Gertrude Bell (20 page)

Her 1909 journey would take her down the east bank of the Euphrates, into unmapped territories. She was well prepared for this by Mr. Reeves of the Royal Geographical Society, who had trained her in surveying and astronomical observation for determining positions.

Yesterday . . . in the evening I went to Red Hill, getting there at 8. A young man (one of my fellow students) met me at the station and we walked up on to the Common where we met Mr. Reeves. Then we took observations on stars for two hours . . . I took a number of observations and shall work them out on Monday . . . this morning I was back at Red Hill before 10 and spent three hours taking bearings for a map with Mr. Reeves.

Later, Reeves told Florence that he had never had anyone to teach who learnt more rapidly. He wrote, “Miss Bell's prismatic compass route traverse made on her remarkable journeys after she left me, was plotted from her field books, and adjusted to her latitudes here by our draughtsmen. I need not say that her mapping has proved of the greatest value and importance.” The RGS still holds those field books.

Gertrude had been interested in archaeology since a holiday in Greece in 1899 with her father and her uncle Thomas Marshall, a classical scholar who had married her mother Mary Shield's sister. There she had met Dr. David Hogarth, the scholarly brother of her Oxford friend Janet. He was in the process of excavating the six-thousand-year-old city of Melos, and was pleased to show them his finds. She became
so interested in the dig that she stayed for several days near Melos, to watch and help. Hogarth became a friend with whom she corresponded; his later book
The Penetration of Arabia
would go with her as part of her travelling library. Later, in 1915, he would precipitate the most important turning point of her career.

Two years on, after a holiday with her father and Hugo, she went on to join archaeological digs at the ancient sites of Pergamon, Magnesia, and Sardis. She evidently enjoyed the excavation work more than the rather dull cruise that preceded it, chiefly memorable for a day's sightseeing in Santa Flavia with Winston Churchill, who was staying in a villa there in order to paint.

By 1904, Gertrude was immersed in plans for her imminent journey through western Syria and Asia Minor, her first expedition after Jerusalem and the Rosens. To give substance to her archaeological credentials, she had written an essay on the geometry of the cruciform structure, which she wanted to place in an eminent magazine, the
Revue Archéologique
, whose offices were in Paris. She wanted to make herself known to the editor, Professor Salomon Reinach, the scholar who had proselytized for the East as the origin of civilization. He was also the director of the Saint-Germain Museum. She set off with her cousin Sylvia and the Stanleys, ostensibly to do a little clothes shopping and buy Christmas presents. She duly called on Reinach, a plain and kindly man and the father of young children. He welcomed her warmly, taking to her at once and opening up his address book for her. She wrote home on 7 November:

I went shopping with the Stanleys and bought a charming little fur jacket to ride in in Syria—yes, I did! Then I came in and read till 2 when Salomon fetched me and we went together to the Louvre . . . We passed from Egypt through Pompeii and back to Alexandria . . . Salomon developed an entirely new theory about eyelids—Greek eyelids, of course, and illustrated it with a Pheidean bust and a Scopas head . . . it
was
nice.

With his letters of introduction to scholarly Paris, Gertrude was welcomed in every library and museum that she had time to visit. Reinach also gave her what amounted to a crash course in archaeological history. Under his aegis she examined Greek manuscripts and early ivories,
buried herself in the Bibliothèque Nationale, spent a day in the Cluny museum, toured a new Byzantine museum not yet open to the public, and spent evenings poring over books in his library—“Reinach has simply set all his boundless knowledge at my disposal and I have learnt more in these few days than I should have learnt by myself in a year.”

On her last evening he played a game with her, showing her a photograph or drawing at random from one of his books, and asking her to identify it. She thought she must have passed the test, for at the end of the evening he paid her the compliment of inviting her to write a book review for the magazine. The book was by Josef Strzygowski, the controversial Viennese archaeologist who looked to the Orient for origins and influences on the West. He was noted for a conviction—debatable—that the antecedents of Christian buildings could be traced to Iran. Writing about any book by Strzygowski would require a delicate balance of views, but Gertrude was not daunted. She spoke to Reinach of her forthcoming journey, and he encouraged her to examine Roman and Byzantine ruins and learn about the impact of these civilizations upon the region. Of the two empires, the Byzantine was then the smaller and less developed field: from now on it would become her special field of study. He would publish her essay, Reinach told her, and they parted company warmly. She would meet him again in Paris after her trip, and he promised to unravel for her some of the mysteries of Nabataean and Safaitic inscriptions.

