CHAPTER TEN
At home again in England in 1911 and 1912, Gertrude worked on her book about Ukhaidir, taking time out to write articles for academic journals on archaeology and book reviews for The Times, attend the coronation of George V in London and make speeches for the Anti-Suffrage League. But now it was Asiatic Turkey that consumed her interest. The Ottoman Government was suffering a quick decline, succumbing at home to the will of the Young Turks (the reformist group that rose against it in the name of nationalism), and in Europe to the fervor of independence of the Balkan states. During the costly Balkan Wars of 1912, the Sultan lost his hold over Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro. What would happen to the Ottoman interests in Asia? Gertrude worried. Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia would all be up for grabs. “I should not be surprised if we were to see, in the course of the next ten years, the break-up of the empire in Asia also, the rise first of Arab autonomies,” she wrote presciently toward the end of 1912 to Domnul, just knighted and traveling in India after his recent retirement from The Times.
She had been hearing much about Turkey from Richard Doughty-Wylie, who was now living in Constantinople. They corresponded frequently, she and he and his wife, Judith: Gertrude filling them in on her trips and her books, congratulating him on his heroic efforts to stop the Turkish massacre of Armenians at Adana; they telling her about events in Anatolia and in Constantinople, where he was posted during the Balkan Wars. Gertrude had seen him in England in 1908, when he came home for a brief visit, and again in 1912, when he was called back to London for a change in assignment. But before long, he went off again, in charge of the Red Cross relief effort in Turkey, where the Balkan states were allied and fighting to yank Macedonia away from Turkish rule. On Christmas Day 1912 she received a letter from him from the Turkish capital, and weeks after, in the early spring of 1913, Doughty-Wylie and his wife arrived in London. Gertrude took tea with them on an occasional afternoon, dined with them on an evening, chatted with them about events in the East.
The more she saw of him, the more attracted she was. No one she knew intrigued her like Doughty-Wylie. He was the consummate male of the British Empire, a decorated soldier-statesman, a sensitive, literate scholar who loved to quote poetry, a shrewd political analyst, a lustful man who roused her deepest desires. In July, she invited him to her Yorkshire house, and in a prurient moment when his wife was away, he accepted her invitation and came. It was a daring move for Gertrude. Rounton was home, intimate. She would be bringing him into her most personal world, showing him her most emotional treasures, revealing herself in a way that she never would have done in London.
She introduced him to her family, showed him around the favorite house of her childhood, the flower beds she had nursed, the rock garden she had created, the library where, even as a young girl she had read voraciously. They talked and talked, she, about the loneliness of being unmarried; he, about the loneliness of being unhappily married; she, about the joy she found in solitude; he, about the joy he found in sex. She sensed his profound hunger and felt the thrill of his passion. They stood in her bedroom, close to each other, her heart pounding, her cheeks turning hot, and as his blue eyes burned with desire, he took her in his arms. He wanted her, but she refused.
A few days later he wrote from London to thank her for the visit. It was to be the first of dozens of letters between them, each an intense display of fervor and passion. There were never love letters like these between other couples, she would later tell a friend; never letters of such depth and pain and beauty. In this first round of their new correspondence, Dick told her how he loved seeing her in her “vital setting,” surrounded by the people, the house, the gardens that meant so much to her. He loved talking to her, hearing what she cared about most. He had always wanted to be her close friend, he said, ever since they met in Anatolia. “Now I feel as if we had come closer, were really intimate friends.… I must write something, something to show you how very proud I am to be your friend. Something to have meaning, even if it cannot be set down, affection, my dear, and gratitude and admiration and confidence, and an urgent desire to see you as much as possible.… Yours ever, R.”
But as quickly as he roused her hopes, he dashed them. A note came the following day to say that once again he was being posted abroad. She sat in her room at Rounton and wrote, telling him of the pleasure she felt in the early morning hours in her garden, of the joy she felt at being near him. Her letters reached him at his old bachelor quarters in London, where he was staying while Judith was away in Wales.
