A Woman in Arabia (17 page)

Beyond Shetateh, they came upon the palace of Ukhaidir, the finest example of Sassanian architecture and the little-known archaeological site that Gertrude had come so far to find. She immediately occupied her time with photographing and measuring, and stayed several days and nights despite the warnings of her crew.

One night I was provided with a different entertainment. I had worked from sunrise till dark and was too tired to sleep. The desert was as still as death; infinitely mysterious, it stretched away from my camp and I lay watching the empty sands as one who watches for a pageant. Suddenly a bullet whizzed over the tent and the crack of a rifle broke the silence. All my men jumped up; a couple more shots rang out, and
hastily disposed the muleteers round the tents and hurried off to join a band of Arabs who had streamed from the castle gate. I picked up a revolver and went out to see them go. In a minute or two they
had vanished under the uncertain light of the moon, which seems so clear and yet discloses so little. A zaptieh
*
joined me and we stood still listening. Far out in the desert the red flash of rifles cut through the white moonlight; again the quick flare and then again silence. At last through the night drifted the sound of a wild song, faint and far away, rhythmic, elemental as the night and the desert. I waited in complete uncertainty as to what was approaching, and it was not until they were close upon us that we recognized our own Arabs and
in their midst. They came on, still singing, with their rifles over their shoulders; their white garments gleamed under the moon; they wore no kerchiefs upon their heads, and their black hair fell in curls about their faces.

“Ma'ashî,” I cried, “what happened?”

Ma'ashî shook his hair out of his eyes.

“There is nothing, my lady Khân. 'Alî saw some men lurking in the desert at the 'asr” (the hour of afternoon prayer), “and we watched after dark from the walls.”

“They were raiders of the Benî Dafî'ah,” said Ghânim, mentioning a particular lawless tribe.

“
,” said I, “did you shoot?”

“We shot,” replied
; “did not your Excellency hear?—and one man is wounded.”

Near the end of the expedition, on the west bank of the Tigris in the Tur Abdin, they came to the village of Ba Sebrina and Gertrude encountered a meeting of
aghas
, Kurdish aristocrats and leaders.

The âghâ of Sâreh belongs to one of the leading Kurdish families of these parts. I found him in an open space near the church, entertaining friends who had ridden over from a neighbouring village. They too were âghâs of the noble house, and they were tricked out in all the finery which their birth warranted. Their short jackets were covered with embroidery, silver-mounted
daggers were stuck into their girdles, and upon their heads they wore immense erections of white felt, wrapped round with a silken handkerchief of which the ends stuck out like wings over their foreheads. They pressed me to accept several tame partridges which they kept to lure the wild birds, and while we waited for the priest to bring the key of the church, they exhibited the very curious stela which stands upside down in the courtyard. Meantime the village priest had arrived, and I followed him unsuspiciously into the church. But I had not stood for more than a minute inside the building than I happened to look down on to the floor and perceived it to be black with fleas. I made a hasty exit, tore off my stockings and plunged them into a tank of water, which offered the safest remedy in this emergency.

“There are,” said the priest apologetically, “a great many, but they are all swept out on Sunday morning. On Sunday there are none.”

I confess to a deep scepticism on this head.

From
Visits of Gertrude Bell to Tur Abdin
,
*
describing her adventures of 1909 and 1911, she tells of one archaeological find of an unexpected nature.

The Babylonians, and after them the Nestorians and the Moslems, held that the Ark of Noah, when the waters subsided, grounded not upon the mountain of Ararat, but upon Jûdî Dâgh. To that school of thought I also belong, for I have made the pilgrimage and seen what I have seen. . . .

