Gertrude Bell (29 page)

In her present state of mind, it was all one to Gertrude. She almost welcomed the danger and the warnings. This was to be a portentous journey. She did not know it, but it was to be her last desert expedition. Before it was all over she would have learnt the meaning of fear, wonderingly identifying this new sensation. The trip would allow her to provide the Foreign Office with detailed new information at a critical moment, essential data for imperial administrators, policymakers, and military geographers. It would also be the hardest and longest she had ever undertaken, bringing her face-to-face with thieves and murderers. She would come to wonder whether the game was worth the candle.

For now, she wrote to Dick only of her intention of reaching Hayyil, and he was as worried as she could wish. An experienced traveller himself, and although fully comprehending her reasons for going, he was troubled by this perverse choice of destination and the length of time she would be outside the sphere of British influence. His anxiety comes through clearly in letters she received at her first port of call, Damascus. Resonant with the understatement that was
de rigueur
for a man of his class and profession, his letter went: “God go with you—and the luck of the world . . . I am nervous about you somehow, lest things should go
wrong . . . south of Maan and from there to Hayil is surely a colossal trek. For your palaces your road your Baghdad your Persia I do not feel so nervous—but Hail from Maan—Inshallah!”

On 27 November 1913 Gertrude arrived by boat, then train, in the Syrian capital of Damascus. She had travelled straight from Beirut. Because she was accompanied by such a pyramid of luggage, she omitted to visit T. E. Lawrence, spying on the Germans from Carchemish. “Miss Bell passed straight through,” he wrote to his brother with some disappointment. “[She] will not visit us till Spring.”

Gertrude's arrival at her favourite Damascus Palace Hotel caused the usual stir. She was the most famous British traveller of her day, male or female. Her new and sixth book,
The Palace and Mosque at Ukhaidir
, was soon to be published to much attention from archaeologists and historians of the Middle East. No one had yet heard of T. E. Lawrence, whose reputation did not eclipse hers until 1920, and then only because of a somewhat sensational biography. The hotel manager welcomed her with deep bows, champagne, and a basket of apricots in her suite. As the bellboys carried in trunk after trunk, she would have thrown open the windows and looked down on the teeming streets, late-flowering gardens, and all-night bazaars. Her melancholy was kept at bay for a while in this familiar city, now pleasantly red and gold in the mellow November sunlight.

There were people to visit, things to do. She would have ordered black coffee and then started to unpack a few of her boxes on the bed and carpets, the room rapidly acquiring a familiar jumble and a miasma of cigarette smoke. As soon as she was settled, she contacted Muhammad al-Bessam, a wily and very wealthy wheeler-dealer currently buying up land around the line of the future Baghdad railway. She knew him, and she knew that he could locate for her the best riding camels and the best guide. He introduced her to Muhammad al-Marawi, who came highly recommended. He had travelled with Douglas Carruthers, the man who was to draw up her maps for the Royal Geographical Society when she returned to London. She had written from England for Fattuh, her old companion of the road, to meet her there. She was delighted to see him again when, on her second day, he arrived from Aleppo. As before, he would be responsible for her personal comfort on the road, putting up her tents, carrying the water for her bath, making up her complicated
bed with the muslin bag, cheerfully unpacking her linen, silver, and china and setting her candlelit table for dinner before retiring to a respectful and ever-vigilant distance.

Leaving him to continue her unpacking, she began at once to take up her contacts and to find out everything she could about the current state of tribal affairs around Hayyil. Almost immediately, she began writing home to reassure her parents, and almost immediately, the shade of a divergence from the truth began to creep into her letters. She wrote glibly to Florence on 27 November: “Muhammad says that it is perfectly easy to go to Nejd this year. It looks as though I have fallen on an exceedingly lucky moment and . . . the desert is almost preternaturally quiet . . . If I found it so I should certainly go. I will let you know anyhow from Madeba.”

