Desert Queen (13 page)

“The lady has been awake since the rising of the sun,” said her servant; “all day she has walked and ridden, now she sleeps.”

“Does she march tomorrow?” asked the Mudir.

“I couldn’t possibly say, Effendim.”

“Tell her she must let me know before she goes anywhere,” the Mudir ordered.

“At your pleasure, Effendim.”

Waiting until two
A.M
., she rose and dressed hurriedly, shivering in the cold. Under the light of the stars her five servants packed up camp, and, with one of the men trembling in fear of both the Druze and the Turks, they all sneaked out of town. The evasion was a success. “I’ve slipped through their fingers,” she declared.

I
n the heart of the mountains called the Jebel Druze, she rode through one tiny village after another, causing a stir as she passed the white-turbaned, black-robed men. At Miyemir she stopped to water her horse. The veiled women, dressed in their long blue and red robes, were filling their earthenware jugs, dipping them into the pool. Gertrude dismounted, and a young man about nineteen approached; like all the Druze men and women, he had outlined his enormous eyes in black kohl. The beautiful boy took her hands, and, to her surprise, kissed her on both her cheeks. Other men followed, shaking her hand, eager to inspect the stranger.

With the boy as her guide, she continued in the mountains, past scattered ruins, riding through meadows, vineyards and cornfields, salaaming white-turbaned farmers, who saluted her back, and she laughed at the thought of the angry Turks. When they reached the town of Areh, she received a warm welcome from the village men. Druze style, she walked with them hand in hand, pinkies entwined, until they reached the nearest house. “Are you German?” the people asked warily as she entered. “I am English,” she replied, and they almost hugged her. They eyed the Germans as suspiciously as they eyed the Turks, fearful that they craved their land. The English had made a better impression; it was known that in Egypt they administered the country but left the local Arabs in control.

At Areh, the villagers quickly made her feel at home. They piled cushions for her to sit on, brought a stool for her feet and filled a pitcher with water so that she could wash her hands. The women were too shy to unveil their faces or to speak, but she drank good coffee with the men and regaled them with her tales of escape from the Turks. They asked questions about the Boer War, showing their knowledge of towns and generals, and when she told them about her brother Maurice, they listened sympathetically. Could she meet their sheikh? she asked finally. She had read about him in
Murray’s
guidebook. “Sheikh!” they said. “Yahya Bey is the head of all the Druze in the land; of course you must visit him.” He had just been freed after five years of prison, and they warned her that she must treat him with great respect.

She followed them to the top of the little hill where the sheikh lived in his verandahed house. In the carpeted reception room she saw him: “the most perfect type of the Grand Seigneur, a great big man, very handsome and with the most exquisite manners … he’s a king, you understand, and a very good king too, though his kingdom doesn’t happen to be a large one.” She stood regally confident before him, her head high, her hair like a reddish crown, her eyes like brilliant jewels. He beckoned her to join his circle, where he sat eating with six or eight other men, and she folded her skirt and crossed her legs on the carpet. With the thin slabs of bread, she scooped up some
laban
and some of the mixture of beans and meat on the big plate, and talking nonstop, she told her tale again, hoping to gain his permission to travel freely around the Jebel Druze. She took his photograph, and by the time they said goodbye she had won his promise of an escort. Weeks after she left, when inquiring of her whereabouts, he was known to have asked a visitor: “Have you seen a queen traveling?”

B
y May 11, 1900, she had left the Jebel Druze and reached Damascus, the desert capital. In a moment of reflection, she wrote: “It is at times a very odd sensation to be out in the world quite by myself, but mostly I take it as a matter of course now that I’m beginning to be used to it. I don’t think I ever feel lonely, though the one person I often wish for is Papa. I think he really would enjoy it. I keep wanting to compare notes with him.” She felt differently about her mother: “You, I want to talk to, but not in a tent with earwigs and black beetles around and muddy water to drink! I don’t think you would be your true self under such conditions.”

With permission from her parents and a fresh supply of money (her yearly allowance and the income from her books had run out), she extended her journey, bought a deep-pocketed khaki jacket made for a man, and hired three Kurdish soldiers, along with a cook and a guide. When they reached the town of Jarad she went to the house of Sheikh Ahmed. “I lay on his cushions, and ate white mulberries and drank coffee,” she recalled contentedly. When they pressed a
narghile
on her, she firmly refused. She had tried it once in Jerusalem. “Never again,” she said of the water pipe; “it’s too nasty.”

B
y the following night the grassy plains had disappeared, and in their place stretched thousands of miles of sand. This was her first night to sleep in the silent, endless desert. “The smooth, hard ground makes a beautiful floor to my tent,” she wrote. “Shall I tell you my chief impression—the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of wind and far away water and falling ice and stones; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it, Father. But here nothing.”

