A Woman in Arabia (11 page)

Baghdad, May 12, 1926

You ask about my plans for the summer. . . . My duty to the museum is of the first importance. I can't go away and leave all those valuable things half transferred. . . . It will take months and months. . . .

Baghdad, May 26, 1926

. . . Already I know that I ought to have all my time for the Museum. As it is I now go there from 7 to 8.30 or so every morning and get to the office about 9. That has meant a pretty strenuous 4½ hours but I find that I can just get through the work. . . . One big room downstairs, the Babylonian Stone Room, is now finished and I am only waiting for the catalogue, which I have written, to be translated and printed, to ask the King to open it—just to show them that we are doing something. But this is the easiest of all the rooms. . . . The serial number of the Baghdad Museum has to be put onto everything and until each object is in the catalogue we can't number it. . . . I have moved about half the things from the old room into the new Museum and they are lying about, some on tables, some on the floor, a desolating spectacle. . . . I don't think I could possibly leave it like this.

Baghdad, June 9, 1926

I am enclosing the catalogue of the Babylonian Stone Room of the Museum and two picture postcards of the exhibits. . . . No. 7 is the thing I am proudest of—there is nothing like it in any museum in the world. . . . The King is going to open this room on Monday. . . .

In March 1905, Gertrude came to Qallat Semaan, a two and a half days' march from Homs, Syria, and stopped to reflect.

This is the place where St. Simon lived upon a pillar. While the servants pitched my tents I went out and sat upon St. Simon's column—there is still a little bit of it left—and considered how very different he must have been from me. And there came a big star and twinkled at me through the soft warm night, and we agreed together that it was pleasanter to wander across the heavens and the earth than to sit on top of a pillar all one's days.

Gertrude's first desert journeys were undertaken at the age of thirty-one, in 1900, comparatively late in her life. Her first glimpse of the desert had been on holiday with her aunt and uncle eight years previously, when she had written ecstatically of the desert around Tehran.

Persia, June 18, 1892, Letter to Horace Marshall

Oh the desert round Teheran! miles and miles of it with nothing,
nothing
growing; ringed in with bleak bare mountains snow crowned and furrowed with the deep courses of torrents. I never knew what desert was till I came here; it is a very wonderful thing to see. . . .

It remained something to see, rather than experience, until she visited family friends, the Rosens, in Jerusalem where
Friedrich was the German consul. She took lessons in Arabic and embarked on horseback expeditions to Palmyra, Damascus, Baalbek, and Beirut. But her long, groundbreaking expeditions did not begin for five more years, until she undertook the journey through the Syrian Desert to Asia Minor that she described in her book
The Desert and the Sown:
the title arising from her explanation written on a journey from Jerusalem.

. . . We came to spreading cornfields. The plan is this—the “Arabs” sow one place this year and go and live somewhere else lest their animals should eat the growing corn. Next year this lies fallow and the fallow of the year before is sown.

Meanwhile, her privileged life was full of traveling, mountaineering, hunting, society, gardening, and learning archaeology. Yet, as the prospect of marriage and children receded, she felt an increasing need for self-fulfillment. As an independent woman of great ability she was driven by the need to test herself, veering toward challenges tinged with danger and excitement. When she conquered Arabic and discovered desert travel, the challenges proliferated into an all-embracing personal experiment of which she would never reach the end. There was the risky business of staying alive and reaching her goal and the intoxication of asserting her own identity far from the world that regarded her as a spinster, an heiress, and a Bell. There were languages to perfect, customs to learn, history and archaeology to explore, techniques of surveying and navigation to master, photography and cartography skills to acquire, Middle Eastern politics to plumb, and, finally, information to gather and pass on. Up to the First World War, affairs of state were conducted as comprehensively at dinner parties, soirees, and embassy receptions as in government offices. She accessed this world and would become recognized in it as an expert.

