Dreamers of the Day (21 page)

When he got back to England, he was eager to meet poets like Hardy and Sassoon and Blunden. They had some secret he hoped to learn—a technical mastery of words that he wanted to study, as an apprentice carver learns the use of mallet and chisel. Writers, painters, and composers fascinated him, and he believed their essential labor differed only in the medium they employed. He’d approached several artists about illustrations for the war book that he was writing. It was going to have photographs, woodblocks, paintings, even cartoons. In fact, he’d offered himself to the artists as a model and looked forward to long, quiet days watching them work and asking questions.

At a bare two miles an hour, the camels plodded down dunes where the sand gave way like fresh snow, then joltingly stumbled up the next ridge, sliding a foot backward for every eighteen inches of advance. In the presence of that busy, far-ranging mind, time passed quickly and I began to understand, to some small extent, how he had kept sane during endless empty hours in the desert. But when we crested yet another ridge with nothing to show for it, I thought, This is hell. And a little while later, Sergeant Thompson said as much aloud.

Hearing that, Lawrence excused himself, touched up his camel, and shouted something to our Arab escort. Suddenly our pack animals were beaten into a loping run and the sheiks on horseback dashed away as though on a bandit raid, leaving us to plod along behind them.

Several ridges later, we crested to find a cup-shaped depression in the land where boxes and baskets of supplies had been emptied and arranged for us to use as chairs. Two circular tents were erected, umbrella-fashion, each upon a center pole, their fabric pulled taut on ropes fastened to stakes driven into the sand. The closest was an unadorned black woolen affair in which a native cook worked over a large stove of admirable simplicity. It consisted of nothing more than an iron trough on legs, its bottom pierced by small holes like those of a sieve, for air. On its bed of burning charcoal, the cook had set out an array of battered pots and kettles. Their contents smelled divine.

Groaning, we rocked and flopped and lurched as our mounts folded up their long legs and jackknifed onto the ground. One by one, we slid off stiffly with chuckling cries of pain. Ladies and gentlemen separated into two simple washing areas behind plain canvas walls. When we emerged, tea was served by the camel boys, who’d turned themselves into waiters by putting on red tarbooshes and belting their long white gowns with matching red sashes.

The dining tent was brilliant against the colorless noonday desert, decorated with abstract appliqués cut from heavy canvas in dazzling colors: crimson and blue, chrome yellow and acid green, rose and turquoise and violet. Inside the tent, Oriental rugs covered the sand, and off to the right there was a serving table with wine, Scotch, and soda. Flanked by camp stools, long tables were laid with white damask, china, glassware, silver cutlery, and tall brass candlesticks. Soup was served, then grilled fish fresh from the Nile. We ate roasted chicken, and mutton with rice, a salad with squab. There was a pudding for dessert. At the very end, the boys passed small dishes of nuts, raisins, and candies, and platters heaped with segments of exquisite local oranges. Replete, we staggered outside and dropped in small groups to rest on the carpet-covered sand and yawn, and yawn, and yawn.

Contentedly on my own, I lay back and closed my eyes. The sun’s radiant warmth was perfectly balanced by a springtime breeze that cooled my face and hands. Drowsing, I listened to the desert wind singing in my ears and to the mournful, minor chanting of the Arabs as they packed up the equipment…

A smoker’s cough roused me. I opened my eyes and beheld Miss Bell, who seemed twelve feet tall from where I lay. She had a cigarette dangling between her lips and a china cup in each hand. “May I join you?” she asked.

“Not if you’re going to tell me my skirt is too short,” I replied.

“I didn’t think you had that in you,” she said, sounding as though she approved. “Coffee?”

I sat up and accepted the drink, sipping carefully so as not to disturb the muddy sludge of grounds at the bottom. Miss Bell lowered herself beside me and leaned back on an elbow. For a time, we were silently companionable while I watched some sort of beetle scooping out a home. As the sand moved backward, the beetle’s rear feet caught and threw it farther behind him. His frenzied determination reminded me of Rosie maniacally digging through snow. Now that I was looking, I noticed a whole colony of such beetles; we were surrounded by tiny geysers of sand.

