Gertrude Bell (31 page)

She was now fifty-four days into her journey, but only a fifth of the way to Hayyil. She had a long and uncertain road ahead of her, but once she was free again, her serenity returned and once more she fell under the spell of the desert. Terrifying and beautiful, with its roaring silence and jewelled nights, it had become for her more than the ultimate testing ground. It was a symbolic alternative to the divinity in whom she had never believed. In her need for love and support, it had become an escape to another perspective. She told the real truths in her rarer and more poetic letters to her friend Chirol:

I have known loneliness in solitude now, for the first time, and . . . my thoughts have gone wandering far from the camp fire into places which I wish were not so full of acute sensation . . . Sometimes I have gone to bed with a heart so heavy that I thought I could not carry it through the next day. Then comes the dawn, soft and beneficent, stealing over the wide plain and down the long slopes of the little hollows, and in the end it steals into my
dark heart also . . . That's the best I can make of it, taught at least some wisdom by solitude, taught submission, and how to bear pain without crying out.

In her other diary she wrote on 16 January:

I have cut the thread . . . Louis Mallet has informed me that if I go on towards Nejd my own government washes its hands of me, and I have given a categorical acquittal to the Ottoman Government, saying that I go on at my own risk . . . We turn towards Nejd, inshallah, renounced by all the powers that be, and the only thread which is not cut runs through this little book, which is the diary of my way kept for you.

I am an outlaw!

The die was cast, and politically Gertrude had passed the point of no return. From Damascus she had already travelled nearly two hundred miles south to Ziza, and would now direct her caravan south-east to Hayyil. From there, she planned to head north-east to Baghdad before setting out across the Syrian desert from east to west, back to her starting point of Damascus.

The wilderness ahead of her was infinitely varied in its forms and conditions. The summer brought extremes of heat, up to 140 degrees in the desert at midday, but now, in the coldest months of January and February, there could be howling winds, ice, fog, and sleet. Cultivation was intermittent, depending on the unpredictable winter rainfall. In the plains and deserts there were occasional underground streams giving rise to pools and thin patches of soil, before giving way again to steppes of rock and gravel with the odd tuft of plant life burnt white by sun and wind. Where and when the rain had come to swell the springs, it was possible for villagers to grow some crops in the oases, but Gertrude was leaving the villagers behind her, travelling where the nomads were making their seasonal migration over hundreds of miles. They were moving great herds of female camels and their young to pasture before pushing north-west to Syria or north-east to Iraq for the annual camel sales. “The world is full of camels . . . They drift across our path in thousands, grazing. It is like some immense slow river, hours wide.”

Gertrude shared with Lawrence an admiration amounting almost to
an addiction for the Bedouin and their powerful mystique. Both admired the independence, mobility, and resilience that made these nomads the aristocracy of the desert. Contained in this, perhaps for both of them, was a physical attraction to the type of a warrior ascetic. Lawrence was to write in his introduction to
Arabia Deserta
:

The Beduin has been born and brought up in the desert, and has embraced this barrenness too harsh for volunteers with all his soul, for the reason . . . that there he finds himself indubitably free. He loses all natural ties, all comforting superfluities or complications, to achieve that personal liberty which haunts starvation and death . . . He finds luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self-restraint. He lives his own life in a hard selfishness.

The Bedouin rejected all authority, and their rules of conduct were their own: they did not answer to Turkish persuasion any more than to British influence. There was, as the Middle Eastern scholar Albert Hourani writes, “a certain hierarchical conception . . . [The Arab pastoralists] regarded themselves as having a freedom, nobility and honour which were lacking in peasants, merchants and craftsmen.” Gertrude, who had to rely on this sense of tribal honour for her life, enthusiastically subscribed to this view.

Members of each tribe were linked by a supposedly common ancestor. The notion of sharing a family through this ancestor, often an ideal concept rather than a provable fact, was promoted by the sheikhs as the inherited leaders, guardians, and judges. While grazing land and water were regarded as common property between the nomads, the tribal groupings engendered constant skirmishes and
ghazzus
, raids whose object was usually the looting of camels, sheep, and goats—or sometimes murder, when they would also carry off the women. Gertrude had written of the fatalistic nomadic attitude to this life in
The Desert and the Sown
.