The sun scorched the daytime air, so for the next two days she and her five men traveled at night, twelve hours each night, without water for either humans or horses. The ride was long and boring across the endlesss sands, and she almost fell asleep in her saddle, but her men kept her awake, telling her grisly tales of Bedouin raids and rumors of the cruel, unyielding desert emir, Ibn Rashid. Their stories whetted her appetite to visit the Nejd, the terrifyingly vacant desert she had read about in
Arabia Deserta
, a seminal work describing life with the Bedouin by the traveler Charles Doughty.

When they stopped on the third night and she finally could sleep, she climbed into a muslin bag she had made to protect herself from animal bites and sand flies. “I’m very proud of this contrivance,” she wrote, “but if we have a
ghazu
, a raid, of Arabs I shall certainly be the last to fly, and my flight will be as one who runs a sack race.”

After another day of riding, they reached a spring. She drank the clear, cold water, closing her eyes to avoid seeing the weeds and creatures swimming in it. Her cook made lunch, fried croquettes and a roasted partridge he had killed, and after tea, she climbed into a cave and slept on thistles. A few hours later they were off again, and by sundown the air had turned bitter cold. At the campsite, to keep warm she put on gaiters and a second pair of knickerbockers, and with a covert cloth coat under her thick winter coat, she rolled herself up in a blanket and cape and went to sleep.

The next day she reached the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a “singular landscape … a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. And beyond all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates five days away.”

She spent two days exploring Palmyra, and then set off in the early morning for her return to Damascus. Outside the ancient city of Palmyra she came across a camp of Agail Arabs, a band of dark-skinned, unkempt Bedouin driving a caravan of camels to the flowering capital. They were led by Sheikh Muhammad, who came from Nejd, the cruel desert of central Arabia. But instead of hiding in fear of the scruffy Bedouin, she took a second breakfast with them: dates, camels’ milk and the bitter black coffee of the Arabs (“a peerless drink,” she called it), and talked excitedly with two of the men about Baghdad and the desert. “The interesting part of it is that the Agail are some of Ibn Rashid’s people,” she reported, “and I’m going to lay plans with Sheikh Muhammad as to getting into Nejd next year.” But it was 1900, and the trip she hoped to make to Nejd would not take place for another fourteen years.

“Please God, who is great,” the Agail sheikh said. He and his men wanted to travel with her; they needed the protection of her soldiers. She agreed, and, looking like a man in her oversized khaki coat, her tanned brown face half hidden in her
kafeeyah
, she took off, surrounded by the pack of burly Bedouin. On the road to Damascus she caught up with two English ladies, neat and tidy, traveling in a carriage across the desert from Jerusalem, a dragoman on top to guide them, a pack of mules trailing behind with their tents. She was pleased to see them. “I liked them and it’s pleasant to meet some one in the desert, but I felt rather disreputable with a troop of Agail on their dromedaries round me and no dragoman and no nothing.” The women gave her ginger biscuits (for which she blessed them) and made plans to meet her in Damascus. But she hardly looked forward to tea and biscuits with the fair-skinned English ladies; she much preferred the bitter coffee and adventurous company of the bearded Arab men. Their world felt more natural to her; “a daughter of the desert,” they had called her.

The following day a large group of the Hassinah tribe pitched their camp near hers, and their twenty-year-old sheikh, Muhammad, appeared at her tent. A “handsome, rather thick lipped, solemn fellow,” she judged him, his hair hanging in braids from under his
kafeeyah
, in his hand an enormous silver-sheathed sword. He greeted her and left. Sheikh Muhammad, not one to be sneered at, had hundreds of tents, countless horses and camels and a house in Damascus.

Gertrude paid a return courtesy call at his tent. While she drank coffee, the Hassinah made a circle around her, their half-hidden eyes staring out at her from under their
kafeeyahs
, their bodies dirty and almost naked. A fire fueled by camel dung smoldered in the air, and one of the men took out a single-stringed instrument and played it with a bow, singing “weird, sad,” melancholy songs.

After a long while she stood up to leave, but one of her soldiers reprimanded her. The Hassinah had killed a sheep for her and were preparing it for dinner. In the etiquette of the desert, she was supposed to share their food, and in return for the privilege, she should give them a present. “You can give nothing to an Arab but arms and horses,” she noted and, back in her own tent, decided to give the sheikh a pistol belonging to one of her men (“net value two pounds”).

She returned to the Hassinah later that night and sat down again on the carpets. This time, besides the bitter black coffee, they offered her “white coffee”—hot water, sweetened and flavored with almonds. She talked with an Agaili about Baghdad and about the mysterious Ibn Rashid, the powerful desert ruler whom she yearned to meet. A black slave brought in a water jar, and as they all held out their hands, he poured the water over their fingers. And then at last came dinner: five men carried in an enormous platter heaped with rice and the meat of a whole sheep. They placed it on the ground in front of her, and she and ten men sat around the platter, eating the food and flat bread with the fingers of their right hand. Behind them stood the black slave holding a glass, which he filled with water whenever someone needed it. Her only disappointment was that the men ate so little; she was still hungry when they finished. There was more hand washing, this time with soap, and then she made her bows and left to go to bed. “It was rather an expensive dinner,” she noted dryly, “but the experience was worth the pistol.”