Desert Queen (20 page)

Toward the end of March she wrote home excitedly: she had come upon a spectacular ruin, the most important relic of its period. “As soon as I saw it I decided that this was the opportunity of a lifetime.” Not a word had been written about it, and it was hers to shout to the world. The Arabs called it Ukhaidir, meaning a little green place, but it was neither small nor green. A huge stone and wood castle surrounded by round towers set in immense outer walls, inside it had one court after another with domed and vaulted rooms, gorgeously decorated plaster walls, hidden chambers with high columns and round niches. By studying this palace she could learn more about sixth-century Eastern art than in all the books she could read.

She worked steadily, photographing, sketching, drawing the plan of the castle to scale. Dressed in her white cotton shirt, petticoat and long patch-pocketed skirt, black stockings and laced-up shoes, a dark
kafeeyah
wrapped around her sun helmet, she gauged the building, walking around the standing walls, lying down on the hard cold floors to take the measurements. Her men stood by her side, cooperative but on guard against the Bedouin raiders, who were everywhere. “Nothing will induce them to leave their rifles in the tents,” she complained. “They are quite intolerably inconvenient; the measuring tape is for ever catching round the barrel or getting caught up in the stock, but I can’t persuade them to lay the damnable things down for an instant.” One night as she lay awake in her tent, she heard the sounds of gun shots whizzing overhead. Her men went out to chase them, but the invisible attackers disappeared into the dark.

Working at Ukhaidir convinced her that this was an archaeological find that would impress even the most important authorities in the field. “It’s the greatest piece of luck that has ever happened to me. I shall publish it in a big monograph all to itself and it will make a flutter in the dovecots,” she wrote home. The discovery could secure her reputation as an archaeologist.

On the last day of March 1909 Gertrude left the castle, sneezing and coughing from the drafty halls of Ukhaidir. Traipsing across the windy, dusty, drought-ridden desert, its landscape strewn with dead sheep and goats and with human corpses, she was overwhelmed by a rush of sadness.

H
er journey took her next to Babylon, where a group of German archaeologists were excavating the site. From the time of the Amorites, in the eighteenth century
B.C.
, until the age of the Chaldeans, twelve hundred years later, the city had risen and fallen like piles of sand in the hands of kings. It had reached its peak in the sixth century
B.C.
, when Nebuchadnezzar made it the capital of his New Babylonian Empire. He had surrounded the city with thick walls, wide enough to race two chariots abreast across the tops, and ordered the construction of grand temples and vast palaces.

It was “the most extraordinary place,” Gertrude wrote after viewing the work of Dr. Koldewey and his team. “I have seldom felt the ancient world come so close.” The archaeologists had dug out most of Nebuchadnezzar’s palace; she could see the “great hall where Belshazzar must have held his feast … the remains of the platform in which Nebuchadnezzar used to sit when it was hot … his private rooms and the tiny emergency exit by which the king could escape to the river if his enemies pressed on him.”

With the help of the Germans, she planned the rest of her trip: from Babylon to Seleucia, and then along the Tigris to Ctesiphon, the ancient Sassanid (Persian) capital that fell in battle to the Arabs. By April 1909 she reached Baghdad. The British Consul, Colonel Ramsay, welcomed her to the Residency, a resplendent symbol of British power: “a palace,” she described it, surrounded by a fortress wall, guarded by Indian soldiers, twelve caravans, thirty sepoys, and countless indoor servants. (“I had to tip them all when I left,” she later complained.) The consul’s wife, she found abhorrent: “a dull dog, a very stiff, narrow and formal Englishwoman, dreadfully afraid of giving herself away or of doing anything not entirely consistent with the duty and dignity of the wife and daughter of Indian officials.” Just the sort of woman she would encounter again and again in the East. But the consul himself, wary at first, responded to Gertrude’s charms and proceeded to show her his secret reports to Whitehall, the Foreign Office. As a result, she wrote to
The Times
emphasizing the need for a railway line from Basrah to Baghdad, to be financed, most important, by Britain.

Her stay in Baghdad was brief, but with names and letters from Friedrich Rosen, she managed to see some of the notables and meet the most important Islamic authority in the town. The Naqib, religious leader of the Sunnis, and respected by the Shiites as well, was a crucial link to the rich large Muslim community. She “felt rather anxious,” meeting such an authority, she confessed; “our political relations with him are so very delicate, and he is so particularly holy.” Beholden to the ruling Turks and a man who rarely spoke with women, he received her nonetheless, robed and turbaned and “with effusion, and talked without stopping for an hour and a half.” Still, she managed to interject the right questions. After instructing her on Mesopotamian history, from the time of the biblical flood up until the present, he finished by inviting her to his private family house on the river.

