Desert Queen (14 page)

H
er adventure to Jerusalem and beyond had come to an end, and before heading home, she picked up some pine cones from the famous cedars of Lebanon. “Shall we try and make them grow at Rounton?” she asked. She had been looking forward to a respite in England. “But you know, dearest Father,” she continued, “I shall be back here before long! One doesn’t keep away from the East when one has got into it this far.” By June she was planting the pine seeds on the lawn at Rounton.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

A Different Challenge

I
n Yorkshire during the summer of 1900, and for most of the following twelve months, Gertrude spent time with her sisters Elsa and Molly and her brothers Hugo and Maurice, and cared for her father, ill with rheumatism. From time to time she took the train to London, lunched and shopped with various friends, and dined when she could with Domnul Chirol. Recently made the director of the Foreign Department at
The Times
, Domnul was devoted to her and always willing to lend her a fatherly ear. His concern and compassion, along with his dry wit and convivial attitude, made him her favorite companion. He shared her interests in languages, literature and art, understood her loneliness (he too was lonely) and cherished her friendship. He guided her in political affairs, gave her introductions to important people and encouraged her travels, and as she traveled, she reported back to him; he used the information in his editorials and as background for officials. The reports she made from wherever she went—Europe, the East—were highly detailed. Details almost obsessed her, and in her diaries and correspondence with family and friends, she rarely left out a color or a food or a flower or a description of an experience or a person.

But, except for confiding in Domnul, she avoided discussing how she felt about herself, the way her life was turning out or the loneliness that drove her. In the Victorian setting in which she was raised, she was taught not to brood over sadness but to push it away, to busy herself. And thus, in addition to reading history and literature, she wrote letters, articles and books, studied languages, learned about art, architecture and archaeology, took up photography, played tennis and golf, swam, went riding and played bridge, filling every vacant moment by doing
something.
She had proceeded thus after the loss of Cadogan, and so she continued to do, rushing from one exercise to the next, filling in whatever empty moments remained by writing things down in all their minutiae, intentionally leaving no time for introspection or self-analysis.

S
he found desert travel alluring, but the mountains gnawed at her too, their very existence summoning her to climb them. In 1899, at the age of thirty-one, she had climbed the Meije; the following summer, after her return from Jerusalem and Damascus, she set off for the Swiss Alps and Chamonix to climb peaks that had not yet been scaled. Arriving at her Swiss hotel at the beginning of August 1900, Gertrude settled into her room, unpacked her suitcase and wrote at once to her father: “I don’t think there is a more delightful sensation than that of opening an Alpine campaign—meeting one’s guide, talking over the great ascents that look so easy on the map; and laying out one’s clean new mountain clothes.”

After a few days of practice runs, she climbed Chamonix and then made the ascent up the Mer de Glacé, explaining in her letter home that the Sea of Ice was really a great mass of broken ice that continued to break and crack. The tougher the conditions, the more she enjoyed them, and within a week she wired home, “
GREPONT
TRAVERSED
” and, a week later, “
DRU
TRAVERSED
.” The weather turned foul, however, and the bigger peaks would have to wait for another visit.

In August 1901, she was off again to Switzerland, stopping first in London for dinner with Domnul, who cast a wary eye on her dangerous mountain climbing. She shrugged off his concerns and arrived at her Alpine hotel; from the window of her room she could see “the great rock of the Engelhorn opposite, the line of snows of the Wetter-horn, Mittelhorn and Rosenhorn—far away, Pilatus and the Jur touched by the sunlight. Phantom armies of light mists walking over the floor of cloud.”

At four
A.M
. the following morning, dressed in a blue climbing suit, Gertrude set out with her professional guides, Ulrich and Heinrich Fuhrer, two brothers respected for their ability and well known for their knowledge of the mountain peaks. First, hooking themselves to the same rope, the threesome began their ascent, working their way up the boulders, occasionally scaling rocks so smooth they offered no possibility of a foothold: good practice for the difficult peaks on the Engelhorn.

