Gertrude Bell (17 page)

Everything that she undertook, physical or mental, was accomplished so superlatively well, that it would indeed have been strange if she had not shone on a mountain as she did in the hunting-field or in the desert. Her strength, incredible in that slim frame, her endurance, above all her courage, were so great that even to this day her guide and companion Ulrich Führer—and
there could be few more competent judges—speaks with an admiration of her that amounts to veneration. He told the writer, some years ago, that of all the amateurs, men or women, that he had travelled with, he had seen but very few to surpass her in technical skill and none to equal her in coolness, bravery and judgment.

M
iss Gertrude Bell knows more about the Arabs and Arabia than almost any other living Englishman or woman.” These were the words of Lord Cromer, a former British Consul General in Egypt, in 1915, when, with no end to the First World War in sight, Gertrude's knowledge would become the key to unlocking the stalemate.

As a tourist in Jerusalem in 1900, she could not have known where and how far her arrival would lead her. It would be the beginning of her passion for the desert. Most of the world was profoundly ignorant about the territory that went by the all-encompassing name of “Arabia,” as if one race and one nation ruled all the uninhabitable deserts, fertile valleys, and inhospitable mountains, tribal territories, regions, imamates, sheikhdoms, and colonies that comprised its 1,293,062 square miles. Over 2 per cent of the global landmass, it reached in roughly rhomboid shape from the River Jordan near the eastern Mediterranean and the corner of the African continent, then south to the Indian Ocean, from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, and northwards along the border of Persia to the Russian front, with Turkey forming its great northern lintel.

This vast terrain was not given the name of “Middle East” until 1902, when the phrase was coined by the American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. As far as the West was concerned, once the Suez Canal was cut in the 1860s, the desert routes formed by millennia of oriental camel trade became redundant. Once British steamships could conveniently
reach India, before the days of the combustion engine and of oil, the great landmass ceased to be of interest to anyone beyond its southern shores and northern mountains, except its Turkish rulers in remote Constantinople. The countries known today as Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq were at that time undifferentiated regions of the Ottoman Empire.

For several hundred years the Turks had been infiltrating, then taking over, the administration of the towns and the few large cities that ringed the deserts at the heart of the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire had systematically set about replacing the Sharia law, the divine law of Islam, with their own Napoleonic laws, and had introduced Turkish as the language of administration and education. The Turks drew leading Arab figures into the Turkish web, rewarding them for loyalty until its gentle hold on Arabia had become a vice-like grip. All this was kept in place by systematic corruption and the careful fostering of enmity between its peoples. But, as Gertrude soon discovered, Ottoman power petered out only a few miles into the wilderness: there the Bedouin sheikhs did as they pleased, defending their precious wells, camel routes, and sparse grazing grounds against their neighbours and rivals. The deserts remained lawless, only to be crossed, as Gertrude would so courageously cross them, by arming herself with a mastery of the language, politics, and customs of the Bedouin tribes, until she was welcomed to their tents.

For all that the religion of Islam predominated and the Arabs were in the majority, the towns of Arabia were extraordinarily cosmopolitan. The few Jews who survived the destruction of their communities by the Romans in the first century
AD
had taken shelter, continuing as traders, where they could. Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Armenians, and Assyrians both Christian and Muslim had thrived on the camel-borne trade between India, Europe, and Africa. They profited from the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, and served the Turks as minor officials.

Most cosmopolitan of all was Jerusalem. Continually invaded over the centuries since the Romans left, it had become ostensibly an Arab town, being merged into the Ottoman Empire in 1840. From then on it had been a focus for every European nation that wanted to affirm its religious history. The French, British, Germans, Italians, and Russians in particular had built churches, hospitals, and colleges there. By the time
Gertrude arrived, the Jewish community was gaining influence, with increasing numbers of refugee settlements. With a population of seventy thousand, Jerusalem was an axis of cultures and special interests at the entrance to Arabia.

Gertrude's career as a desert traveller did not begin until she was thirty-one. She had accepted a Christmas invitation from Nina Rosen, an old friend, now wife of the German Consul at Jerusalem.

The German consulate was small, having only three bedrooms. The two little Rosen boys shared one, and Nina's sister Charlotte was installed in the other. Gertrude intended to stay in Jerusalem several months. She booked herself into the Hotel Jerusalem, two minutes' walk from the consulate, where she would join the family for meals and expeditions. On 13 December she wrote home:

My apartment consists of a very nice bedroom and a big sitting room, both opening on to a small vestibule which in its turn leads out on to the verandah which runs all along the first story of the hotel courtyard with a little garden in it. I pay 7 francs a day including breakfast . . . My housemaid is an obliging gentleman in a fez who brings me my hot bath in the morning . . . “The hot water is ready for the Presence” says he. “Enter and light the candle” say I. “On my head” he replies. That means it's dressing time.

Settling into a Middle Eastern hotel, be it in Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, or Haifa, would become a happy ritual, an almost sacred preliminary to the extensive organization required at the start of Gertrude's desert expeditions. At this particular moment she was wanting only to buy a horse and begin a new course of Arabic, but these initial arrangements set a pattern that would never vary. She would always book two rooms with a veranda or view, and turn one room into a work space for the campaign ahead; she would stipulate two armchairs and two tables, and banish all unnecessary furniture. Having unpacked her books and maps she would trail cigarette ash across the room as she tacked up her pictures with the small hammer and nails she had brought for the purpose. “I spent the morning unpacking and turning out the bed and things out of my sitting room; it is now most cosy—two armchairs, a big
writing table, a square table for my books, an enormous Kiepert
*
map of Palestine . . . and photographs of my family on the walls. There is a little stove in one corner and the wood fire in it is most acceptable.”