“While I am alone, let’s be alone,” he teased in reply. “Ah yes, my dear, it’s true enough what I said about solitude, on every hill, in every forest, I have invoked, and welcomed her.… And you, too, know the goddess well, for no one but a worshipper could have written what you did about the hush of dawn in the garden. But for all that, we shall meet and say nothing, and go on as before.”
But he was troubled, he said, by a recurring dream: “Rounton ghosts visited me the next night also. Is there any history of them?… some shadowy figure of a woman, who really quite bothered me, so that I turned on the light. It wasn’t your ghost, or anything like you; but something hostile and alarming.” He ended the letter, “Dick.”
She was a spinster of forty-five, alone, aching for a husband, yearning for children. He was a married man, grounded to a woman of wealth and social position. The situation seemed impossible, ridden with ghosts and guilt. Yet even as he spoke of the hopelessness of it all, her desire grew. When was he leaving? she wanted to know. What would happen to them? Should she still write to him after he left? Should she write only to him or to Judith too?
He informed her calmly that she had better write to them both. Having read her letters before, his wife would find it odd if she were suddenly barred from seeing their correspondence. After all, “on voyages one lives at close quarters—not even with you would I like it, that is, not always, but only when we wanted to.… But what’s the good of writing like this?” he asked.
He was nearly ready to leave for the Balkans, prepared to say goodbye to Gertrude, taking away any hope of another rendezvous. And yet he continued to rouse her, telling her “we shall still meet in thoughts and fancies,” and taunting her with his lust. He ended the letter: “Last night, a poor girl stopped me—the same old story—and I gave her money and sent her home.… So many are really like me, or what I used to be, and I’m sorry for them.… These desires of the body that are right and natural, that are so often nothing more than any common hunger—they can be the vehicle of the fire of the mind, and as that only are they great; and as that only are they to be satisfied.”
And then it was time for him to go. Please write, he begged. She should call him Dick, and he would call her Gertrude, and even if his wife read the letters, their intimacy would seem to be nothing at all. Many people call each other by their first names, he told her. But as for the passionate words she had written over the past few weeks, he vowed: “Tonight I shall destroy your letters—I hate it—but it is rightful. One might die or something, and they are not for any soul but me. Even though I hide in the silent room, they pursue me. Goodbye, my dear, I kiss your hands.”
It had been the most intense, most extraordinary few weeks in her life. Finally she had met a handsome, intelligent, sophisticated man who shared her passions for the East, the desert, the Arabs, ancient worlds, modern politics, poetry, literature, solitude. He, like no one else, understood and loved them as much as she did. Now he was gone, and she was left with anguished memory.
She made plans to return to the desert. There was never a year more favorable for a journey into Arabia, or so they said in Damascus. Miss Gertrude Bell arrived in the city on November 27, 1913, eager to hear such news. Looking a bit weary after her voyage—by boat from England to France, a week aboard ship on the Mediterranean, then by rail from Beirut—the slightly agitated, forty-five-year-old Miss Bell stepped impatiently from her carriage, smoothed the wisps of ginger hair peeking out from her feathered hat, straightened her hobble skirt and marched briskly into the lobby of the Damascus Palace Hotel. She preferred this centrally located hotel, although it was first class and not deluxe, for she enjoyed the good rates and the good service, and the solicitous manager, who remembered her, of course; and although he might have forgotten how haunted her green eyes appeared, or how sharply pointed her nose, he recalled at once the commanding tone in her voice and the authority in her bearing. Flustered by the arrival of the famous lady (everyone in Damascus knew of the intrepid Englishwoman who traveled alone through the desert), he welcomed her with a profusion of bows and salaams, and she returned them routinely.
Gertrude signed her name at the register and, as always, with shoulders erect and head held high, proceeded to her room. A string of Arab boys in caftans scuffled behind, struggling to carry the heavy steamer trunk that Marie, her maid, had packed with smart French gowns, pegged skirts, fur coats, tweed jackets, fringed shawls, frilly blouses, plumed hats, parasols and linen riding clothes. One of the servants toted her toiletries case fitted with silver brushes and cut-glass flacons, their polished caps twisted tight to prevent any lotions from spilling. Two more boys bore the suitcase carefully stuffed with lacy corsets and petticoats, a masquerade for her maps, cameras, film, binoculars, theodolite and guns.
