Gertrude Bell (22 page)

Gertrude's entry in the
Prolegomena
, the
Who's Who
of archaeology, names her as “the remarkable pioneer woman of Byzantine architecture.”
After publishing
The Thousand and One Churches
, about Binbirkilisse, in 1909, she concentrated on the high Anatolian plateau of the Tur Abdin, publishing the material she gathered there as her seventh book,
The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin
, in 1913. Gertrude had by now found her own archaeological viewpoint and argued persuasively against some of the convictions of Josef Strzygowski. Far from taking offence, though, he invited her to write an essay on the Tur Abdin in the journal he published with Max van Berchem,
Amida
, which she followed with a second essay in the
Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Architektur
, both illustrated by her plans and photographs.

Leaving the Tur Abdin behind her, on that same trip she had made a small diversion to the archaeological site of Carchemish, the ancient southern capital of the Hittites. There she had hoped to see her old mentor and friend David Hogarth, but he had left. Instead she found a young man who would become part of her future life, as she would of his. On 18 April 1911 Gertrude wrote of him: “An interesting boy, he will make a traveller.”

His name was T. E. Lawrence; and he was impressed by her, as she was by him. He wrote of the famous traveller to his mother back home in England that she was pleasant, about thirty-six—she was in fact forty-three—and not beautiful.

Miss Gertrude Bell called last Sunday, and we showed her all our finds, and she told us all hers. We parted with mutual expressions of esteem: but she told Thompson his ideas of digging were prehistoric: and so we had to squash her with a display of erudition. She was taken (in 5 minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite, and French architecture . . . and over Greek folklore, Assyrian architecture, and Mesopotamian Ethnology . . . prehistoric pottery and telephoto lenses, bronze age metal technique, Meredith, Anatole France and the Octobrists . . . the Young Turk movement, the construct state in Arabic, the price of riding camels, Assyrian burial-customs, and German methods of excavation with the Baghdad railway . . . This was a kind of hors d'oeuvre . . . she was getting more respectful.

To David Hogarth he wrote more flatteringly, in a rather different vein: “Gerty has gone back to her tents to sleep. She has been a success: and a brave one.”

In every expedition, there is a moment long remembered that
catches in memory its essence. For Gertrude in 1911 this came at Ashur, in northern Mesopotamia some sixty miles south of Mosul. Sitting in solitude on a hilltop, she remained there for an hour, while in her mind's eye she watched the history of civilization stream past:

The whole world shone like a jewel, green crops, and blue waters and far away the gleaming snows of the mountains that bound Mesopotamia to the north . . . I considered that the history of Asia was spread out before me. Here Mithridates murdered the Greek generals, here Xenophon began to have his command, and just beyond the Zab the Greeks turned and defeated the archers of Mithridates, marching then on to Larissa, the mound of Nimrud, where Xenophon saw the great Assyrian city of Calah standing in ruins. Nimrud stood out among the cornfields at my feet. A little further and I could see the plain of Arbela where Alexander conquered Asia.

We people of the west can always conquer, but we can never hold Asia—that seemed to me to be the legend written across the landscape.

She was looking down on what would become Iraq, the country of which she would be the uncrowned queen. Curiously, she had also foretold its future, a future extending far beyond her own lifetime.

*
Engraver Heinrich Kiepert of Weimar was well known in the mid-nineteenth century for his precise maps.

†
A terai was a wide-brimmed felt hat, often with a double crown, worn by white men in subtropical regions. (The terai is a belt of marshy jungle between the Himalayan foothills and the plains.)

*
A Turkish title of respect (usually, effendi) applied to government officials and members of learned professions—necessarily male.

*
For food on one of his journeys, Lord Byron bought a couple of geese which accompanied him in a basket. He could never bring himself to have them killed, and so took them home at the end of the journey, where they spent the rest of their lives.

*
A random example from her visit to Constantinople that year: “As to the fall of Kiamil: it was quite unconstitutional: Kiamil tried a fall with the Committee and was beaten. As far as Sir A knows Ap 13 was due firstly to the Liberals—Ismail Kemal much to blame, he has not come up to expectation. Not unprobably they themselves founded or helped to found the Muhammidiyyah committee.”

Braver soldier never drew sword . . . Tenderness and pity filled his heart.

In the summer of 1907, with her latest book just published, Gertrude was at Konya and Binbirkilisse in Turkey, working with Sir William Ramsay. Their association over this project, carried out as promised in 1905, entailed Gertrude's willingly taking on the drudgery of the work, measuring and planning the buildings and working twelve-hour days while he supervised and interpreted. The resulting book,
The Thousand and One Churches
, published in 1909, is still the standard work on early Byzantine architecture in Anatolia. The reward, for Gertrude, was a prestige and credibility in the world of archaeology that she could have gained in no other way without years of study, and that many archaeologists would envy.

Gertrude had great advantages as an archaeologist: her willingness to go into dangerous territories, the freedom with which she could pursue her independent and expensive ends, her energy, her enthusiasm. No mountain was too high; no site too well guarded by snakes, spiders, or mosquitoes; no journey too far for her, once she was on the scent. Ramsay wrote in the preface of the book, and in a letter to Florence, that the all-important date that she had spotted two years earlier in Binbirkilisse was concealed in a small cave, where it had hitherto been overlooked. He wrote of his admiration for Gertrude's “thoroughness and alertness” in having noticed it, adding: “The chronology of the Thousand and One
Churches centres round this text.” Compared to Ramsay, Gertrude was a gifted novice in the field. When David Hogarth had applied to work with him, the professor had packed him off to Greece to learn epigraphy. In extending his patronage to the eager student that was Gertrude, Ramsay may not have been entirely ingenuous. She was already famous for her expeditions and it was known that she was an heiress who might contribute financially to excavations.