In the high oak woods I forgot for a few hours the stifling heat which had weighed upon us ever since we had left Môsul. Each morning we had promised one another a cooler air as we neared the mountains; each evening the thermometer placed in the shade of my tent registered from 88° to 93° Fahrenheit [31–34°C]. The heavy air was like an enveloping garment which it was impossible to cast off, and as I walked through the woods I
was overmastered by a desire for the snow patches that lay upon the peaks—for one day of sharp mountain air and of freedom from the lowland plague of flies. Sefinet Nebî Nûh, the ship of the Prophet Noah, was there to serve as an excuse.

Accordingly we set out from camp at four o'clock on the following morning. Kas Mattai and Shim'ûn in their felt sandals, raishîkî, a proper footgear for the mountaineer, Selîm, whom Providence had marked out for the expedition, 'Abdu'l Mejîd, a zaptieh from Zâkhô, who had been ordained as pointedly to walk upon flat ground, and the donkey. “As for that donkey,” said Fattûh, “if he stays two days in the camp eating grass, Selîm will not be able to remain upon his back.” He was Selîm's mount, and Selîm, who knew his mind better than any other among us, was persuaded that he would enjoy the trip. The donkey therefore carried the lunch. We climbed for two hours and a half through oak woods and along the upper slopes of the hills under a precipitous crest. But this was not what I had come out to see, and as soon as I perceived a couloir in the rocks, I made straight for it and in a few moments stepped out upon an alp. There lay the snow wreaths; globularia nudicaulis carpeted the ground with blue, yellow ranunculus gilded the damp hollows, and pale-blue squills pushed up their heads between the stones and shivered in the keen wind. Selîm had followed me up the couloir.

“The hills are good,” said he, gathering up a handful of snow, “but I do not think that the donkey will come up here, nor yet 'Abdu'l Mejîd.”

We returned reluctantly to the path and walked on for another half-hour till Kas Mattai announced that the Ark of Noah was immediately above us. Among asphodel and forget-me-nots we left the zaptieh and the donkey; Selîm shouldered the lunch-bags, and we climbed the steep slopes for another half-hour. And so we came to Noah's Ark, which had run aground in a bed of scarlet tulips.

Gertrude's research in Tur Abdin led to her re-evaluation of the architecture of that little-known area.

Into this country I came, entirely ignorant of its architectural wealth, because it was entirely unrecorded. None of the inscriptions collected by Pognon go back earlier than the ninth century; the plans which had been published were lamentably insufficient and were unaccompanied by any photographs. When I entered Mâr Yâ'kûb at Salâh and saw upon its walls mouldings and carved string courses which bore the sign manual of the Græco-Asiatic civilization I scarcely dared to trust to the conclusions to which they pointed. But church after church confirmed and strengthened them. The chancel arches, covered with an exquisite lacework of ornament, the delicate grace of the acanthus capitals, hung with garlands and enriched with woven entrelac, the repetition of ancient plans and the mastery of constructive problems which revealed an old architectural tradition, all these assure to the churches of the Tûr 'Abdîn the recognition of their honourable place in the history of the arts.

In 1907, when she was thirty-eight, and happily occupied with a life of travel and study, Gertrude met the love of her life. Unfortunately, he was a married man.

Gertrude was in her prime, a supremely civilized and able woman with a rare grasp of world history and contemporary political debate, combined with a love of beautiful clothes. The center of attention at embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East, she had become a brilliant conversationalist and a confident storyteller. A famous traveler with her latest book just published, she was working hard with Sir William Ramsay in Binbirkilise in Turkey. Their ensuing book,
The Thousand and One Churches
, would become the standard work on early Byzantine architecture in Anatolia.

With less time to write letters, she kept a diary that she sent to her parents at regular intervals.

Making Her Way to Binbirkilise
From Her Diary, May 10, 1907

. . . We dropped down into the Konia plain. Got in about 12.30. . . . I washed and changed and went off to see the Doughty-Wylies.