The rest of her baggage consisted of crates filled with Wedgwood china, crystal stemware, silver flatware, table linens, rugs, blank notebooks, sets of Shakespeare, archaeology texts by de Vogue and Stryzgowski, history books collected since her student days at Oxford, Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, Hogarth’s The Penetration of Arabia, the Blunts’ Pilgrimage to Nejd, guidebooks, quinine, camphor, boric ointment, a remedy for diarrhea, bandages, soaps and flea powder. It would take two weeks in Damascus to reorganize before moving forward into the desert.
As soon as she settled in her room, simple but adequate, she sent for one of the Arab boys and, handing him some baksheesh, some coins, instructed him to deliver her calling cards, not to any Turkish officials, she warned, but to a few European acquaintances like Lütticke, the head of the well-known banking house, and Loytved, the German Consul, and to local Arabs she knew she could trust.
She arranged her clothes as best she could and smiled to herself as she took out her shoes and felt for the bullets inside them. “I need not have hidden the cartridges in my boots!” she wrote home. “We got through customs without having a single box opened.” She had foiled the Turks again.
After the sun set over the Syrian hills, she pinned up her hair, changed into a gown and checked to see that her cigarette case was in her evening purse before going downstairs to dinner. She was greeted warmly in the hotel restaurant, where full pension, but not wine, was included in the ten-franc daily room rate. The waiters hovered attentively, bringing her food that was reliable if not remarkable, as Murray’s guidebook had promised. After coffee she excused herself from the Bruntons, an English couple at her table, and went to her room, making a few notes in her leather diary before retiring.
In bed that first night in the city, she could hardly keep from thinking about the journey to Central Arabia that lay ahead. She had cherished the idea of this expedition for more than a dozen years. Time and again she had tried to organize the voyage, but in the past the warnings of friends like Sir Louis Mallet in the Foreign Office or Willie Tyrrell, the Secretary of State, had forestalled her. Four years ago Percy Cox, the British Resident in the Gulf who worked for the Intelligence office of India Civil Service, had cautioned her again; it was far too dangerous for anyone to cross the desert.
But she had never given up her desire to uncover the mystery of Central Arabia. She was well aware that its vast, relentless desert, the Nejd, was fraught with hazards. She knew she might face endless days parched from lack of water, and endless days soaked from floods, as heavy rains drenched the impervious ground. It was winter and there would be weeks when the temperature dropped below freezing at night and weeks when the sun blazed furiously at noon. She knew she would have to fight off hordes of fleas that hovered around the camels, and that she would find snakes and scorpions stalking the sand. And there would be the inevitable sand; sand as far as the eye could see, sometimes bleak black sand, sometimes yawning yellow mounds of sand, sometimes hard, gray, unforgiving sand.
And yet, she loved the desert. For her it meant escape. She had written years before: “To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance of the sanctuary is lowered … and, like the man in the fairy story, you feel the bands break that were riveted about your heart.” Indeed, the bands around her heart were not just the obstacles of English society but the shackles that constrained her love for a married man. Travel would let her break free.
The morning brought good news. Fattuh, the loyal Armenian who had served her on a decade of desert journeys, had arrived from his home in Aleppo. There was much to be done before she could set out from Damascus, and they went off together to see one of the people who could assist her the most, Sheikh Muhammad Bassam, a man she had met in the desert long ago. Rich and well-connected, Bassam shared the friendship of the Bedouin sheikhs as well as the confidence of the notables in town. He could help her hire the most experienced guide, help her find the best and cheapest camels, help her lay out a path in the shifting Arabian sands.
The weather was “heavenly,” she wrote home, and with only a jacket to cover her blouse and long skirt, and a felt hat on her head, she hurried along the streets. She reached the seedy façade of sun-dried bricks that formed a wall around Bassam’s house, knowing that beyond it lay a large courtyard graced with bubbling fountains and colored stones. Her low heels clicked againt the marble floor of the patio, and she paused for a moment to breathe in the sweet scent of oranges, lemons and pomegranates. Ah, it was good to be back in the East!