Clementine’s musical laughter floated out on the still air. Miss Bell, for whom desert beetles had long since lost their novelty, stared balefully over the rim of her coffee cup at the Churchills. “When Winston was away at the front,” she told me, “Clementine ran soldiers’ canteens that fed a thousand men at a sitting. Raised the money, bought the supplies, hired the staff, ran the whole operation. Now look at her!”

With both small neat hands, Clementine had clasped her dumpy husband’s round arm and laid her forehead against his shoulder, fawning.

“‘And the two shall be as one,’” Miss Bell intoned. “The one, of course, is always the husband. Why have
you
never married?” she asked abruptly, but allowed no time for a reply. “I had my chances,” she said, “but…the war, you know.”

Her eyes shifted to Colonel Lawrence, who was sitting on the other side of the encampment with two of the men in uniform. “We were close once, or so I believed. We hardly speak now. Tell me, Miss Shanklin, is the dear boy satisfied with this fortnight’s work? He should be,” she said, not waiting for an answer. “I wouldn’t have thought it, but he has a talent for negotiation. It is something female in him. He despises it, as an intelligent woman would, but uses it nevertheless. You see how he listens and listens?” she asked, lifting her chin toward the three men. “When all the others have talked themselves out, he will suggest just the right words, just the right formula…The art of diplomacy: everyone gets something, no one gets everything.”

The French would get Syria and the Lebanon, she said, to govern and exploit as they wished. In return they had accepted nominal Arab rule in the British protectorates. The oil fields of Mosul would most likely go to the British; that was still to be worked out. Miss Bell herself had drawn the borders that would bring the Kurds, the Sunni, and the Shi’a together under a single administration in a new country to be called Iraq.

Why had she chosen to tell me all this? Was it to display her importance? To make it clear she had more than skirt lengths on her mind? I honestly didn’t know. Maybe I was all she had: no one else in the party had invited her company. People who are respected but not liked often seek out newcomers, hoping for admiration if not affection. Maybe she was lonely.

Or perhaps she was just summing up the outcome of the conference for her own purposes, trying to decide who had won and who had lost. Hussein, the elderly sherif of Mecca, would not rule a vast post-Ottoman caliphate, but in return for his goodwill toward the British government he would receive a yearly cash
douceur
. His chief rival to the south was a man named Ibn Saud, and to promote tranquillity in the rest of Arabia, that person was to be given a subsidy equal to Hussein’s, though Ibn Saud’s would be doled out monthly.

“That will keep him on a shorter leash,” Miss Bell remarked. Perhaps it was the mention of a leash that reminded her that I was listening. “You haven’t understood a thing I’ve said, have you.”

That’s why she’s telling me all this, I thought. Talking to me is like talking to a dog. To her, I might as well be Rosie. That’s what all of them think, I suppose.

And yes, I had probably gotten lost in some of the details, but I understood more than she thought, and something began to shift inside me. While I had been willing to promise Lawrence not to say anything to Karl, I had no such feeling of loyalty or friendship for Miss Bell. She clearly believed that whatever she said to me would go in one side of my empty head and swiftly out the other.

There is a difference between looking and being inconsequential, I thought then; I am not the cipher you think I am. “And what of Lawrence’s friend Feisal?” I asked. “Will he rule Iraq?”

Yes, Miss Bell informed me with satisfaction, she had beaten Colonel Wilson in that contest of wills. Feisal would be “elected” king, as soon as the British had removed his native rivals from the local scene.

Like Karl, Miss Bell admired Feisal, but she believed that he would be welcomed with rose petals in Baghdad. The new king would, of course, manifest his gratitude by acting in accord with advice tendered to him by Sir Percy Cox, for our cadaverous dinner companion would be named high commissioner of the new nation.

Across the sand, one of the officers with Lawrence suddenly stood. We could hear his voice, raised but indistinct. “The dear boy must have told him the bad news,” Miss Bell observed. “Winston is going to pull nearly all our ground troops out of Iraq. Trenchard will police the region from the air. Watch. The general will now cry carnage and ruin,” she predicted, and indeed both officers were visibly upset, though Lawrence remained calm and reasonable. “If Boom Trenchard says he can keep order with the R.A.F., he probably can, but…” Miss Bell shrugged. “Arnold Wilson thinks the plan is doomed. Without three hundred thousand British troops to keep order, he expects the Arabs to rise against any government with ties to us. Feisal will be tainted by association. Why bother with the dumb show? We should simply rule, as we do in India.”

