A Woman in Arabia (13 page)

Gertrude returned to the East briefly in 1902 and again in 1905, when she undertook the journey through the Syrian Desert to Asia Minor without requesting Turkish permission: “I laugh to think that I am marching along the Turkish frontier, so to speak, some ten miles beyond it, and they can't catch me or stop me.” She took part in a
ghazu
, beat a rival to arrive first with her friends the Druze, experienced the desert in bad weather, and found that she was famous in Syria.

A Week's March from Jericho, February 13, 1905

Yesterday a great ghazu, a raid, swept over this very country and carried off 2,000 head of cattle and all the tents of one of the small outlying groups. . . . Five hundred horsemen, they say there were. . . . I must tell you what will happen to the destitute of the Beni Hassan. They will go round to the rest of the tribe and one will give a camel, and one will give a few sheep and one some pieces of goat's hair for the tent, until each man has enough to support existence—they don't need much. So they will bide their time until a suitable moment when they will gather together all the horsemen of their allies, and ride out
against the Sakhr and the Howeitat who were the authors of their ills; and then if they are lucky they will take back the 2,000 head of beasts and more besides. It seems a most unreasonable industry this of the ghazu—about as profitable as stealing each other's washing, but that's how they live.

. . . To-morrow is the great feast of the Mohammmedan year. . . . After sunset there was a mighty firing off of guns. I too contributed—by request—in a modest way, with my revolver, the first, and I expect the only, time I shall use it.

February 16, 1905

Salkhad is a little black lava town hanging on to the southern slope of a volcano, and in the crater of the volcano there is a great ruined castle, most grim and splendid. This evening as I dined, . . . I heard a great sound of wild song, together with the letting off of guns, and going out I saw a fire burning on the topmost top of the castle walls. You who live in peace, what do you think this meant? It was a call to arms. I told you the Beni Sakhr and the Druzes were bitter foes. A month ago the Sakhr carried off 5,000 sheep from the Druze folds in the plain. To-morrow the Druzes are going forth, 2,000 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 country side. To-morrow they will assemble here and Nasib rides at their head. There was a soldier sitting at my camp fire. He wears the Turkish uniform, but he is a Druze from Salkhad, and he hates the Turk as a Druze knows how to hate. I said: “Is there refusal to my going up?” He replied: “There is no refusal, honour us.” And together under the moon we scrambled up the sandy side of the mountain. There at the top, on the edge of the castle moat 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. “Oh Lord our God! Upon them! Upon them!”—I too joined the circle with my guide. “Let the child leave his mother's side, let the young man mount and be gone.” Over and over again they repeated a single phrase. 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 good man? are you a true man? Are you valiant?” they shouted. “Ha! ha!” came the answer and 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. When it was over we ran down the hill together, the Druzes took up a commanding position on the roof of a house—we happened to be on it at the time, for one always walks for choice on the roofs and not in the streets to avoid the mud—and reformed their devilish circle. I listened for a little and then took my leave and departed, many blessings following me down the hill. . . .

February 18, 1905

I hear that Mark Sykes
*
has come into the Jebel Druze with an official escort. . . . I am very glad I came up through the desert . . . a most amusing journey and a very valuable experience for a future expedition. You see I have laid the foundations of
friendship with several important people—of desert importance that is.

The weather worsened as she traveled north.

Saleh, the Safah Desert, February 20, 1905

All went well for the first three hours or so, except that it was so cold that I rode in a sweater . . . a Norfolk jacket and a fur coat; then we began to get into snow and 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, the wind increasing and sleet beginning to fall 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. . . . Some interest surrounds me, for I am the first foreign woman who has ever been in these parts.

February 23, 1905

I left my tents behind. . . . We rode down the Druze mountains. . . . We rode on and on over all the stones in the world and at last, half an hour before sunset, just as we were deciding that we should have to sleep out, waterless, one of the Druzes caught sight of the smoke of some Arab tents. . . . Very miserable the little encampment looked. They have nothing but a few camels, the black tents and the coffee pots. They eat nothing but bread. . . . My servants and I went to the house of the Sheikh, whose name was Understanding. His two sons lighted a fire of desert thorns and we all sat round watching the coffee making. And the talk began to the accompaniment of the coffee pounding, a great accomplishment among them. They pound in a delightful sort of tune, or rather a sort of tattoo. We dined on flaps of fresh bread and bowls of dibbis and then I curled myself
up in a blanket and went to sleep in a corner of the tent. The smoke of the fire was abominable, but it blew out after a bit. . . . The fleas didn't blow out.

. . . The second night in Arab tents was rather wearing, I must admit, and I felt quite extraordinarily dirty this morning. We started early and I got back to my tents at 4—the bath that followed was one of the most delightful I have ever had.

Damascus, February 27, 1905

I . . . alighted at a most fascinating hotel, with a courtyard. . . . The governor here has sent me a message to say would I honour him by coming to see him. . . . An official [Turkish] lives in this hotel. He spent the evening talking to me and offering to place the whole of the organisation of Syria at my disposal. . . . I have become a Person in Syria!