If Muhammad al-Marawi had in fact said this to Gertrude, he must have known better. Perhaps, like Bessam, whose advice she had also sought, he was too ready to pocket her money. Perhaps both believed that she would be certain to turn back long before she got to Nejd. It would have been extremely difficult to deter her, of course, but she appealed, next, to Hugh, as the spoilt daughter she had always been. She wrote as though his refusal would have brought her home on the next boat, but knowing that she could always twist him round her little finger: “I hope you will not say No. It is unlikely that you will because you are such a beloved father that you never say No to the most outrageous demands . . . Dearest beloved Father, don't think me very mad or very unreasonable and remember always that I love you more than words can say.”

Gertrude knew just how to go about organizing a caravan, but this would be the most elaborate she had ever undertaken. She needed seventeen camels, costing an average of £13 each with their saddles and cordage. “I must reckon to spend £50 on food,” she scribbled in her diary, “. . . £50 for presents such as cloaks, keffeyehs for the head, cotton cloth, etc.” Following the advice of Bessam, she would take £80 with her, and give £200 to the Rashid agent for a letter of credit which would permit her to draw the sum in Hayyil. Adding up her expenses, she was surprised to find them making a total of £601. She would need twice as much as she had brought, and would have to ask her father to telegraph the money through the Ottoman Bank. On 28 November, she wired him
for £400—a not inconsiderable sum, the equivalent of £23,000 in today's money—then hurried back to the hotel to write him a long letter of explanation: “This is not a gift for which I am asking. I am practically using all my next year's income for this journey, but if I sit very quiet and write the book of it . . . I don't see why I shouldn't be able to pay it all back . . . The desert is absolutely tranquil and there should be no difficulty whatever in getting to Hayyil, that is Ibn al Rashid's capital.”

The fact that she had to explain the significance of Hayyil shows just how little she had told her father. Hugh, as always, poring over maps in the Rounton library with her latest letter in his hand, knew only what Gertrude wished him to know.

As usual, she bared her soul to her friend Domnul, one of the few people she felt able to write to about her relationship with Doughty-Wylie: “I don't know that it is an ultimate way out, but it is worth trying. As I have told you before it is mostly my fault, but that does not prevent it from being an irretrievable misfortune—for both of us. But I am turning away from it now, and time deadens even the keenest things.” In claiming most of the responsibility for her misery she may have been being disingenuous. It is more likely, given Domnul's affection and respect for her, that she was putting a spin on the facts. It would have been awkward for her to explain that the love of her life would rather live with his wife. She might have preferred to stress what was after all no less than the truth—that she was the one to draw back from adultery.

Meanwhile, she discussed her route with Muhammad. As her chief of staff and the man who would keep her crew in order, he would lead them through the Hamad desert and an uncharted region of the Nefud. In a photograph she took of him, with his moustache and curly Sinbad beard, he sits cross-legged on the ground holding a folded telescope and looking keenly into the camera lens from under his white keffiyeh. This was “the man of all others who I should have chosen,” she decided. That evening he accompanied her to dinner in the Maidan, the native bazaar quarter, to meet the Rashid agent who would collect Gertrude's £200. In her description of him there is almost a suggestion of ill omen, as if she had a passing premonition of danger awaiting her in Hayyil:

A curious figure, young, very tall and slight, wrapped in a gold embroidered cloak and his head covered with an immense gold bound camel's hair robe
which shadowed his crafty narrow face. He leant back among his cushions and scarcely lifted his eyes, talking in a soft slow voice . . . and told marvellous tales of hidden treasure and ancient wealth and mysterious writings . . . The men on either side of me murmured from time to time “Oh Beneficent, oh Ever Present!” as they listened . . . Finally we ate together and then—why then we all came back together on the electric tram!

While she waited for the money from home, she bought camels and hired camel drivers with Muhammad, adding to her staff a smiling black African, Fellah, and the first
rafiq
of the trip, an escort from the Ghiyadh tribe. By employing a
rafiq
, travellers gained an ally whose paid companionship would protect them from attack by his own particular tribe. She would hire a score or more, one by one, as she encountered different tribes along the way.