On this first visit, she at once engaged a teacher and set herself six Arabic lessons a week. The rest of the time before Christmas she would spend mainly riding, and joining the Rosens and their children in festive activities such as painting walnuts gold to decorate the Christmas tree. On Christmas Eve they all attended high mass at the Franciscan church in Bethlehem, before joining a candlelight procession to the Grotto of the Nativity.

Gertrude already spoke French and Italian, her Persian was as good as her German, and she understood a little Hebrew. She would learn Turkish easily, but it would be the only language she did not retain. Arabic proved to be far more difficult than she had anticipated. Slow progress in this most difficult of languages, however, did not stop her reading verses of Genesis in Hebrew before dinner, for light relief. The first fortnight of her Arabic lessons brought her to the brink of despair:

I may say in passing that I don't think I shall ever talk Arabic . . . It is an awful language . . . There are at least three sounds almost impossible to the European throat. The worst is a very much aspirated H. I can only say it by holding down my tongue with one finger, but then you can't carry on a conversation with your finger down your throat, can you? I should like to mention that there are five words for a wall and 36 ways of forming the plural.

She tried out a few horses before settling on a small and lively Arab stallion. She paid about £18 sterling, and hoped to sell him for the same when she left. She wrote home: “a charming little horse, a bay, very well bred with lovely movements, rather showy, but light and strong and delightful in every way . . . Will you order Heath to send me out a
wide grey felt sun hat
(not double, but it must be a
regular Terai
†
shape
and broad
brimmed) to ride in, and to put a black velvet ribbon round it with straight bows.”

She was delighted by all she saw in and around Jerusalem. Riding down to the Jordan, then to the Dead Sea—“very sticky!”—and the Virgin's Tomb—“shut!”—she began to feel constrained by the stiff posture demanded by riding side-saddle. Amongst the varied local costumes, her habit seemed clumsy and obstructive. With Friedrich's and Nina's encouragement, she started to ride astride. She tried out a “masculine” saddle and liked it so much she bought one of her own. When the sisters at the nearby convent made her a divided riding skirt, the first of many, her sense of freedom was complete. Pulling away from the well-used tourist roads busy with Thomas Cook caravans and carriages, she would gallop off on her own, raising clouds of dust as she leapt stone walls, whooping for joy, one hand hanging on to the newly arrived terai hat with its velvet ribbon:

The chief comfort of this journey is my masculine saddle, both to me and to my horse. Never, never again will I travel on anything else; I haven't known real ease in riding until now. You mustn't think I haven't got a most elegant and decent divided skirt, however, but as all men wear skirts of sorts too, that doesn't serve to distinguish me. Till I speak the people always think I'm a man and address me as Effendim!
*

Exploring the hills and valleys, she would dismount to pick hyacinths, bee-orchis, or cyclamen, sometimes squinting up at the Anchorites entering their caves high above, then drawing their rope ladders up after them. The Bible came alive to her: every time she wanted to buy butter and bread, her route led her past Herod's house and the Pool of Bethesda. She started to take her camera everywhere she went, photographing the gracefully robed women she passed in the streets. She watched a mass baptism of singing Russian pilgrims, amused at the way the monks seemed to take pleasure in holding them under water until they struggled for breath. On the outskirts of Jerusalem, she stopped to look at an encampment of black Bedouin tents, appearing out of the desert one evening, then gone without a trace the next.

A telegram, then letters, from Red Barns interrupted her pleasure with sad news. Aunt Ada, who had helped bring up the motherless Gertrude and Maurice before Hugh remarried, had died. Her father was suffering from a painful rheumatic illness, and Maurice was preparing to depart for the Boer War. Her concern for the two men frequently breaks through her correspondence: she was “much bothered” about her brother—it was “an awful blow” to hear he had left for South Africa. “Rode out in very bad spirits . . . very miserable,” she wrote in her diary.

It was March 1900. In spite of bad weather, Gertrude decided to make an expedition of ten days or so into the Moab hills, riding some seventy miles down the east bank of the Dead Sea. It would be her first journey with her own caravan and its crew of three—a cook and a couple of muleteers—none of whom could speak a word of English. She would pick up a guide along the route, probably a Turkish soldier travelling between garrisons.

As soon as she reached the Jordan plain, she found herself waist-deep in a wilderness of flowers. In the first of many letters home addressed “From my tent” she described the scene before her:

sheets and sheets of varied and exquisite colour—purple, white, yellow, and the brightest blue and fields of scarlet ranunculus. Nine-tenths of them I didn't know, but there was the yellow daisy, the sweet-scented mauve wild stock, a great splendid sort of dark purple onion, the white garlic and purple mallow, and higher up a tiny blue iris and red anemones and a dawning pink thing like a linum.

Beyond were great pale swaths of corn sown by the Bedouin as they passed, which would be reaped when they returned. Her Arabic improving by the day, she talked principally to Muhammad, the handsome Druze muleteer who ate only rice, bread, and figs. She liked him, and everything he told her about his tribal homeland. She decided that one day she would ride into the Jebel Druze, the mountains to the southwest of Syria, to meet his kinsmen. Buying yoghurt from a family of the Ghanimat tribe, she stopped for a rudimentary conversation with the women and children, noting with surprise that they were eating grass “like goats”: “The women are unveiled. They wear a blue cotton gown 6 yards long which is gathered up and bound round their heads and their
waists and falls to their feet. Their faces, from the mouth downwards, are tattooed with indigo and their hair hangs down in two long plaits on either side . . . Isn't it a joke being able to talk Arabic!”