Settling on arrival into a Middle Eastern hotel would become a happy ritual, an almost sacred preliminary to the increasingly complicated organization of Gertrude's five desert expeditions. She would book two rooms with a veranda or view, and use one as an office. She would banish all furniture
except for two armchairs and two tables, and trail cigarette ash behind her as she tacked up her maps and photographs of the family.

On her first visit to Jerusalem she bought only a lively Arab stallion on which she soon departed from the tourist tracks, riding astride for the first time instead of side-saddle, leaping stone walls and whooping for joy, one hand hanging on to her gray felt hat with its black velvet ribbon.

Deraa, April 30, 1900

. . . The chief comfort of this journey is my masculine saddle, both to me and my horse. Never, never again will I travel on anything else; I haven't known real ease in riding till now. Till I speak the people always think I'm a man and address me as Effendim! You mustn't think I haven't got a most elegant and decent divided skirt, however, but as all men wear skirts of sorts too, that doesn't serve to distinguish me.

Her first expedition was the seventy-mile ride down the east bank of the Dead Sea, with a cook and a couple of muleteers. On the Jordan plain she found herself waist-deep in flowers. The flora and fauna of the desert would never fail to enchant and surprise her.

Ayan Musa, March 20, 1900

. . . The wilderness had blossomed like the rose. It was the most unforgettable sight—sheets and sheets of varied and exquisite colour—purple, white, yellow, and the brightest blue (this was a bristly sort of plant which I don't know) and fields of scarlet ranunculus. Nine-tenths of them I didn't know, but there was the yellow daisy, the sweet-scented mauve wild stock, a great splendid sort of dark purple onion, the white garlic and purple marrow, and higher up a tiny blue iris and red anemones and a dawning pink thing like a linum.

April 2, 1900

My camp is pitched half way up the hill, with . . . deep corn fields . . . the storks walking solemnly up to their necks in green. . . . There has been an immense flock of them flying and settling on the hillside, and when I took a stroll I soon found what was engaging [their] attention . . . The ground was hopping with locusts. . . .

Sometimes the fauna was less enchanting.

Jericho, April 6, 1900

Madeba, in proportion to its size, must have the largest number of mosquitoes and fleas of any inhabited spot on the globe.

She returned northward, crossing the pilgrim road leading to Mecca.

March 22, 1900

Road of course it is not; it is about one-eighth of a mile wide and consists of hundreds of parallel tracks trodden out by the immense caravan which passes over it twice a year.

On the last day of the journey, instead of returning to Jerusalem, she had decided to go on to the Nabataean ruins of Petra and stopped for the night near an encampment of the Beni Sakhr, the fierce tribe that had been the last to submit to Turkish rule.

She made many mistakes and omissions that turned this first desert journey into a steep learning curve. She learned that she must hire a
rafiq
from each of the Bedouin tribes in whose territories she traveled, to pass in peace. Not yet cognizant of the etiquette of the desert, she did not know that when she found herself near a desert encampment, she should immediately pay a courtesy visit to the sheikh in his tent. As a result,
her expedition soon ran into trouble and was threatened by Beni Sakhr tribesmen, armed to the teeth. That night, nevertheless, she wrote home, “Don't think I have ever spent such a wonderful day.” She learned to distrust the maps, which were full of errors—“one of the great difficulties of this journey is that no one knows the distances even approximately and there is no map worth a farthing. Another is that the population is so scant we can't get food! This is starvation camp tonight. . . .” Arriving at Petra, she was distracted from the fabulous ruins by hunger.

March 29, 1900

The Bab es Sik is a passage about half a mile long. . . . Suddenly between the narrow opening of the rocks, we saw the most beautiful sight I have ever seen. Imagine a temple cut out of the solid rock, the charming facade supported on great Corinthian columns standing clear, soaring upwards to the top of the cliff with the most exquisite proportions and carved with groups of figures almost as fresh as when the chisel left them—all this in the rose red rock, with the sun just touching it and making it look almost transparent . . . .We camped under a row of the most elaborate tombs, three stories of pillars and cornices and the whole topped by a great funeral urn. They are extremely rococo, just like the kind of thing you see in a Venetian church. . . . “A rose red city half as old as Time.”—I wish the lamb had come!