Gertrude was asked to lunch by Dick and Judith Doughty-Wylie when she came to Konya to pick up her mail. She was tanned and wisps of her hair, escaping from her straw hat, had turned blonde. She exuded energy, and she talked volubly. She laughed a lot and made other guests laugh with her descriptions
of the absentminded professor losing track of time and his luggage, dropping papers wherever he went, while Mrs. Ramsay ran along behind him with his Panama hat and a cup of tea. On one occasion Sir William Ramsay had turned to Gertrude and asked, “Remind me, my dear, where are we?” Dick Doughty-Wylie recalled this lunch: “GB walking in, covered with energy and discovery and pleasantness.” Gertrude and he had left the table to discuss the Sufi philosopher and theosophist Rumi, whose tomb is at Konya. The Doughty-Wylies met and helped her several times at Konya. She invited them to visit her one day at Rounton.

Educated at Winchester and the Royal Military College in Sandhurst, Captain, later Lieutenant Colonel, Charles Hotham Montagu Doughty-Wylie VC, CB, CMG was the same age as Gertrude. Known as “Richard” or “Dick” to his friends, he was a quiet war hero with a chestful of medals. He had been severely wounded in the Boer War and again in Tientsin during the Chinese rebellion. He was the nephew of the traveler Charles Montagu Doughty who had written the sonorous
Arabia Deserta,
one of the books that Gertrude always carried with her when she went on expeditions.

A military photograph shows Doughty-Wylie thin and mustached, tanned, taller, broader, and more handsome than many of his contemporaries. He had enjoyed many affairs but married Judith only three years before meeting Gertrude. Judith had been widowed. She was ambitious, and appreciating Dick's need for breathing space, she had motivated his transfer to diplomatic work. In 1906, he was appointed the British military vice-consul at Konya.

Konia, May 12, 1907, Letter to Chirol
*

I wish you could drop down here for a few hours that we might have a good talk, but you would find me so preposterously sunburnt that you would scarcely recognize me.

Well, to Turkey. You know there is an English v. Consul [Dick Doughty-Wylie] here now, a charming young soldier with a quite pleasant little wife. He is the more interesting of the two, a good type of Englishman, wide awake and on the spot, keen to see and learn. . . .

Konia, from Her Diary

[I] lunched with the Wylies and spent the afternoon with them in their new garden. . . . They are dears, both of them. . . . [I] talked long to Captain DW of things and people.

May 1907

It makes me laugh to think I could ever have had the idea of leaving things to the Ramsays. They had arrived at Konia entirely without tents or camping possessions. “Nevertheless,” writes Captain Wylie, “Ramsay was most eager to set off to join you at once—in the wrong direction. I lent him two tents and headed him off towards you.”. . . Ramsay, bless him, is perfectly helpless in such matters as concern the management of a camp; and Lady Ramsay is completely helpless in everything, but one thing, which is that she is essential to his comfort. She is as deeply as she is ignorantly sympathetic about our doings. . . .

The good Ramsays have just been begging me to let them share the expenses, but I've persuaded them to leave things as they are. I don't want their time here to cost them a penny. It's an inestimable privilege and advantage to have Sir William to work with, and indeed I could not have ventured upon anything
at all without him. I think I can do the whole thing within the sum I intended to pay.

While in Konya, Fattuh fell ill. The “Wylies,” as she called them at this stage, invited her with Fattuh to leave their tents and stay at the consulate.

From the British Vice-Consulate, July 18, 1907

I am very much afraid I shall be delayed a few days. Fattuh is ill. He gave his head a horrible blow on a low doorway two years ago when he was with me, and he has been ill on and off ever since. He suffers from acute pains in the head, and I fear there must be something wrong. I cannot leave him in this state, and had therefore determined to take him with me to C'ple to see a very good doctor there. . . . Yesterday the authorities here said they had no power to allow him to go to C'ple with me. . . . I telegraphed at once to the Grand Vizier and to the Embassy asking for a special permit for him. . . . I would do a good deal for Fattuh, and this is not much. It's a great alleviation to be staying with the Wylies, they are dears, both of them.