The Arab is never safe and yet he behaves as though security were his daily bread. He pitches his feeble little camps, ten or fifteen tents together, over a wide stretch of undefended and indefensible country . . . Having lost all his worldly goods, he goes about the desert and makes his plaint, and one man gives him a strip or two of goats-hair cloth, and another a coffee pot, a third
presents him with a camel and a fourth with a few sheep till he has a roof to cover him and enough animals to keep his family from hunger.

Slights and grudges resulted in enmities which could continue down through the generations, in a similar way to the self-perpetuating blood feuds of the Italian mafia. By honourable tradition, however, the sheikhs extended their protection and hospitality to those travellers who strictly followed their etiquette. This code of conduct, without which Gertrude could never have travelled in the Middle East, was in fact not so much a matter of etiquette as of obligation. It was written into the Koran, the Word of God as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the Arabic language, and the communication of God's commandments to the world of Islam. The Third Pillar of these commandments was the benevolent duty of
zakat
, the giving of help to the poor and the needy, for the relief of debtors, the liberation of slaves, and, most important in the desert, the giving of welfare to wayfarers. “I am in the real desert again, with the real desert people, the Bedu, who never touch settled life . . . I have to be voice and tongue for myself. I like it; it amuses me to run my own show,” Gertrude told her parents.

On her travels, Gertrude rode straight to the tent of any sheikh in the vicinity, greeting him in fluent Arabic and with all conventional deferences. She paid for the usual
rafiq
, as any male traveller would have done, but as a woman she had, for her very life, to convince the sheikh that she was his equal. She had to impress him with her importance and wealth, initially by the giving of presents. The gifts she dispensed were carefully graded, but sometimes she misjudged. After giving a minor sheikh a silk under-robe, she noted in her diary: “He did not think it enough, I fear.” The stock of gifts that she carried included bales of silk, cotton headdresses, coffee and sugar, and the very valuable rifles and collapsible Zeiss telescopes that she had bought in quantity in London.

Because of the sheikh's own position in the tribal hierarchy, she had to make it clear that she was a member of a family as great as his own. In the telling, her father, Hugh, was transformed from a leading industrialist to the paramount sheikh of northern England. “Your safest course of action in the desert is to let it be known that you come of great and honoured stock.”

Feminine as she was, Gertrude was not a woman as the sheikh knew
women. In the first place, she rode like a man in the saddle, and not like the women of his harem, who rode curled up on small platforms of cushions. He would put together all the evidence she presented and conclude that she was mysteriously independent, rich, powerful, and probably royal. She was certainly not his enemy, and might even, with her connections, be his ally. She spoke his language and she could quote more mystical Arab poetry than he knew himself. In the purely oral culture of the nomad, where every poem was lost if not committed to memory, her long study of the subject and her translation of
The Divan of Hafiz
stood her in good stead. Many were the occasions after dinner in a desert tent, when she cast a spell over the company by speaking an entire poem of which the sheikh might know only a line or two. Some of the odes, or
qasidas
, that she could quote from her photographic memory were written before
AD
600: her hosts, she noted in
The Desert and the Sown
, had no idea that Arab culture had existed before the Prophet. Equally important, she had up-to-date gossip to impart—information about tribal movements and water sources that she had learnt along the way. Only Gertrude, with her regal bearing and assertive self-confidence protecting her like a suit of armour, could have survived the desert as a woman alone, but she was always close to danger. An important slip in her manner, or an encounter with a sheikh careless of his Koranic duty, or any number of other accidents, could prove fatal.