As she became more experienced, she learned more. She made herself a muslin sleeping bag to protect herself from biting insects at night. She learned to toughen up and drink water from wells swarming with “little red animals swimming cheerfully about.” She learned how to mend a leaking water-skin, covering the hole with a stone and tying the skin tightly around the neck with string. She learnt to wrap up against the sun, finding that the sun could burn her ankles and feet even through her thick leather boots. On farther journeys she would
wear the traditional white cloth, the keffiyeh,
*
tied over her hat and wound over her lower face, and over her head a fine blue veil cut through with eyeholes. Her new divided skirt would be partly covered by a large masculine coat in khaki cotton. Effectively, though unintentionally, she would disguise herself as a man.

We know every detail of her life on her expeditions because of her wonderful consistency as a writer of letters to her father and stepmother, kept today in the Robinson Library at Newcastle on Tyne University. It was a matter of enormous importance to her to keep them in touch and unworried, and her detailed and humorous accounts of her travels were sent in almost daily installments; however, her dating of letters was a little erratic. When she was pressed for time she occasionally wrote a diary for them instead, which she sent off in batches.

From 1909 her mode of traveling was little short of majestic. It was not only that she liked to travel in style, but she found that the tribes would judge her status by her possessions and her gifts, and treat her accordingly. She did not forget the Druze chief, Yahya Beg, questioning the local villagers, “Have you seen a queen traveling?” She packed couture evening dresses, lawn blouses, linen riding skirts, cotton shirts, a fur coat that would double as a blanket, sweaters, scarves, and canvas and leather boots. Beneath layers of lacy petticoats she hid guns, her two cameras and film, and many pairs of binoculars and pistols as gifts for the most important sheikhs. She carried Egyptian cigarettes, insect powder, a Wedgwood dinner service, silver candlesticks and hairbrushes, crystal glasses, linen and blankets, folding tables, and a comfortable chair. Growing tired of sleeping on the ground, she brought with her a camp bed and two tents, one for writing as soon as they struck camp, the other for her bed. She also brought her traveling canvas bath for when there was enough water.

When she stopped for the night at a small distance from the black Arab tents, she made herself known to the sheikh. As soon as she had struck camp and had washed and changed, she presented herself at his tent, bringing gifts suitable to his power
and importance. With her long red hair swept up, wearing an evening dress of muslin or lace, she combined a regal appearance with assertive self-confidence. In what was now fluent Arabic, she brought news of interest to the sheikh—information about tribal movements, who had sold horses, who owned camels, who had been killed in a raid, and how much the blood money would be. He would invite her to dine, they would eat with their fingers and then wash their hands in bowls brought by slaves. After dinner and coffee when she might smoke or take her turn with the
nargile
, the water pipe in which tobacco, marijuana, or opium was smoked, she would quote from her photographic memory whole odes, or
qasidas
, of Arabic poetry, of which she probably knew more than the sheikh himself.

Camping near Tneib, after Dining in the Tent of Sheikh Fellah Isa of the Daja Tribe, February 12, 1905

I hope you realise what an Arab tent is like. It's made of black goats' hair, long and wide, with a division in the middle to separate the women from the men. The lee side of it is always open and this is most necessary, for light and warmth all come from a fire of desert scrub burning in a shallow square hole in the ground and smoking abominably. . . .

The hours riding a horse or a camel were long, and she spent days trying, in ferocious heat, to take photographs and measure ruins lying deep in snake-infested grass. At other times she had to march on through freezing weather or storm conditions. To add to these tribulations, her 1905 expedition crew were rebellious.