Constantinople, July 26, 1907

I arrived last night—with Fattuh! . . . I can't leave Fattuh all alone here till I am satisfied that he is out of the wood.

At home again, Gertrude began a scrapbook in which Doughty-Wylie's latest heroic adventure figured large. In the volatile mood engendered by the Young Turks' nationalist rebellion, fanatical mobs had turned on Armenian Christians, leaving corpses scattered over the countryside around Konya. Donning his old uniform, Doughty-Wylie had collected a posse of Turkish troops and led them through Mersin and Adana, pacifying the murderous crowds. Wounded by a bullet, he went on patrol again with a bandaged right arm. For
this initiative, he was decorated both by the Queen and by the Turkish authorities. Gertrude's letter of congratulation was only one of many he received, but he answered hers. A year later they were in regular correspondence. Gertrude usually addressed her letters to Dick and Judith but sometimes to him alone.

Gertrude engineered a visit from Dick to Rounton. Concealing the fact that she had invited him, she wrote to tell Florence that he would be coming.

Holyhead, April 18, 1908

Captain Doughty suggests himself for two nights on Wednesday next. It's rather a bore but I can't say anything but do come for they were so exceedingly kind to me. He is very nice.

According to her diary, the Doughty-Wylies did visit the Bells at Rounton in 1908; she added no details.

In 1909, Gertrude was exploring the banks of the Euphrates and photographing and measuring the ruined palace of Ukhaidir. A new warmth entered the correspondence between the two of them as it shuttled to and fro between Mesopotamia and Addis Ababa, where Dick was now consul. Then, in spring 1912, he arrived in London to take up the appointment of director-in-chief of the Red Cross relief organization. He was without Judith, who was visiting her mother in Wales. As always when his wife was not with him, he stayed in his old bachelor flat on Half Moon Street. Gertrude decided immediately that she had to be in London, too, to give a lecture and see her cousins, and be fitted for a lot of new summer clothes. She shot up to town and launched herself into one of the happiest times of her life.

Her large circle of vivacious cousins and wealthy friends provided her with a perfect opportunity to absorb the weary soldier into her orbit. He met through her a more lively, stimulating group of people than he had ever known. In congenial groups, Gertrude and he went to exhibitions, museums, plays,
the music hall, and concerts. He went to hear her lecture, something she did with style, her humor as much as her erudition carrying the audience with her. On a walk in the park or on the way to a restaurant, they would fall behind the others, absorbed in conversation. After dinner, too, they would draw apart, talking and laughing late into the night, veiled in the smoke from her ivory holder. Seeing Gertrude in her pearls and diamonds, her beautiful hair pinned up, and wearing one of her new French gowns, her family must have seen how pretty and flirtatious she could be.

This was becoming the most important relationship in her life. The flicker and pulse of sexual attraction between them grew stronger with each meeting. That summer she turned down an invitation to go on a scientific expedition to the Karakoram mountains in China, so that she could remain in London. It was easy, for a while, to forget the existence of Judith.

95 Sloane Street, London, February 6, 1913, Letter to Chirol

I must tell you I have given up the Central Asian plan, and written to tell Filippi
*
. The nearer I came to it, the more I could not bear it. I can't face being away from home for fourteen months. My life now in England is so delightful that I will not take such a long time out of it.

Judith was expected, and in due course she arrived in London. Gertrude left for Rounton and threw herself into gardening and studying, doing anything and everything to pass the time. The highlight of every day was the arrival of the post that might, and frequently did, bring letters from Dick.

There were few moments in Gertrude's life when she did not tell her parents the whole truth; if she hid something from
them, it was always to shield them from anxiety. This time it was different. She knew that an affair with a married man would be completely unacceptable to them and to society in general. She began a chapter of duplicity by deciding to ask the Doughty-Wylies to Rounton at a time when she knew perfectly well that Judith was away. He would be just one of the crowd at a Rounton weekend house party. She did not intend to start a sexual relationship with him, just to continue the mutual delight of his attractive and attracted presence. She had her own sense of honor, one so inviolable that it would compromise the affair at every stage.