In January 1905 she set off from Beirut, buying herself two strong horses and aiming south along the coast, riding astride. Her crew was small. She took a couple of mules, carrying her own green waterproof tent bought in London, a travelling canvas bath and extra pistols, as well as lesser gifts bought locally to give, as necessary, to sheikhs.

The journey began badly and became much worse before she ended up in Konya in Anatolia, nine hundred miles later. Even before she had covered the 150 miles from Beirut to Jerusalem, “the mud was incredible. We waded . . . for an hour at a time knee deep, the mules fell down, the donkeys almost disappeared, and the horses grew wearier and wearier.” Fever delayed her, then ice. She had her fur jacket from Paris, but otherwise only two small trunks. In the Jordan Valley the hundred-foot ravines of mud, washed by falling rain, became so slippery that she
nearly lost a horse. She arrived twenty miles north of the Dead Sea, in Salt, so saturated that she took shelter in a house: “My host,” she wrote home, “. . . his nephew and his small boys held it a point of hospitality not to leave me for a moment, and they assisted with much interest while I changed my boots and gaiters and even my petticoat, for I was deeply coated in mud.”

Her declared intention was to revisit the Jebel Druze without contacting the Turkish authorities, who would remember how she had slipped through their fingers before. They would have heard that she was in the area and insist on giving her a military escort, which would herald the end of her plans to travel from sheikh to sheikh and site to site in western Syria. Her now sound knowledge of the language was the only key she needed. Her host in Salt passed her on to his brother-in-law Namoud, a well-to-do merchant east of Madeba, who would take good care of her. To reach him, she would be moving a day's march east, and beyond the Turkish authorities.

Poring over her map with her, Namoud was able to tell her exactly how to get to the Jebel Druze and avoid the Turks. But now came a delay in the form of a phenomenal storm. Like castaways on an island shore, a group of Bedouins of the Beni Sakhr tribe, plus three of the Sherarat, were washed out of their tents and joined Gertrude and her crew, all taking shelter in the enormous cave where Namoud and his people lived with their twenty-three cows. It was a group of Beni Sakhr who had menaced Gertrude on her trip to Petra, before she had learnt how to enlist their friendship and help. Now they made her one of themselves. “Mashallah! Bint Arab,” they declared—“As God has willed: a daughter of the desert.”

In the desert, word travels almost by magic. Now a kinsman of the sheikh of the Daja arrived, to act as escort (
rafiq
) for Gertrude over the four days' journey into Druze territory. As warm as she could make herself in her fur, and smoking Egyptian cigarettes, Gertrude sat by the fire in the damp cave and observed the shades of difference between the three tribes and the complexities of their politics. After a few subsequent questions to Namoud and her crew, she was able to summarize the information in the clearest way. She noted that the Sherarat, though generally considered by the others to be base-born, sold the best camels in Arabia; that there was blood between the Sherarat and the Sakhr, that the Sakhr
were allied to the Howeitat tribe, and that both were enemies of the Druze and the Beni Hassan, who were allied in their turn to the Daja.

She was soon the guest of the sheikh of the Daja, and was struck, in the course of conversation, by the tribe's knowledge of current affairs and of poetry. The recitations accompanied the evening gossip concerning the latest
ghazzus
—tribal raids—and tales of Turkish oppression. Sitting in Sheikh Fellah's goat-hair tent, with his harem curtained off on the far side, she became more than a guest—she became an equal.

I produced the Muallakat [pre-Muhammadan poems] and three or four examples for the use of various words. This excited much interest, and we bent over the fire to read the text which was passed from hand to hand . . . I spent a most enjoyable evening . . . telling them how things are in Egypt. Egypt is a sort of Promised Land, you have no idea what an impression our government there has made on the Oriental mind.

