Desert Queen (15 page)

O
nce more the high peaks of Switzerland tempted her, and in little over a month she left for the Oberland, writing home delightedly that she was recognized by a guard on the Brünnig train. Was she “
the
Miss Bell who had climbed the Engelhorn last year?” he had asked. “This is fame,” she informed her family.

Soon after registering at the Kurhaus, her hotel in Rosenalui, she wanted to put herself in shape for serious climbs. Walking straight up a hill, she reached the edge of a glacier and sat down, thinking “what a lucky dog” she was to be there.

Dressed for the biting cold, she was off once again with her guides, the brothers Ulrich and Heinrich, making easy ascents up and down some “charming” little rocks of the Oberland. They tackled “the first of the impossibles, the Wellhorn arête,” 10,485 feet, running up the beginning of the Vorder Wellhorn, and after hours of climbing the smooth rocks, they came to a terribly dangerous precipice. “My heart sank,” she confessed. “I thought we should never do it.” Shivering with cold, they faced a rotting knife edge of rock that crumbled in masses as they went along, with steep precipices beneath them that threatened their every step. But with the aid of an iron nail and a double rope they reached the summit, returning happily to the inn to plan the next event.

In the course of her previous visits she and her guides had considered an ascent up the rocky face of the Finsteraarhorn glacier. Serious climbs were a means to stretch her athletic stamina, to prove her physical strength, to compete with her own sex as well as with males and, most important, to test herself. She was determined to achieve the highest possible position, no matter in which field of endeavor; mountain climbing (a popular sport for females) offered clear tasks and, quite literally, a chance to reach the heights. But if she was going to climb a mountain, she would do it the way she did everything else: not by following in other people’s footsteps, but by seeking to break new ground. She would find the untried and persevere to overcome it; otherwise, it was hardly worth the doing.

The climb up the face of the Finsteraarhorn was three thousand vertical feet, steeper and higher than almost any place in the Alps, a daring climb that had not yet been tried. “The arěte,” she explained, “rises from the glacier in a great series of gendarmes [spires], and towers, set at such an angle on the steep face of the mountain that you wonder how they can stand at all and indeed they can scarcely be said to stand, for the great points of them are continually overbalancing and tumbling down into the couloirs [the gaps], between the arêtes and they are all capped with loosely poised stones, jutting onto and hanging over and ready to fall at any moment.” The dangers were enormous, the rocks “exceedingly steep” and as they began their ascent at one
A.M
. on the fateful day of July 31, 1902, black clouds rolled up from the west. But “the game” had begun. Gertrude was determined to slash through the glacier to the peak.

Tied to one another on a rope, she and the guides pushed their way up the arěte for several hours, past some of the terribly difficult “chimneys,” narrow clefts in the cliff, until, at a thousand feet below the summit, they were in sight of the final two spires. White flakes started to fall, and they sat down to eat a few mouthfuls of snow; refreshed, they crept along the knife edge of a narrow pass. The snow was coming down faster, furious and blinding, swirling in a small avalanche; they could see nothing of the mountainside either to the right or to the left, and the slope was too slippery with the fresh snow. They had had no choice but to turn back. They knew it would be only slightly less precarious than going up.

They reached a sloping rock ledge, but it offered little relief; from there they would have to drop eight feet down onto deep snow. They fixed an extra rope and tumbled down, one after the other, onto the snow. “It felt awful,” Gertrude reported; “I shall remember every inch of that rock face for the rest of my life.” It was six in the evening, and their goal was to work down to the most difficult of the narrow clefts while it was still layered with only a little snow. But after they toiled for several more hours down the rocks, a furious thunderstorm began. They were completely vulnerable. “We were standing by a great upright on the top of a tower when suddenly it gave a crack and a blue flame sat on it for a second,” she wrote. “My ice axe jumped in my hand and I thought the steel felt hot through my woollen glove—was that possible? I didn’t take my glove off to see! Before we knew where we were the rock flashed again.” They “tumbled down a chimney as hard as ever we could, one on top of the other, buried our ice axe heads in some shale at the bottom of it and hurriedly retreated from them. It’s not nice to carry a private lightning conductor in your hand in the thick of a thunderstorm.”

There was no way to continue in the dark and no place to take shelter from the storm, but somehow, linked together on their rope, they squeezed into a tiny crack between the rocks and huddled together. Gertrude sat at the back on a pointed bit of rock, Ulrich sat on her feet to keep them warm, and Heinrich sat just below him, the brothers’ feet in a knapsack, the snow coming down, the thunder booming fast behind every strike of lightning. “At first the thunderstorm made things rather exciting,” she explained. “The claps followed the flashes so close that there seemed no interval between them. We tied ourselves firmly on to the rock above, lest, as Ulrich philosophically said, one of us should be struck and fall out. The rocks were all crackling round us and fizzing like damp wood … and as there was no further precaution possible I enjoyed the extraordinary magnificence of the storm with a free mind: it was worth seeing.” She managed to doze. Gradually the skies cleared, the stars came out, and they talked about the sunrise. But the sun never rose; gray skies hung over the day.