Bassam welcomed her, as did his wife (a handsome woman born in the Nejd), to the sitting room, but as soon as the greetings were over, the woman disappeared. A servant arrived, bringing the English guest a coffee that was thick and pleasingly bitter. Gertrude spoke in classical, florid Arabic, moving the conversation as quickly as she could. How was his father? his sons? she asked politely. How were his orchards? his sheep? the friends they had in common? And what about Turkey? What did his friends in Damascus think? How did the desert Arabs feel? she wanted to know. Bassam asked her opinion of the Ottoman state, now in the throes of revolution, and noted that in Basrah, in Mesopotamia, where Great Britain had a stronghold, the people wanted British protection. Finally the conversation reached her plans to penetrate the desert.
She was determined to meet the leaders of two of the greatest Arabian clans: Ibn Rashid and Ibn Saud, the two formidable rival warriors of Central Arabia. With the Ottoman Empire in a weakened state, there was reason to believe that both men would welcome her, each eager for the latest political news. As for her own government, the journey would prove highly significant. If war were to come, the fate of Arabia might hang in the balance. The British would want to know who would be reliable Arab allies against the Turks.
She turned to her host. Among those she had already spoken to, she had heard conflicting comments. Now she asked Bassam’s advice. Did he think it was safe to enter Central Arabia? There was no need to worry, Bassam reassured her; it would be perfectly easy to go to the Nejd this year. The atmosphere was calm; fighting had ceased between Sauds and Rashids. She had come at “an exceedingly lucky moment,” she wrote later to her mother; “everyone is at peace. Tribes who have been at war for generations have come to terms and the desert is almost preternaturally quiet.”
An ivory holder between her fingers, she smoked a cigarette, and as the breeze blew in from the garden, they sketched a route she knew well, east of Damascus, then south to the great Nejd, the vast Arabian desert, remote and rarely traveled, a virtual battleground for Bedouin tribes. Only three or four Europeans had survived the journey, but with skillful guides and the right rafiqs—tribal escorts paid to guarantee safe journey through each tribe’s territory—Gertrude hoped to avoid the murderous raiders and treacherous thieves who crisscrossed the Nejd. She planned to arrive, first, in Hayil, the nineteenth-century headquarters of the Turkish-supported Ibn Rashid. From there she aimed to go farther south to meet his enemy, Ibn Saud.
She should avoid going near the Hejaz Railway, she and Bassam agreed. With the Ottoman Empire in disarray, the Turks suspected the British would encourage Arabs to revolt. Inquisitive officials and bored police would ask too many questions. What exactly was she doing there? they would demand to know. She could answer truthfully that she was an archaeologist seeking Byzantine ruins, or that she was an author researching a book, but they might not believe her. Indeed, they might even detect some deception in her tone, though she would never let them know it was the pain of a love affair that she was hiding. She had successfully avoided the Turks before, and she felt sure she could outwit them once again. Nevertheless, the thought of the game sent a shiver down her spine.
The servant brought another coffee and she drank it quickly, thanking Bassam for his support. She stamped out her cigarette and said goodbye.
It took ten days for mail to reach home and she could not afford the time. Instead, at the telegraph office near her hotel she wired home to Rounton, asking for extra money, explaining that she had used her next year’s income for the trip, promising her father that she would pay him back with earnings from the new book she hoped to write. Hugh Bell was always cautiously frugal, and Gertrude accounted for her spending like an obedient young wife. He had never stopped her before, of course, yet she always asked his permission. In an almost childlike way she wrote to him: “The desert is absolutely tranquil and there should be no difficulty whatever.… I hope you will not say No. It is unlikely that you will because you are such a beloved father that you never say No to the most outrageous demands.… Dearest beloved Father, don’t think me very mad or very unreasonable and remember always that I love you more than words can say.”
