CHAPTER NINE
“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,” Gertrude wrote as she started out, in the winter of 1909, on her first expedition from Syria to Mesopotamia. “Existence suddenly seems to be a very simple matter, and one wonders why we plan and scheme, when all we need do is to live and make sure of a succeeding generation.”
Her own ability to contribute to successive generations was becoming more doubtful as the possibility of marriage floated beyond her grasp. But as for planning and scheming, she could hardly resist, riding off onto dangerous paths, plunging into political whirlpools. Almost as soon as she arrived in Syria, she was swirling in local politics, promising to write to Domnul at The Times in London and keep him informed of the latest news, which, she hoped, he would publish. (In Constantinople a group of reformers, the Young Turks, were threatening the Sultan with nationalist ideas, and the winds of change were blowing in Syria, too.) But the real reason for her trip was to do research for another book. The success of The Desert and the Sown stirred her on.
She had taken time, the previous winter, to study at the Royal Geographical Society, learning how to do surveying, make astronomical observations and apply the techniques of mapmaking. She had hoped to be able to use her knowledge on a trip to Central Arabia, but a meeting with Percy Cox in London had pushed the journey aside. The British Resident in the Gulf had cautioned her that, besides the usual, perilous raids and brazen thievery, war had broken out among the tribes; it was far too dangerous for anyone to cross the desert.
Redirecting her attention, she decided to map the uncharted sands of Mesopotamia. She began her journey in Syria, once again, to study the Roman and Byzantine churches, and to help David Hogarth, who had asked her to take casts of the stones of the Hittites, the ancient iron smelters, progenitors of England’s ironmasters. From there she would go on to Iraq.
Her trunk once again packed with pistols and with Maurice’s rifle from the Boer War, her saddlebags crammed with books and cameras, the forty-year-old Gertrude laid out a journey from Aleppo, across the Syrian desert to Iraq, then down alongside the Euphrates River, five hundred miles southeast to Baghdad, where she would regroup and travel along the Tigris, northward to Turkey.
In Aleppo she met up with Fattuh, her highly capable Christian servant, and arranged her belongings: her tents, a folding bed, mosquito netting, a canvas bath, a canvas chair, rugs, table, pots and pans, enough provisions to last at least a month, and linens, china, tea service, crystal and silver cutlery for proper dining. They hired seven baggage animals, a dozen horses and three muleteers—Hajj Amr, Selim and Habib. There were two servants, the round-faced Fattuh, in his striped shirt and Turkish pants, and his young brother-in-law Jusef; two soldiers; and herself. Riding dawn till dusk for two full days across the sweeping grassy plains, she thrilled to being in the open, untamed, yawning ocean of desert, unbound by drawing room constraints, free to be, to do, to say, to feel as she wanted. She wrote to Florence that she could “scarcely believe it to be true.”
She reached the Euphrates, the narrow, shallow passage that once nursed the cradle of civilization and now divided Syria from Mesopotamia, “the land of two rivers” (Iraq, the Arabs called it). “A noble stream,” she pronounced the Euphrates, “as wide as the Thames at Chelsea”; a “turgid liquid,” infested with insects, algae, bacteria and ancient dust. She insisted that Fattuh boil her water, and he did, without a protest.
At the river’s edge, biblical transport waited to ferry her across: she climbed into one of the narrow, high-bowed boats and watched as the boatman mimicked the ancients, using a long pole to steer the vessel across to the opposite shore. She had reached the region of the Hittites and their city of Carchemish. Finding the mounds of stones that David Hogarth had asked her to inspect, she worked for several hours, her men helping to dig out the boulders with picks and spades. In the late afternoon, after casting the inscriptions, she returned to the mound above the river where her camp was pitched. Fattuh boiled some water and brewed a fresh pot of tea. Relaxing outside her tent, Gertrude sipped the English brace from her china cup and scrawled contentedly to her family: “The broad Euphrates sweeps slowly past the tel, and I have just watched the sun set beyond the white cliffs of his other bank. I doubt whether there is anyone in the world so happy.”