L
eaving Baghdad, she reached the territory of the Shammar, the great tribe of the north. “They rule this country with a rod of iron,” she wrote. “Not a caravan that passes up and down from Tikrit to Mosul, but pays them tribute on every animal, unless, of course, they happen to be under government protection as I am.” The Shammar owed some of their strength to the Turks; Humeidi Beg Ibn Farhan, a son of the ruling “sheikh of sheikhs,” was “particularly in their favor,” she wrote later, “in touch with the Ottoman official world, as a go-between on behalf of the tribe.” But now Gertrude entertained the handsome young man in her tent; beguiled by the gentle, indolent sheikh, she talked with him about the desert. At the end of their conversation, the British lady reverted to habit and handed him her visiting card. In return, he offered her welcome to all the Shammar tents. “Someday I shall profit by the invitation,” she noted. “I like making the acquaintance of these desert lords, it may always come in useful.”

Making her way north she reached Mosul and then rode onward to the land of the Yezdi, the devil worshippers, who offered her a room to sleep in. But the thicket of fleas hopping around sent her back to her tent. In the mountains of the Kurds she rode through luxuriant valleys, wild with olive, pomegranate, mulberry, fig and almond trees, and visited old castles, monasteries and churches. Intrigued by the churches in one particular town, the village of Khakh, she decided to spend an extra day.

In the middle of the night, in her tent, she heard a noise and woke to find a man crouching on the floor. She tore open the mosquito net around her bed and leapt off her cot to jump him, but by the time she untangled the netting, the man had run away. She shouted to her servants—her soldiers, who should have been on guard, were fast asleep—and, still standing in her nightgown, remembered to see if anything had been stolen. Everything that had been lying about was gone. The thief had taken her clothes, her saddlebags, her boots, and all the contents, including her money, of one of her trunks. Worst of all, the saddlebag he had stolen held her notebooks and photographs. He had made a clean sweep of every precious article in her tent. The whole journey, four months’ work, was a waste. She was overwhelmed.

“The truth was,” she admitted, “we had all grown thoughtless with so much safe travelling through dangerous places, and we needed a lesson. But it was a bitter one.” And then, after an anxious week, with the local police and the Turkish Governor and the closest British Consul all alerted, the thief was found. Everything except her money was returned. Embarrassed by her own carelessness, she apologized to the village people for all the trouble she had caused, and left. But most humiliating of all, the tale was published at home in
The Times
and other papers. Publicity was something she always shied away from; it seemed to her to be vulgar, and although she craved recognition, she somehow thought it should come spontaneously from her superiors and peers.

A few weeks later, after trying fruitlessly to see Richard Doughty-Wylie (he was away at Adana, trying heroically to stop a Turkish massacre of Armenians), she came to the end of her seven-month trip. It had proved a great success. “We have reaped a harvest that has surpassed the wildest flights of my imagination. I feel as if I had seen a whole new world, and learnt several new chapters of history,” she wrote. But at the very last stop, in Constantinople, her heated excitement was doused with a splash of cold water. As she dined at the French Embassy, she learned that she had been scooped in her discovery of Ukhaidir. Before she had even had a chance to publish her find, the French archaeologist M. Massignon had written about Ukhaidir in the
Gazette des Beaux Arts.
All the fame and the glory that she had dreamed of had been snatched away in the night.

F
or eighteen months after she returned home, Gertrude stayed in England, working on a book about her Mesopotamian journey.
Amurath to Amurath
was a chronicle of the people and the archaeology she had encountered. But Ukhaidir still held out an enticing hand. In spite of the disappointment, of someone’s having beaten her story, she was the only one who had drawn the castle’s plans. In January 1911, with mixed reviews for
Amurath to Amurath
casting a cloud (“Those who expect brilliant scenes and characteristic dialogue from the author of that fascinating book
The Desert and the Sown
may feel some disappointment in reading her present work,” said
The Times
, adding, however, “
Amurath
, in short, is a serious contribution to Mesopotamian exploration”), she set off again for the East.

Riding from Damascus, rifle at her side, she was eager to re-examine the ruins she had discovered two years before. Once more, winding her way across the Syrian desert, she traveled through soft sands and balmy days, through mud and slop and “scuds” of winter rains, across miles of barren wasteland and across plains peopled with raiding horsemen and welcoming sheikhs. Riding her mare in the sharp dry air of February, wrapping her fur coat close to her body, bathing at night in camp, she felt invigorated. “I think every day of the Syrian desert must prolong your life by two years,” she rejoiced in a letter home.

By the beginning of March 1911, she reached the palace fortress of Ukhaidir, confirming it as “the finest Sassanian art that ever was.” She spent a day measuring, mapping out the plans of the ancient castle, reassuring herself that her earlier work had been accurate. As she left the site the following day she felt a surge of excitement and a wave of sadness. “I wonder whether I shall ever see it again and whether I shall ever again come upon any building as interesting or work at anything with a keener pleasure,” she wrote wistfully.

Her Mesopotamian trip progressed: through Najaf, the Shiite holy city where pilgrims came from Persia as well as from Iraq; through Kalat Shergat, where a mound marked the capital of ancient Assyria; through Haran, where the Jewish tribes had lived before they moved on to Canaan. It was the first of May and she was feeling lonely. She longed “for the daffodils and the opening beech leaves at Rounton—it’s not all beer and skittles travelling, you know; I still have an overpowering desire to see my family.”