Florence, if she suspected anything, may have reflected that Gertrude at forty-four was not of an age when she could be told how to behave. So Dick came to Rounton for a few days in July 1913. After the day's excursion, the gallop across the fields, the noisy, cheerful dinner followed by card games, guests drifted upstairs in ones and twos while Gertrude and Dick sat by the fire, looking at each other. She must have let him know, obliquely, where her room was, because subsequent letters refer to their being together there, on the bed, and to a deeply intimate conversation they had. It is also clear that their night together went no farther—that at the final moment she pulled away. He left, pursued by her letters full of an agonized regret.

How did Gertrude remain a virgin so long? Twenty-three years had passed since her presentation at court when she was twenty-one, and twenty-one since her failed engagement to the legation secretary Henry Cadogan. With her green eyes, long auburn hair, and beautiful clothes, Gertrude was an attractive, feminine, confident, humorous, and energetic woman, but she had failed to find a man who interested her. Her character was too decided, her mind too sharp, and her critical sense too finely tuned to mix easily with less-developed personalities and intellects. She failed to hide a felt superiority to men who could not measure up to her father, and she was too much of a bluestocking for most of society. When Florence reprimanded her for traveling in a hansom cab alone with a “Captain X” in the year she came out, she wrote back that
Florence need not worry. “I discussed religious beliefs all the way there and very metaphysical conceptions of truth all the way back,” and added disarmingly, “I felt sure you wouldn't like it, but you know, I didn't either!”

At an age when hopes of meeting a man she could love with all her heart had become unrealistic, she had found exactly the kind of man she had always been looking for. Dick was a man who would not be frightened by her intellect, a man with accomplishments the equal of hers. He was a brave soldier who could fight and hunt and quote poetry, who had read the great books of civilization, spoke foreign languages, who appreciated the theater and the National Gallery, who was equally at home in London and in foreign society, who was well traveled and knew the distinguished politicians and statesmen she knew herself. She had set her heart on a hero—and why not? She was, after all, a heroine.

His thank-you letter for the weekend at Rounton was deeply unsatisfactory to Gertrude, revealing that what had been a momentous weekend for her had been far less important to him. From London he thanked her for her letters but failed, as usual, to address her questions: “Wonderful letters, my dear, which delight me. Bless you. But there can be no words to answer you with. Well—let's talk about other things. . . .”

Dick, in his fond but confusing letters, never gave the slightest indication that he would leave his wife. It was only in letters to her dearest friend Chirol that Gertrude revealed the pain she was in. She knew there was no future for this relationship. She had hidden so long behind her lines of defense that she was caught unawares by his hold on her.

Sloane Street, London, October 30, 1913, Letter to Chirol

You know I am the more fortunate of two unfortunate people because I have had the opportunity to gather such delightful friends about me. But that only warms my heart more to the other unfortunate person, you understand.

Then came the hammer blow. He had accepted a post in Albania, with the International Boundary Commission. “My wife is in Wales. She'll come up when I wire to her and go with me—till we see the hows and whys and wheres . . . I have turned in to my old bachelor quarters in Half Moon Street, no. 29. Write to me there . . . while I am alone, let's be alone.” He signed the letter “Dick” for the first time. Then, a warning: “Judith knowing you well and having always before seen your letters would find it very odd to be suddenly debarred them and on voyages our lives are at close quarters. . . . Of course call me Dick in letters, and I shall call you Gertrude—there is nothing in that . . . tonight I shall destroy your letters—I hate it—but it is right—one might die or something, and they are not for any soul but me. . . . If I can't write to you, I shall always think of you telling me things in your room at Rounton . . . the subtle book eludes, but our hands met on the cover.” “The subtle book,” she knew, was his metaphor for sex.