Within several days she had left behind the villages of the plains and entered the empty sands, where treacherous Arab raiders roamed the desert preying upon each other’s flocks. “All this country is racked, as it has been for the past four thousand years, by the lawless Arab tribes,” she wrote home. No government had ever discovered a way to keep the tribes in check. When she asked her men to accompany her on a nighttime ride, they were so frightened of blood-feud enemies that not a single man would go alone. But if the Bedouin feared each other, she was afraid of no one. Instead, she dove into the wilderness, leading her men through heat that burned the evening air, across land so dry that the oases offered the animals only caked earth in place of drinking water. Her throat was parched and her body was coated with dust.
She had ridden more than four hundred miles toward Baghdad when, in the middle of March, she arrived at the town of Hit, known since ancient times to be a source of petroleum. The Babylonians, Assyrians and others had used its dark sticky fuel to light their lamps and fire their cooking stoves. Hit was an ugly place, the air choked with smoke and the ground pitted with refuse, not unlike the grim industrial English town that housed the Bell Brothers’ Ironworks. “Except for the palm groves,” she wrote, “there is very little difference between Hit and Clarence.” Oil oozed from the earth, and peril menaced the air as she and her men continued on, rifles strapped to their sides, through sinkholes of pitch and across black crusty land.
They rode warily, searching for Arabs to camp with. The rule of the desert prevailed—“Everyone is an enemy till you know him to be a friend”—and they could not risk setting up their tents alone. They could be murdered; robbed at best. But if they found a tribe to camp near, the hosts would protect them as though they were guests. This was the territory of the Dulaim, notorious fighters, but at the sight of their black tents, her men slowed their horses. Approaching carefully, she gave the salaam. The Dulaim chief, Sheikh Muhammad el Abdullah, “a handsome creature,” invited the Englishwoman inside his tent, and together they sat in front of the fire, drinking the bitter coffee of the Bedouin. A few hours later, inviting him to her tent, she offered him afternoon tea. “The bonds of friendship are firmly knit,” she declared in her letter home. At night, after Fattuh cooked her dinner, she rolled herself up in her rugs and fell soundly asleep.
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.
Her 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.
Leaving 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.
For 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.”
She was pleased to have come close to Carchemish, where David Hogarth was still carrying out his excavation of the Hittite site. The remains of the once-thriving city had been discovered more than thirty years earlier, but interest was reawakened when work on the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway reached this area of the Upper Euphrates. The German-financed train line was a clear threat to British trade and influence in the entire Persian Gulf. With Carchemish less than a quarter of a mile away from where the Germans were building a bridge across the river, it was a convenient watching post for English archaeologists to report back home by letters and photographs. Hogarth was a serious scholar doing work for the British Museum, but like other Englishmen in the region, he carried out observations of the Germans that were valued by the British government.
The night before Gertrude was to visit, the local authorities informed her that Hogarth had left the dig. Nonetheless, they noted, his assistant, Mr. Campbell Thompson, was still working at the site. By now, after four months of travel, she was eager to see almost any English colleague, and was curious to revisit the Hittite ruins she had written about in Amurath to Amurath.
At the age of forty-two, preceded by her reputation, and accompanied by her servant Fattuh, Gertrude set out early on the morning of May 19, 1911, dressed in her desert costume: a long divided skirt, linen jacket, and kafeeyah draped around the brim of her canvas hat. Carrying a haughty air of self-assurance, she rode to Carchemish and, at their lodgings in the village, came upon two fledgling archaeologists, Thompson “and a young man called Lawrence (an interesting boy, he is going to make a traveller) who had for some time been expecting that I would appear.”
Campbell Thompson, Hogarth’s assistant at the Ashmolean Museum, was a tall, quiet academic, soon to be married, who taught linguistics and enjoyed deciphering ancient codes. His junior colleague, Thomas Edward Lawrence, destined to be a myth-maker and a legend himself, was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student with a specialty in medieval pottery. Looking him over she saw a short fellow, strongly built, with yellow hair, intense blue eyes, a high forehead and a straight nose. An eccentric dresser fascinated by Oriental things, he favored a gray flannel blazer piped in pink, white flannel shorts, gray stockings and red Arab slippers; around his waist he tied a bright red tasseled Arab belt, which marked him as a bachelor. Since he was obviously eligible, his cause had been taken up by the local villagers, who were eager to find him a wife; hearing of Gertrude’s pending arrival, they assumed she was coming to be his bride.