Safely distant from Ziza, she and her caravan rode across rolling Shammar country. She was getting to know the members of her expedition. There was the chief-of-staff, the elderly Muhammad al-Marawi who knew the Nejd and many of the Rashids of Hayyil from riding and fighting with them as a young man. A camel dealer in his middle years, he had fallen on lean times and now took whatever odd jobs presented themselves—“He has had few odder jobs than me, I expect,” commented Gertrude drily. Then there was his courteous and educated nephew Salim, “a capital boy,” who helped Fattuh. Ali she knew from a former journey across the Syrian desert. He was, she wrote to Dick, borrowing one of his own phrases, “an ‘ole dog,” but brave as a lion. Sayyid, the chief camel driver, was another nephew of Muhammad's and “a treasure.” They had a raw recruit, an Agail—“but he will learn”—and Mustafa, a farm worker sent with her from her Christian friends near Ziza. There was Fellah, the black camelherd whose histrionics had saved
them from the Druze horsemen, the cameleers and two
rafiqs
, and the occasional guest or hanger-on. The first of these, a young sheikh of the Sukhur tribe, “a nice boy,” arrived with his slave and lodged with her caravan for the night.

The desert to the south of them was uninhabited. Her men kept watch for robbers who might take off with her camels. The land here had no landmarks to use as bearings, and they were getting short of water. Gertrude walked behind the caravan, using the direction of the line of camels in conjunction with the compass in her hand. The crew looked back from time to time, when she would correct their course by pointing with her outstretched arm. They marched for three days through a bare, forbidding land littered with flints, then on to a plain with outcrops of rusty volcanic stone. Here the men spotted recent camel prints in the dust, and feared the worst. They turned off into a dip and stretched out silently alongside the camels while Gertrude and two of her men climbed up a tell, rifles in hand, and lay on their stomachs, peering over the rocks. This time there were no warning shots, and after a while they stood up and went cautiously on. She wrote to Dick:

When we were little, Maurice and I had a favourite game which consisted in wandering all over the house, up and down the staircases, without being seen by the housemaids—I felt exactly as if we were playing that beloved game as we crept up to the shoulder of the tell. But a careful survey through my glasses revealed no housemaids, and we went on boldly.

A little rain fell on the night of 23 January, and the camels hurried to drink from small puddles on the flinty ground as the water drained away. There was no prospect of any more for at least a day ahead. “There are no words to tell you how bare and forbidding is this land . . . mile after mile of flat black country and nothing grows . . . I found a brave little geranium—the only flower I have seen.”

She delighted in the meagre life of desolate places, and noted down every edible mushroom, each wild geranium or marigold, oryx or cloud of moths that she saw on the journey. These minute notes on the flora and fauna were mixed in with the horrid tales of murder and mutilation that she heard every night around the fire. She had no reason to doubt these stories. Inspecting a ruin on her path two days previously, she had
found a dead body: it was roughly buried, but draped over the mound were the corpse's clothes soaked in dried blood. Each day's march took her further from the zone of British influence and in her daily diary there were frequent references to her men's, rather than her own, anxiety about
ghazzus
. For herself, she was occupied with more pedestrian problems. There was no spare water for washing—she hated to go dirty but hardly ever complained about it.

In search of water, they turned away from the flint-strewn plateau into a valley where they found a multitude of fresh prints of camels and men. They did not know whether these were the footprints of friends or enemies, and they no longer knew exactly where they were, but whatever happened they would have to find water by nightfall. Gertrude pored over her map and found a well in the eastern hills. But even if they got there, would these unknown people have used it up? After two hours' driving east, they saw a curl of smoke above the tells, and she put their next move up for democratic vote among the crew. If it was a
ghazzu
, would it be better to make themselves known? The crew thought so. They would be tracked down in any case, and, after all, they could find themselves among friends. They turned towards the smoke, and crept up a low ridge to the south. There below them was a village. Now they knew where they were—at the winter pasturage of the Howeitat, a large and powerful tribe of what is described in
Arabia Deserta
as “the stout nomad native,” with a reputation for courage and devilry. The camels, sniffing water, set off at a bumpy, jingling trot and drank their fill. From shepherds they learnt that numerous Howeitat were some way off with their head sheikh, Auda Abu Tayyi, but that nearer, perhaps a day off, they could find the tents of another important Howeiti sheikh, Harb.