March 3, 1905

I made my way at last to the great mosque . . . left my shoes at the door with a friendly beggar and went in. It was the hour of the afternoon prayer. In the courtyard, men of all sorts and kinds, from the learned Doctor of Damascus down to the raggedest camel driver—Islam is the great republic of the world, there is neither class nor race inside the creed—were washing at the fountain and making the first prostrations before they entered the mosque. I followed them in and stood behind the lines of praying people some two or three hundred of them, listening to the chanting of the Imam. “Allah!” he cried, and the Faithful fell with a single movement upon their faces and remained for a full moment in silent adoration, till the high chant of the Imam began again: “The Creator of this World and the next, of the Heavens and the Earth, He who leads the righteous in the true path, and the evil to destruction. Allah!” And as the name of God echoed through the great colonnades, where it had sounded for near 2,000 years in different tongues, the
listeners prostrated themselves again, and for a moment all the church was silence. . . .

I begin to see dimly what the civilisation of a great Eastern city means—how they live, what they think; and I have got on to terms with them.

Homs, March 9, 1905

I took a walk through the bazaars, but that was not as pleasant as it might have been on account of the interest my appearance excited. It was an interest purely benevolent but none the less tiresome, for I was never without the company of fifty or sixty people.

Kalaat el Husn, March 12, 1905

It is one of the most difficult things I know to keep one's temper when one is constantly surrounded and mobbed. . . . Only a fixed determination not to afford more amusement than I could help to the inhabitants of Homs kept me outwardly calm.

Hamah, March 16, 1905

I have just had a struggle with the authorities who insisted on giving me eight watchmen for the night. I refused to have more than two. . . . It's a perfect pest having so many, for in the first place they talk all night and in the second one has to tip them all.

In April 1907, Gertrude went to Asia Minor. The work she did there at the Hittite and Byzantine site of Binbirkilise with Sir William Ramsay is detailed in their 580-page book,
The Thousand and One Churches.
They worked on it for much of 1908, and it was published a year later. They met, as arranged, in
Binbirkilise, but she traveled there alone except for Fattuh and her crew, buying a couple of horses but mostly traveling by cart. On the way she stopped here and there to take notes on ancient stones that Ramsay had asked her to look at.

Back in England, she took tutorials in surveying and astronomical observations for determining positions in preparation for her next important desert expedition.

London, October 1907

I have had a wild 24 hours. I worked at the Geog. Soc. all yesterday and 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. It was wonderfully calm and warm but the moon was so bright that even the big stars were a little difficult to see. However, I took a number of observations and shall work them out on Monday. I got back after midnight, very hungry, and this morning I was back at Red Hill before 10 and spent three hours taking bearings for a map with Mr. Reeves. That has to be plotted out too on Monday at the Geog. Soc.

Gertrude was back in Syria in 1909. She started from Aleppo in the middle of February for her longest journey so far. Taking the northern desert route, she crossed the Euphrates in order to explore its unmapped east bank. It was in mid-March that she left her caravan and rode with Fattuh and a small party north of Najaf. There, in a dangerous section of the desert, she discovered the ruined palace of Ukhaidir (see “The Archaeologist”). She returned via Babylon and Ctesiphon, Samarra and Ashur.

Leaving Aleppo, February 1909

There is a moment . . . when one is newly arrived in the East, when one is conscious of the world shrinking at one end and growing at the other till all the perspective of life is changed—after a few days it becomes a common place and one notices it no more. . . . Some day I hope the East will be strong again and develop its own civilisation, not imitate ours, and then perhaps it will teach us a few of the things we once learnt from it and have now forgotten, to our great loss. . . .

This bank of the Euphrates is in many parts untravelled and I am therefore obliged to take a great deal of trouble about it. . . . I forgot to tell you . . . that at Der I saw the Arabs swimming across the Euphrates on inflated skins just exactly like the Assyrian soldiers on the bas reliefs in the British Museum.

On a hill in Ashur, in northern Mesopotamia some sixty miles south of Mosul, she sat for an hour looking down on what would become Iraq, the country of which she would one day become the uncrowned queen.

April 27, 1909

The whole world shone like a jewel, green crops, and blue waters and far away the gleaming snows of the mountains that bound Mesopotamia to the north—we saw them today for the first time. I sat on a hill top for an hour and considered the history of Asia that was spread out before me. Here Mithridates murdered the Greek generals, here Xenophen began to have his command, and just beyond Zab the Greeks turned and defeated the archers of Mithridates, marching then on to Larissa, the mound of Nimrud, where Xenophon saw the great Assyrian city of Calah standing in ruins. Nimrud stood out among the cornfields at my feet. A little further east I could see the plain of Arbela where Alexander conquered Asia. We people of the west can always conquer, but we can never hold
Asia—that seemed to me to be the legend written across the landscape. . . .