For sixteen hours, from four
A.M
. until eight the next evening, they were on the arěte; they carried nothing to drink but two tablespoons of brandy and a mouthful of wine, and the only food they had was what was left in their knapsacks: five gingerbread biscuits, two sticks of chocolate, a slice of bread, a scrap of cheese and a handful of raisins, doled out during the course of the day. The climb down was slow and torturous, almost every yard requiring an extra rope: “You can imagine the labour of finding a rock at every 50 feet round which to sling it, then of pulling it down behind us and slinging it again.”

It snowed all day, and they watched the white sheets whirl down the precipices, knowing, helplessly, that the snow was likely to start an avalanche. They tackled the next chimney, the iced rope slipping like butter through their hands, and then worked their way down an icy slope of rock covered with four inches of new snow and split by broad gaps. “The rock was too difficult for me, the stretches too big, I couldn’t reach them.… I handed my axe down to Heinrich and told him I could do nothing but fall, but he couldn’t, or at any rate, didn’t secure himself and in a second we were both tumbling head over heels down the couloir.” Somehow Ulrich held them. “But it was a near thing and I felt rather ashamed of my part in it.” She thought then that it was “on the cards we should not get down alive.”

The cold was bitter, the snow had turned to rain, their clothing was soaked and they shivered all day as they worked their way down, only to find themselves at nightfall still on the glacier. They had no matches to light their lantern and no shelter from the driving rain. Nevertheless, they found a spot in which to sink their axes, and they sat on them and she slept a bit, thinking how her brother Maurice had slept through the rain during the war in South Africa.

When morning came they could hardly stand, but they managed to take a few steps, and by six o’clock, they were safe enough to free themselves from the rope. At ten
A.M
. on August 3, 1902, they reached the hotel. Gertrude’s toes had swelled and she had frostbite, but she announced, “I am perfectly absolutely well except for my toes—not so much as a cold in the head. Isn’t it remarkable!” She had made the trip despite Domnul’s gloomy forebodings, which, she acknowledged, “came very near to being realised, and I am now feeling some satisfaction in the thought that my bones are not lying scattered on the Alpine mountain cold.” She had not reached the pinnacle, but in the face of death-defying danger, she had escaped unharmed. Later on, her guide Ulrich would say, “Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished.” Of all the amateur climbers he had known, he added—men and women—no one had equaled her “in coolness, bravery and judgement.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

The Desert and the Sown

H
er toes still swollen, Gertrude returned to the “horrid cold” of London, even in mid-August of 1902. She hired a personal maid, Marie Delaere, resumed her rounds of afternoon calls, and over dinner with Domnul, who was traveling frequently as foreign editor of
The Times
, planned a trip to Delhi. To celebrate Edward VII’s accession to the throne as King of England and Emperor of India, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, had announced an imperial durbar, an impressive gathering of notables. Resplendent, sumptuous, spectacular; no words were too profuse to describe the richness of this coming event. The great meeting of dignitaries, potentates and luminaries would regale the most populous subcontinent on earth with the grandeur of Empire. Replete with jewel-laden elephants and dazzling electric lights, the display of wealth and majesty would reinforce the image of British power to the Indian people and justify the notion of imperial possession. A confirmed imperialist herself, Gertrude looked forward to joining the festivities. For her and for her circle, her country’s unique position of strength was a noble necessity. The British, with their commerce, courage and conviction of superiority, were clearly meant to take charge of less fortunate souls.

She journeyed to India with her younger brother Hugo, in part for pleasure, in part to dissuade him from taking Holy Orders. Convinced that being a Christian was a foolish waste of time, Gertrude spent much of the seagoing trip engaged in intellectual argument. But to no avail. Hugo was determined to join the church. By the end of December 1902 their boat reached Bombay, and it was with great relief to both that they turned their attention from the religion of Christ to the religion of Empire.

It seemed that “all the world” had come for the brilliant durbar: family, friends, close officials, all installed, like her, in the privileged tents of the Viceroy, in front-row seats at parades, at the best receptions and the most lavish parties. And to her delight, Domnul, who had come by way of the Persian Gulf, introduced her to representatives of the venerable Indian Civil Service, that prestigious club of Oxford and Cambridge graduates that ruled the colony and its outposts, meted out justice, taught the natives how to pour a good wine and made sure that British business interests were always protected. In particular, she met the tall, distinguished-looking British Resident, the presiding British Consul in Muscat, Percy Cox.

Lunching together with trusty Domnul and the knowledgeable Cox, she learned the latest news from Central Arabia, an up-to-date report on the blood feud between the Emir of Nejd, Ibn Rashid, leader of the seminomadic clan of the Shammar tribe, and his powerful rival, Ibn Saud, head of the Bedouin clan that belonged to the Anazeh tribe. Two of the most powerful sheikhs in Arabia, between them they controlled the vast and vacant desert that formed the central plain of the Arabian peninsula, over which their clans had fought for generations. Years of warring had led in 1891 to the defeat of the Saudis by the Rashids; exiled to Kuwait, an emirate allied to the British, the Saudis had allowed their anger to fester with revenge against the Rashids. Now there was talk of Ibn Saud’s return.

Gertrude’s meeting with Cox was brief but important; it strengthened her determination to penetrate Arabia and marked the start of a long and important relationship with Percy Cox.