Gertrude had met up with her beloved servant from Aleppo, Fattuh, having arrived in Asia Minor in April. She wrote on the twenty-eighth:

The seas and the hills are all full of legend and the valleys are scattered over with the ruins of the great rich Greek cities. Here is a page of history that . . . enters into the mind as no book can relate it . . . I don't suppose there is anyone in the world happier than I am or any country more lovely than Asia Minor. I just mention these facts in passing so that you may bear them in mind.

At Miletus she received a telegram from her half-sister Elsa to say that she was engaged to one Herbert Richmond. Florence's follow-up letter arrived at the site of the ancient Carian city of Aphrodisias, where Gertrude was entranced by doorways decorated with scrolls of fruit and flowers entwined with birds and animals. She made her way along the shores of lakes and past peach and cherry trees under snow-covered mountains, the rough roads crossed by rushing streams which made the going difficult for the baggage animals. At the Lake of Egerdir she bought another horse for ten Turkish pounds, and persuaded a fisherman to row her out to a tiny island: “It was surrounded by ruined Byzantine walls dropping into the water in great blocks of masonry; here and there there was a bit of an older column . . . and they were densely populated by snakes.” Looking down at the lake below, she could see the glimmer of a fallen stone under the water that seemed to have an inscription on it. Brushing aside the snakes, she climbed down over the rocks and waded in: “I did all I knew to get the inscription. I tried to scrub the slime off the stone, but . . . the slime floated back and finally I gave up and came out very wet and more than a little annoyed.”

With Fattuh, she crossed into Asia via the Roman roads, noting the many butterflies, and reached Konya. She was already at work at Binbirkilisse,
“digging up churches,” when the Ramsays rumbled in on a couple of donkey carts with their son, who had come on a project for the British Museum. Mrs. Ramsay made tea while the professor, “oblivious of all other considerations,” immersed himself at once in what Gertrude was doing, as if continuing a conversation they had broken off only a moment or two earlier. “We think we have a Hittite settlement!” she wrote home on 25 May. “What gorgeous fun it's being. You should see me directing the labours of 20 Turks and 4 Kurds!”

Although she was now thirty-eight, she was in her prime. Love apart, she was fully realized and still—as Janet Hogarth had noted at Oxford—effervescently alive at all points. So good a time was she having that Florence probably took with a pinch of salt Gertrude's scribbled protestation at the foot of a letter, “I'm horribly bored at not being at E's wedding.” Happy and absorbed, she had no presentiment that she was about to meet the man who would prove to be the love of her life.

Major Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie of the Royal Welch Fusiliers—Richard, or “Dick” to his friends—was a quiet war hero who had won clasps and medals in battles both during the East African campaign of 1903 and before then. He was the nephew of the traveller Charles Montagu Doughty, the poet and geologist who had written the sonorous
Arabia Deserta
. The record of Doughty's wild and dangerous adventures, written in rich majestic prose, the book was a kind of Bible to serious travellers in the Middle East. It was one of the books that Gertrude always took with her when she travelled.

Dick Doughty-Wylie had been educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. In 1889, at twenty-one—he was the same age as Gertrude, almost to the day—he had joined up and gone on to serve in the British Egyptian army in China and in South and East Africa. He had been a transport officer in India, a mounted infantryman in South Africa, and in charge of a camel detachment in Somalia. A military photograph shows him thin and moustached, tanned, taller, broader, and more handsome than many of his contemporaries, and with a chestful of medals. He had been badly wounded in the Boer War and again in Tientsin during the Chinese rebellion. He had married only three years before meeting Gertrude, in the year she had climbed the Matterhorn. His volatile and ambitious wife, Lilian, known outside the family as Judith, had been the widow of Lieutenant Henry Adams-Wylie of the Indian Medical Service.
(She had demanded that both husbands add her surname to theirs.) In a photograph taken in Konya she sits in a garden chair, leaning forward looking pensively at the ground, her hands in her lap, the fingers tightly interlaced. Judith's insistence, combined with Dick's need for breathing space, had motivated his transfer to the diplomatic field, and he was now the British military consul at Konya. Gertrude made their acquaintance when she knocked at the door to pick up her mail.

To Gertrude, at first, Doughty-Wylie was just the “charming young soldier” with the “quite pleasant little wife” who invited her to lunch in the shady garden of their Konya house. Gertrude arrived and was ushered into the garden with the other guests. After weeks of digging in the burning sun, she was tanned; her green eyes sparkled; wisps of her auburn hair, escaping from her straw hat, had faded to blonde. When crossing the desert she would habitually wear a pale-blue veil that she pulled down all round from the brim of her hat, but on the dig she needed to survey and inspect, and the veil got in the way. Judith's skin was pale: she wore white, and tended to frills. She seldom ventured out without a parasol.

Gertrude exuded energy; she talked volubly; she laughed a lot. She was in her element. Six troubled years later, Doughty-Wylie would recall the occasion: “GB walking in covered with energy and discovery and pleasantness.” By now rather a famous Englishwoman, she was at once the centre of attention. Everyone was curious to meet this traveller and linguist, whose latest book
The Desert and the Sown
was being widely discussed. A brilliant conversationalist and a confident storyteller, she dominated the afternoon, amusing everyone with her descriptions of Ramsay's chaotic mode of travelling. He might have been the prototype of the absent-minded professor, losing track of his luggage and clothes along the way, regularly leaving his drawings and rubbings under a stone somewhere on site. Gertrude had got into the habit of doing a tour of the dig each time they left, picking up the papers and notes he had scattered about, while Mrs. Ramsay would run along behind him with his Panama hat and cups of tea. On one occasion he asked Gertrude: “Remind me, my dear, where are we?” Without his wife or Gertrude he was incapable of remembering the name of his hotel or its location.