to visit cousins of the Amir in their garden that afternoon—in the light of day. Her hosts turned out to be five small children, dressed in embroidered gold robes and with painted faces. She sat with them in a summer-house on carpets “like all the drawings in Persian picture books.” Slaves and eunuchs brought plates of fruit, tea, and coffee, and the boys took her round the garden naming for her each tree and flower. Other adults were present, and she soon identified Sayyid sitting among them. Gertrude sat down next to him and spoke without the introductory courtesies. Tersely, she told him of her urgent desire to leave Hayyil. When he responded that “the going and coming are not in our power,” she lost her temper: “I spoke to him with much vigour and ended the interview abruptly by rising and leaving him . . . to tell you the truth I was bothered,” she wrote in her other diary.

An hour later, she was sitting in the coffee room she used as her bedroom when a slave beckoned her into the reception hall. This time she did not bother to straighten her clothes or brush her hair. There in the doorway stood Sayyid, impassive as ever, holding a bag in his hand. He told her that she had full permission to go where she liked and when
she liked. Wonderingly, she took the bag from him and found it full of gold. “And why they have now given way, or why they did not give way before, I cannot guess,” she wrote. “But anyhow I am free and my heart is at rest—it is widened.”

She would never know the reason for her unexpected freedom, and she would always wonder. Turning it over in her mind, a new idea came to her. Where Ali's uncles had interceded and failed, where Ibrahim had lied, and where Fatima had refused to give up the money, had a nobler spirit interceded on her behalf? Doubtless there were ways in which even harem women could influence male dictates and events. Was it Mudi, effectively the queen of Hayyil, who had unlocked the door of the cage and given her back the liberty she would never have herself?

Anyone else would have packed up and left while the going was good, preferably before dawn. It was characteristic of Gertrude that, having asked so many times to leave, she now asked permission to stay an extra day, pushing her luck, spending eight more hours looking into every corner of Hayyil and taking many photographs. One imagines her request coming by messenger to Ibrahim, cloistered perhaps with Fatima or drinking coffee with his slaves, then their exclamations of surprise giving way to amusement at the pure effrontery of this demand. The lighter mood seems to have reached the city outside. Certainly Gertrude, flaunting herself unveiled in the sunshine despite the disapproval of the clerics, found herself the object of friendly curiosity wherever she walked. “Everyone was smiling and affable . . . all the people crowded out to see me, but they seemed to take nothing but a benevolent interest in my doings.”

She circled the palace towers that crowned the massive defences, walked through the Medina gate guarded by slaves, delved into the palace kitchens, climbed to the rooftops, then descended to the plain, to take pictures of the fortifications. When she returned there was a message from Turkiyyeh inviting her to tea: “I went, and took an affectionate farewell of her. She and I are now, I imagine, parted for ever, except in remembrance. And thus it was that my strange visit to Hayyil ended, after 11 days' imprisonment, in a sort of apotheosis!”

The next day, 7 March, she was up before dawn, and was surprised to receive another visitor as she was packing up. He was a palace slave, a
man of sinister aspect with henna-dyed beard and blackened eyes, come to tell her to take the western road out of Hayyil as it would be safer for her. She knew she had to follow his instructions because she would be watched, but she was immediately suspicious. “I fancy they meant to send me to the Amir and thinking he was certain to be on the western road they issued their order,” she noted. The intrigue back-fired, for by the time she reached the place where the Amir was expected, he had fortunately passed east of them. She had still not shaken the dust of Hayyil from her feet: on the second day out, Rashid messengers arrived at her tents to say that the Amir was expecting her. They told her that he had taken Jof and driven out the Ruwalla, sparing her few of the details about the capture. They left, and she set off again. Keeping steadfastly to her road, she marched nine or ten hours a day, turning north-west to Baghdad by way of Hayianiya and Najaf: “[The journey is] so wearying to the spirit in this immense monotony that I come into camp every evening giddy with fatigue . . . I am beginning to feel the effects of rather hard camp fare; anyway I shall be glad to reach civilization again.”