With Bassam’s long list of suggested provisions in hand, Gertrude made forays past the great Ummayad Mosque and into the crowded Damascus souk. Almost everything she wanted—food, clothing, even camels—was available in the covered bazaar. In a new Parisian suit, and with the amiable Fattuh at her side, she tramped through the dirty passageways, brushing past pashas in gold-embroidered robes; sheikhs in gilt-edged cloaks; Turks covered in long silk coats with colorful turbans wound round their heads; Christians in frock coats, holding rosaries in their hands; Jews with long beards, their heads in turbans, their pants in Turkish style; Armenians and Greeks in colorfully embroidered tunics; old men proudly wearing the green turbans that announced they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca; Bedouin, just in from the desert, in their striped blue abbas and kafeeyahs; their women tattooed in indigo and veiled in dark blue cloth; and native boys hardly wearing anything at all.
She stepped carefully away from the piles of dung left by camels and mules parading through the labyrinth of alleys. The narrow streets were a storefront for fortune tellers reading palms, public scribes and seal engravers selling their services, vendors everywhere hawking their wares. A cacophony of cries from ragged beggars and sweaty street merchants and wailing muezzins rang in her ears. The sweet smell of Middle Eastern foods drew her on: carts piled high with pistachio nuts, roasted peas, sweet Damascene pastries, licorice, biscuits and all kinds of breads. The brim of her hat was nearly crushed as she dodged sherbet sellers in bright red aprons, butchers carrying carcasses on their shoulders, drink vendors lugging two-handled jars.
At the entrance to the covered lanes, close to the Ummayad Mosque, the aroma of spices wafted from the Souk ali Pasha; she looked in at the tobacco stalls and the coffee stands and she sampled fresh desert dates. She paid a visit to her friend the red-bearded Bahai, who owned a tea shop, and he welcomed her as always with a cup of sweet Persian blend. “Your Excellency is known to us,” he had told her years before when she first stopped in. When she had reached for her money he said, “For you there is never anything to pay.”
Fattuh headed for the Souk el Jamal, where the caravans came to buy and sell their camels. Paying no attention to the putrid stench, he haggled over the dromedaries, settling happily on an average of thirteen pounds apiece; next door he found the big leather saddles and tapestry saddlebags. Gertrude poked her way through the Souk el Arwam, where Greek merchants sat on the floor of their shops, calling out to her to offer weapons, armor, shawls, carpets and water pipes. She bargained skillfully in the clothing stalls, piling up armloads of cheap cloaks, kafeeyahs, cotton cloth and kerchiefs to give as presents along the way. And at the food markets they bought enough bread, butter, meat, eggs, cheese and water to last three or four weeks. Still there was more to be done. Camel drivers were needed, and with Sheikh Bassam’s help she hired Muhammad Murawi, an old guide said to have friends among every Arab tribe along the way.
The desert was thick with robbers. Lacking mercy for those in their own tribes, much less for Europeans, they would steal her money at the slightest chance; she could not risk carrying cash for restocking supplies. With her guide, Muhammad, she rode the electric tram to Maidan, just outside the city, to meet an agent of Ibn Rashid. If she gave the merchant two hundred pounds, he would give her a letter of credit she could draw on in Hayil.
The man was waiting at a native restaurant. A large party was with him, a dozen or so local men and visitors from the south, all curious to meet the lady, El Sitt. Their heads covered in braided cloths, their bodies clothed in robes, they greeted her: “Salaam Aleikum.” “Aleikum salaam,” she responded, as they made space at one of the wooden tables that filled the familiar-looking room—mosaic patterns on the tile floor, Islamic pictures on the whitewashed walls. A spread of hors d’oeuvres was set before her, plates of lebeneh—white cheese—with olive oil and dried mint, taboule, olives, baba ghanoush and more. Scooping some humus onto a leaf of flat bread, she savored the chickpeas and leaned forward to talk. She spoke knowledgeably, discussing antiquities, answering the men’s questions about ancient money, showing them how to write the early Sufaitic alphabet.
She had questions of her own: about the disposition of the Turks; about the terrain and oases of the desert; about the ghazus, the vicious raids that were the Bedouin’s game of life and death; about the politics of the desert tribes; and about the tribal wars. She asked anxiously, her eyes studying their black-bearded faces, searching for truth. One after another their turbaned heads nodded reassuringly, answering that all had become serene; tribes that had been at war for generations had come to terms and peace becalmed the desert.