She toured the bazaars, haggling for cheap presents to smooth her way across the desert, and worried about Fattuh, who she had begun to realize was unwell. She hated the thought of starting without him, but suspected that he had malaria. She delayed a few days, by which time he was so much worse that she feared it was typhoid. Leaving him in the care of his wife, she decided to start without him. He could join her along the way. It was the arrangement to meet up with Fattuh that made her alter her planned route. Now she would skirt the Druze mountains north-east of the Dead Sea and make her way to the station at Aziz where, she hoped, he would meet her. It would give him three weeks to recover his health.

Before she left, she received mail from Dick. “I wonder where in the great desert you might be?” he asked, not knowing she had had to delay. “I shall miss you more than ever when I get back to London . . . I shall go to see Lady Bell.” As always, he blew hot and cold alternately, writing in his familiar rhetorical manner and prevaricating in a way that must have tortured her. “Might we have been man and woman as God made us and been happy? I know what you felt, what you would do and why not—but still and after all you don't know—that way lies a great and splendid thing, but for you all sorts of dangers.” He had told her he would burn all of her letters—“one might die, or something”—and she knew that he had. But she would keep all of his.

And so on Tuesday 16 December 1913 she set off, through orchards
of apricots and olives, to meet her party at their staging ground. The cordage complete—the tying onto the camels and donkeys of all the tents, equipment, and baggage—the stately procession moved off in the direction of Adhra. The first day's ride was a short one, just to the edge of the Damascus oasis. The next day brought torrential rain and bitter winds and took them across icy volcanic ground—far removed from the baking yellow sand and shimmering mirages of popular imagination. She wrote: “We struggled on . . . through the mud and irrigation canals—a horrible business with the camels slipping and falling . . . It was horribly cold last night . . . impossible to keep warm in bed. I am not cut out for Arctic exploration. The men's big tent was frozen hard and they had to light fires under it to unfreeze the canvas.”

It was an inauspicious beginning, and about to get worse. Starting at 9:15 a.m. on the twenty-first, the party soon spotted smoke rising in a thin column on the horizon. The camel drivers became nervous. As Hamad, the new
rafiq
, remarked, “Every Arab in the desert fears the other.” Full of her usual confidence, Gertrude scoffed and marched to the top of a nearby tor, extending her telescope for a better view. What she saw was a collection of tents surrounded by sheep: just shepherds, she concluded. But she was wrong, and she had been spotted. Nearly half an hour passed, and then, like a whirlwind, a Druze horseman came galloping towards them, firing as he came.

Hamad advanced with his hands in the air; the horseman aimed the rifle at him. Muhammad came forward shouting, “Stay! God guide you! We are Shawam and Agail and Qanasil,” naming three tribes not likely to be enemies. The rider, his long matted hair flying around him, circled the caravan at a gallop, whirling his rifle above his head. Riding up at full speed to Ali, one of the camel drivers, he demanded his gun and fur cloak. Backing away from the stamping horse, Ali threw them to the ground. Now the lone rider was joined by a larger group of equally wild-looking Bedouin, some riding, some running, and firing in all directions. One of them, aiming his gun at Muhammad, seized the guide's sword and hit him across the chest with the flat of the blade. Then, turning, he charged at Gertrude on her camel, hitting the animal across the head in the same way that he had hit Muhammad. He seized the reins and forced the frightened animal to crouch, while a couple of boys pushed Gertrude aside and ransacked her saddle-bags. At the same time the
other men, all half-dressed and one “stark naked except for a handkerchief,” all shouting, began systematically to strip her men of their arms and cartridges while she watched helplessly. It was at this moment that the day was saved by Fellah, the black boy who looked after the men's tents. Bursting into theatrical tears, he yelled out that he knew them and they knew him: he had been a guest amongst them only a year ago, buying camels. There was a sudden silence, a tense moment of hesitation, and then the traditional etiquette of the desert swung slowly into play. Piece by piece, the booty was returned. Before they were finished, a couple of sheikhs rode up, took stock of the situation, and greeted Gertrude and her party. They continued, however, to behave menacingly. Gertrude proceeded to pitch camp, and followed the usual custom by paying for a local
rafiq
. But the sheikhs remained immovable until, reluctantly, she handed over more money. At night they returned to her camp, yelling and singing.