Thompson and Lawrence had not only been expecting her; they had been anxiously awaiting her arrival. She was famous and famously outspoken, and the two men welcomed her warily; this was their first venture in excavating and, having found few antiquities, they knew she was perfectly capable of sending back damaging reports. With studied politeness, they took her into their house, an abandoned licorice warehouse suffering from a leaky roof and damp mud floors, and charmed her, pouring coffee into ancient cups of thin unglazed clay, filling her ears with stories, lamenting the lack of valuable finds; so far they had discovered not much more than a slab of warriors carved with headless captives, a five-foot-high basalt relief and some champagne cups found in the Hittite graves.
After lunch the threesome walked to the tel to observe the digging. Gertrude had described the northern mound of Carchemish in Amurath to Amurath: “covered with the ruins of the Roman and Byzantine city, columns and moulded bases, foundations of walls set round paved courtyards and the line of a colonnaded street running across the ruin field form the high ridge.… It has long been desolate, but there is no mistaking the greatness of the city that was protected by that splendid mound.”
As she reached the hill, she saw that trenches had been cut out; below the Roman remains could be seen foundations dating to prehistoric times. Still, she opined, there was “precious little” and the work was “bad.” Only a few weeks earlier she had observed the precise excavations and elegant reconstructions of some German archaeologists; now she watched as, under English tutelage, some eighty natives shoveled the earth, hacking away at the remains of ancient civilization, eager to find a treasure and receive a promised bonus. Gertrude was taken aback. “Prehistoric!” she exclaimed, and proceeded to lecture the two young men on the modern techniques of digging.
The young scholars had readied themselves for the challenge.
And so [Lawrence wrote the next day to his mother], we had to squash her with a display of erudition. She was taken (in 5 minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite and French architecture (my part) and over Greek folk-lore, Assyrian architecture, and Mesopotamian ethnology (by Thompson); prehistoric pottery and telephoto lenses, Bronze Age metal techniques, Meredith, Anatole France and the Octoberists (by me): the Young Turk movement, the construct state in Arabic, the price of riding camels, Assyrian burial-customs, and German methods of excavation with the Baghdad railway (by Thompson). This was a kind of hors d’oeuvre: and when it was over (she was getting more respectful) we settled down each to seven or eight subjects and questioned her upon them. She was quite glad to have tea after an hour and a half, and on going told Thompson that he had done wonders in his digging in the time, and that she thought we had got everything out of the place that could possibly have been got: she particularly admired the completeness of our notebooks.
So we did for her. She was really too captious at first, coming straight from the German diggings at Kalat Shirgat. Our digs are I hope more accurate, if less perfect. They involve no reconstruction, which ruins all these Teutons. So we showed her that and left her limp, but impressed. She is pleasant; about 36, not beautiful (except with a veil on, perhaps). It would have been most annoying if she had denounced our methods in print. I don’t think she will.
Gertrude was indeed impressed; the conversation continued animatedly through dinner, and after pleasing Lawrence no end by presenting her hosts with two Meredith novels, which she had already finished, she spent the night at Carchemish. She awakened before dawn and rode out of camp at five-thirty A.M., somewhat bewildered by the villagers who came out to jeer; she had no idea that, in trying to calm them, Lawrence told them she was too plain to marry. Years later she laughed when she found out from Hogarth that Lawrence had given them such an excuse to keep his bachelorhood.
The evening after she left Carchemish, Lawrence sent Hogarth a note, far more sympathetic than the one to his mother: “Thompson has dressed tonight and something of the sadness of the last shirt and collar is overtaking him, for Gerty has gone back to her tents to sleep. She has been a success: and a brave one. She called him prehistoric! (apropos of your digging methods, till she saw their result—an enthusiast … young I think).”
At almost the same time, back in her own camp, Gertrude was writing to Florence, giving no hint at all of either the rivalry or the newfound friendship with T. E. Lawrence: “They showed me their diggings and their finds and I spent a pleasant day with them.”