“And what do you think?” I asked.

She motioned for more coffee. One of the waiters hurried over to pour, starting at the cup and raising the long-spouted brass pot high to elongate the stream dramatically before cutting it off—just so—without spilling a drop. “The arrangement is not ideal,” she admitted finally, “but things can’t go on as they have.” She lit another cigarette and shot smoke upward before adding bitterly, “It will cost less to fail from the air than to fail on the ground. And fewer soldiers will die for the mistakes of politicians. God!” she cried suddenly. “They are all so proud of the British art of muddling along—as though ignorance and bad planning were a virtue!”

The man she didn’t marry, I thought. He must have been a soldier.

She stopped to pick a shred of tobacco from her lip. “There was a time when I had an infinite capacity for coffee, cigarettes, and cajolery,” she said, more with wonder than with wistfulness. “I knew every Arab chieftain. Whom they loved, whom they hated. Every name, every relation, every nuance of alliance. I could flatter and push, suggest and demand. No more! Diplomacy and marriage—I’m past them both. I simply haven’t the patience.”

She must have been a beauty once. Now her pink scalp peeked out amid thinning strands of half-grayed hair. Even when her mouth was empty, her lips pursed as though frozen in the act of smoking. Oh, yes, she was past it now, poor thing, but I wasn’t, and at that moment I knew that Gertrude Bell was everything I did not want to be in ten years: an elderly virgin who’d had her chances but didn’t take them, whose yellowed eyes were full of defensive disdain and hidden envy for a married couple who doted on each other as the Churchills did.

“It must have been hard on you,” I said. “All those years alone, so far from friends and family.”

She barked a dismissive laugh. “Happy and contented people don’t make history, Miss Shanklin. I’ve done that much, at least.”

And yet, there was no place for Gertrude Bell in the British plans. She had drawn the boundaries of Iraq and willed it into existence, but she would not be high commissioner. Percy Cox would rule.

She set her cup down, and stood, and looked north, her expression pulled taut as a pale, thin glove. “I can work with Feisal,” she said then, but not to me. “He’ll need a friend. Someone to guide him. Good God, the poor man’s never even been to Baghdad!”

She raised her voice and beckoned to the others. “All right, everyone,” she called out ringingly. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

We gathered and remounted, an excruciating process now that we’d had time to stiffen up, but as we drew closer to our destination, the scent of clover blew in from the riverbank, freshening the air and our dispositions. At the distance of two miles, the pyramids seemed to hover in a tremulous haze of sand, grand and imposing above the palms. An hour more, and then—

Well, it doesn’t matter how many photos and paintings you have seen. The pyramids will take your breath away. They are immense in a way that is incomprehensible unless you experience them up close and in all four of Professor Einstein’s dimensions: length, breadth, height, and time.

What will it mean to you if I say that the Great Pyramid is an almost solid mass of stone that covers thirteen acres? That each block at the base was a third the size of a railroad boxcar? Not much, I imagine.

All right. Try this: the Great Pyramid appears from a distance to terminate in a point, does it not? In fact, the apex is a flat square platform nearly thirty feet on a side, so large that an ordinary home in Cedar Glen would fit on it with room to spare. Such an imaginary penthouse would sit forty-eight stories above the desert—and at that, the Great Pyramid is only a suggestion of its original size. Three thousand years old when Jesus was a child, it has served Egyptians as a quarry for millennia. Most of its smooth limestone facing stones were carried off for reuse long ago. What you see today is only its rougher, smaller core. Yet even in that reduced state, it was the tallest man-made object on earth through all of human history until 1889, when the Eiffel Tower was erected.

Around that corrugated mountain of hewn rock, hundreds of tourists dominated the landscape while mobs of half-naked children cried
“Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”
and robed men in tarbooshes offered their services as guides. The Great Pyramid itself swarmed with climbing trios of steadily diminishing size. Nearly every foreigner was accompanied by two Egyptian stevedores who clambered up and over the shoulder of each huge block of stone, then reached down to grab the raised hands of their freight. Thus they hauled the tourist up by his arms, from one ledge to the next, chanting relentlessly in English singsong: “All right! Very good! Hard work! Pay soon!” Politely, they left off what seemed to me implied:
Or prepare to be hurled to your death, should you fail to meet our remunerative expectations, O wealthy representative of colonial power!