A day further on, her Daja guide led her to a camp of Beni Hassan, where they found despondency. They had just missed a
ghazzu
by five hundred riders of combined Sakhr and Howeitat tribesmen, who had carried off two thousand head of cattle and many tents—“I could not help regretting a little,” she wrote, “that the ghazu had not waited till today that we might have seen it.” Meanwhile, it was the Feast of Sacrifice. Gertrude drew a veil over the killing of three camels, but joined in with the firing of guns at sunset: “I too contributed—by request—in a modest way, with my revolver, the first, and I expect the only, time I shall use it.”

A grim ruined castle at Salkhad, a town of black lava built into the southern slope of a volcano, provided compensation for missing the excitement in the Beni Hassan camp. Dining on the evening of her arrival, she heard wild singing and gunfire outside in the darkness. Stepping out of her tent, she saw a fire burning on the castle tower. So she left her supper, scrambled up the mountainside, and came upon a
ghazzu
in the making, a retaliation for a Sakhr raid that had recently carried off five thousand sheep belonging to the Druze. She described the scene:

Tomorrow the Druzes are going forth, 2000 horsemen, to recapture their flocks, and to kill every man, woman and child of the Sakhr that they may come across. The bonfire was a signal to the countryside. There at the top
we found a group of Druzes, men and boys, standing in a circle and singing a terrible song. They were all armed and most of them carried bare swords . . .

She approached and listened, spellbound, to the words of the war song:

“Oh Lord our God! Upon them! Upon them!” Then half a dozen or so stepped into the circle, each shaking his club or his drawn sword in the face of those standing round. “Are you a true man? Are you valiant?” . . . the swords glistened and quivered in the moonlight. Then several came up to me and saluted me: “Upon thee be peace!” they said. “The English and the Druze are one!” I said: “Praise be to God! We too are a fighting race.”

And if you had listened to that song you would know that the finest thing in the world is to go out and kill your enemy.

The ceremony ended with a headlong rush down the mountainside. Gertrude, carried away by the thrill of it all, ran with them. In the valley she stopped, let them pass, and stood listening for a few minutes before returning slowly to her tent. She was the first woman who had ever been to the Safeh, that wild territory continually swept at the time by tribal raids from both north and south. For the rest of the journey she would ride fully armed.

Bad as had been the weather throughout, it worsened. Soon they were fighting their way through deep snow and ten degrees of frost:

. . . it was more abominable than words can say. The mules fell down in snow drifts, the horses reared and bucked, and if I had been on a side-saddle we should have been down half a dozen times, but on this beloved saddle one can sit straight and close. So we plunged on . . . till at last we came out on to a world entirely white. The last hour I walked and led my horse for he broke through the deep snow at every step.

At the Druze village of Saleh where she took shelter, she found that the male inhabitants knew the name of the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and were interested in Lord Salisbury, the former Prime Minister, expressing polite regret to hear that he had died. “The real triumph
of eloquence was when I explained to them the fiscal question, and they all became Free Traders on the spot.”

Leaving Druze territory, she sheltered for two nights with some Ghiath tribesmen, whose tents were smoky and full of fleas. She wrote to Florence that the bath that followed, back in her own tent, was one of the most delightful she had ever had. Arriving in Damascus, she was greeted by an invitation from the Governor, and learnt that there had been three telegrams a day from Salkhad about her disappearance. She had become a Person in Syria too.

She entered the great mosque, leaving her shoes at the door, and was much moved by the evening prayers: “Islam is the greatest republic in the world, there is neither class nor race inside the creed . . . I begin to see dimly what the civilization of a great Eastern city means—how they live, what they think; and I have got on to terms with them.”

Being a Person, she soon saw, was not always an advantage. Later in her journey she was to discover that she had been followed in Damascus, unaware, by a police “minder.” She arrived in Homs, a hundred miles further on, a celebrity, to find that she could not even take a casual walk through the bazaar because of the interest she excited—“Tiresome, for I was never without the company of fifty or sixty people. It's one of the most difficult things I know to keep one's temper when one is constantly surrounded and mobbed . . . I hereby renounce in despair the hope of ever again being a simple, happy traveller.” She had to employ a soldier to keep the crowd at bay, and then to fend off the authorities who wanted to give her eight watchmen for the night, when she refused to have more than two.