After several days of snowy weather, they launched a climb on the south side of the fifth peak of the Engelhorn, to a point where no one else had ever been. “[It]
may
be impossible, but I don’t think it is,” Gertrude informed her family. “They say it is, but we know that the experts may be mistaken.” She and the guides made their way up an easy buttress, and the Klein Engelhorn came into full view, looking “most unencouraging”; the bottom third was composed of smooth perpendicular rocks, the next section had a steep rock wall with a deep mountain gorge, which “turned out to be quite as difficult as it looked.” They climbed over the smooth precipitous rocks, “scrabbled up” a shallow crack and stopped at the bottom of an overhanging rock, difficult because it was so smooth and unprotected.

Then came the test of her daring. Ulrich tried climbing on Heinrich’s shoulder but could not reach anything to hold. Gertrude described the experience: “I then clambered up on to Heinrich, Ulrich stood on me and fingered up the rock as high as he could. It wasn’t high enough. I lifted myself still a little higher—always with Ulrich on me, mind!—and he began to raise himself by his hands. As his foot left my shoulder I put up a hand, straightened out my arm and made a ledge for him.”

Balancing himself on Gertrude’s arm, Ulrich called out: “I don’t feel at all safe—if you move we are all killed.”

“All right,” Gertrude assured him. “I can stand here for a week.” And with that he climbed up by her shoulder and her hand.

Heinrich stayed behind, but Gertrude and Ulrich continued the climb, struggling to the top, then working their way down. It was seven in the evening when they reached the foot of the peak and joined Heinrich again. After their fifteen-hour trek, the trio slept that night high up in the mountains, in the hayloft of a farm, breakfasting the next morning on a shepherd’s milk and coffee, polished off with their own bread and jam. The adventure ended with a pleasant walk home through the woods.

Later, Ulrich confessed that if, when he asked, Gertrude had said she did not feel safe on the rock, he would have fallen and the three of them would have been killed. In truth, Gertrude admitted, she had hardly felt safe at all. Her air of confidence had merely been a cover for her own fear. Indeed, she said, “I thought I was falling when I spoke.” But despite the risks, she felt content: “I don’t think I have ever had two more delightful Alpine days.”

Within a fortnight they tackled two old peaks, seven new peaks, one new saddle ridge between two peaks, and traversed the 9,130-foot Engelhorn. Invigorated by her success, she informed her father that she hoped to climb one new Engelhorn peak and one of the high arêtes, the sharp, narrow ridges of the mountain: “I
would
like to have one of them to my name! It is a silly ambition, isn’t it! Still one does like to have the credit one really deserves.” Yet only a few weeks later, in mid-September, it was time to leave; sadly, she packed her belongings, but as she said farewell, she felt gratified to know that she was leaving behind a promontory that had already been named “Gertrude’s Peak.”

A
t the start of the new year, 1902, the East beckoned. Gertrude set sail from Liverpool with her father and her brother Hugo, stopping first in Algiers, where she wrote in her diary: “Even here there is enough of the East to give one the feel of it. I find it catching at my heart again as nothing else can, or ever will I believe, thing or person.” At Naples, she parted company from her family and continued on to Malta, where she joined an archaeological dig.

Poking around the Turkish island, she noted determinedly: “Some day, I shall come and travel here with tents, but then I will speak Turkish, which will not be difficult.” Most intriguing, however, was what she learned over a lunch at the British consulate: the day she had arrived in Smyrna, an influential uncle of the powerful sheikh Ibn Rashid had passed through town on his way back to Nejd. If only she had known. “I would have given worlds to meet him.” She was sowing plans for a trip to Arabia.

With Arabic still a challenge, she left Smyrna in March, sailing on the
Cleopatra
for Haifa, taking up residence on Mount Carmel, near the site of the great Crusader castle. She hired two sheikhs as tutors, one for Persian, which she found “perfectly delightful,” one for Arabic, over which she despaired once again: “I am soaked and sodden in it and how anyone can wish to have anything to do with a tongue so difficult when they might be living at ease, I can’t imagine. I never stop talking it in this hotel and I think I get a little worse daily.”

She visited Jerusalem and filled every day with lessons, excursions and afternoon teas, and as interesting as she found the local notables, they thought her even more intriguing. “I am a Person in this country,” she wrote excitedly to her parents. “I am a Person! and one of the first questions everyone seems to ask everyone else is, ‘Have you ever met Miss Gertrude Bell?’ ” But after two months it was time to leave, and by the end of May 1902, she was home in England, if only for a brief stay.