One of the dark-eyed men murmured that, though there had been a dispute between the tribes of Ibn Rashid and Ibn Saud, all were now at peace. “Are the old enmities to be forgotten? Can you mold the desert sand into shape?” she wondered dubiously. She found it intriguing to watch the strange young man who spoke. Abd al Aziz was the agent of Ibn Rashid; tall and slight, with thin black hairs on his narrow face, his slim frame wrapped in a gold-embroidered cloak, his head covered in a huge camel’s hair robe bound in gold. There was something curious about the way he leaned back against the pillows, scarcely moving, hardly lifting his eyes, while his soft voice flowed in slow classical Arabic. Then she noticed his mood change, and gradually he began to stir, waving his thin hands and talking of Hayil and strange jewels that had been brought to the medieval city, about hidden treasures in the mosques at Karbala, about mysterious writings in Central Arabia. The others listened attentively: “Ya Satif! Ya manjud,” the men around her murmured. “O Beneficent, O Ever Present,” they purred, in admiration of his stories.
His tales left her somewhat skeptical; nevertheless, she paid close attention to the sly-looking Bedouin. This was the man she had come to meet. After a while, when he finished telling his stories, they broke bread to bind their friendship and shared salt as a promise of his tribe’s protection. She looked closely at his treacherous face; she could only hope that his word was good.
The morning before the journey was to begin, Fattuh complained of feeling ill. His temperature climbed deliriously; the doctor thought it was malaria. Always impatient, Gertrude nevertheless delayed her trip, restlessly filling the time by playing bridge, nervously eating too many helpings of sour curds. “I’ve grown fat,” she wrote home, from “the best food in the world.” A few days later she was told that Fattuh had typhoid. The waiting had become too much. She decided to hire a substitute servant and risk traveling along the railway line. In a week Fattuh could take the train and catch up.
At night in her hotel room she wrote feverishly, jotting details in her diary, drawing up descriptive letters to her parents and friends, dashing off a note to her fellow archaeologist T. E. Lawrence, writing that she would see him again at Carchemish on her way back in the spring. Drawing out fresh stationery from her leather case, wooden pen in hand, she dipped the steel tip into the inkwell and wrote another letter. Still desperate and depressed, mired in loneliness, wanting so badly to be with Dick, but knowing too well it was not her fate, she wrote her true feelings to Domnul:
“I want to cut all links with the world, and that is the best and wisest thing to do. Oh, Domnul, if you knew the way I have paced backwards and forwards along the floor of hell for the last few months, you would think me right to try for any way out. I don’t know that it is an ultimate way out, but it’s worth trying. As I have told you before, it’s mostly my fault, but that does not prevent it from being an irretrievable misfortune—for both of us. But I am turning away from it now, and time deadens even the keenest things.”
A stack of mail arrived from home. She riffled through the envelopes and her eye caught a letter from the Balkans, from Captain Doughty-Wylie. Hastily she slit it open. It was four months since she had seen him! She scanned the pages eagerly, devouring his precious words:
It’s late and I’m all alone, and thinking of those things, of philosophy and love and life—and an evening at Rounton—and what it all meant. I told you then I was a man of the earth, earthy.… You are in the desert, I am in the mountains, and in these places much could be said under the clouds. Does it mean that the fence was folly, and that we might have been man and woman as God made us and been happy.… But I myself answer to myself that it is a lie. If I had been your man to you, in the bodies we live in, would it change us, surely not. We could not be together long, and there’s the afterwards sometimes to be afraid of.
Do you never think like this? I don’t know—probably not—as I told you, I am a man of the earth. And still it is a great and splendid thing, the birthright of everyone, for woman as for man, only so many of them don’t understand the divine simplicity of it. And I always have maintained that this curious, powerful sex attraction is a thing right, natural and to be gratified … and if it is not gratified, what then; are we any the worse? I don’t know.
That night she could hardly sleep, his words rushing through her mind. She thought of the trip and how she had to break with the world. Her camels were ready, her men and goods were packed; in another day she would be on her way to the Nejd and the vast Arabian unknown.