CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gray clouds cloaked the sky as Gertrude set off to the east of Damascus, leaving behind the world of shops and friends and spoken English, riding away without permission from the Turks. It would take three months’ time to reach Hayil, headquarters of Ibn Rashid; from there she hoped to visit Ibn Saud, inshallah, God willing. “I feel like an Arab sheikh,” she wrote, with her caravan of twenty camels laden with goods; three camel drivers—Ali, Abdullah and Fellah; her cook, Selim; her elderly guide, Muhammad Murawi; and her rafiq, the paid escort Hamad. Sitting high on the camel saddle, she held the loosely tied halter in her gloved hands and tapped the animal with a switch, sending it to the left or the right as she rode across miles of marshy land. Pockets of truffles lay underfoot, wild fowl occasionally flew overhead, wild boar rushed past, and an hour outside Dumeir, the last outpost of civilization between Damascus to the Euphrates, she stopped to camp.
Her men had never traveled with a European before, and she watched impatiently as they struggled to set up her canvas tents—a small one for her, two larger ones for themselves, and a separate one for the cooking—fumbling with the poles and the furniture. Eventually, they adjusted the wooden dining table and the canvas chairs, stationed the canvas bathtub and the folding bed. It was all so strange to them, compared with the Bedouin tents made of goat hair, furnished with cushions and woven rugs. Without Fattuh, who had packed her belongings, she had difficulty sorting through the boxes, searching for bed linens, pots and pans, and the sponges for her bath. Worse, she discovered, her new cook did not even know how to boil an egg for breakfast.
Nevertheless, the men seemed willing to learn, and dinner that night, with meat from Damascus, she pronounced “quite good.”
Relieved finally to be under way, she slept well. But during the night the wind and the rains came. The downpour continued all the next day, making it muddy and impossible for the camels to walk. With little choice, she stayed in the camp and, shivering, wrapped herself in her wool jacket and fur coat. Fleeting thoughts of Turkish authorities trailing from Damascus made her tremble slightly more, and although she tried to concentrate on her last issue of the Weekly Times from home, she could not keep her mind from wandering to the Balkans and Dick.
Work was the only cure, she knew, and while the men chopped wood for the fire and straw for the camels, she sewed, as she had been taught by her childhood nanny, diligently stitching cotton bags to hold the provisions. When the skies finally cleared two days later, the ground was so soaked that the camels slipped when they marched, moaning as they fell helplessly in the muck. Within a few hours, however, the caravan had reached the open desert. She rode across the hills of black volcanic earth, contented by the feel of the solid stones crunching beneath her camel’s hoofs.
The cook fried tender mushrooms for dinner, and in the afterglow of a brilliant sunset Gertrude joined the men in their tent for coffee and a smoke. Later, when the endless land was eerily quiet, she snuggled in her bed, a hot water bottle warming the sheets, the blankets pulled around her. A candle flickered on the table as she wrote a letter home:
“Already I have dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place; silence and solitude fall round you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon, the bustle of getting into camp, the talk round Muhammad’s coffee fire after dinner, profounder sleep than civilization contrives, and then the road again. And as usual one feels as secure and confident in this lawless country as one does in one’s own village.” Within five days of the outset, she had been lulled into a soothing routine, reaching her first goal of Jebel Sais, a large, dormant volcano. “Content reigns in my camp and all goes smoothly,” she said.
The following morning they moved past the black hills onto the flat and yellow plain, but soon the men caught sight of rising smoke and a camel flock, signs of the Jebel Druze. Gertrude spotted a horseman galloping toward them, firing shots into the air. He wheeled his horse around them, shouting that they were foes and ordering them not to use their guns. With that, he aimed his rifle at Gertrude and demanded that Ali, her helper, hand over his rifle and his fur cloak.
Within seconds, more of the tribesmen appeared. Terrified, Gertrude found herself surrounded by a dozen Druze, shrieking insanely, matted black hair flying in their faces as they leapt into the air, their bodies half-naked except for one, who had no clothes at all. Shouting crazily, one of them grabbed Muhammad’s camel, drew the sword hanging behind the saddle, and danced around the group, slashing the air and hitting Gertrude’s camel on the neck to make it kneel. As the animal struggled to get up, Gertrude could only watch in silence while the thieves stripped her men of their revolvers, cartridge belts and cloaks.
A week out, and already her hopes were scorched. There was no way they could continue without guns and bullets; they would have to return to Damascus. Suddenly one of the ruffians recognized one of Gertrude’s men, and just as abruptly, two sheikhs arrived who knew Muhammad and Ali. With great relief, Gertrude invited the sheikhs to drink coffee in her tent, and after the stolen goods were returned, she paid off the pair with baksheesh. The caravan was soon on its way again, but her voyage carried heavier baggage now—the weight of ominous portents.
“What sort of Xmas Day have you been spending?” she asked her parents. “I have thought of you all unwrapping presents in the Common Room and playing with the children.” She could picture the family at home in Rounton, gathered in the splendid stone house. In the big room with its William Morris furnishings and hand-blocked chintz, a tall tree would be decorated to the brim, and the air would be rich with the smell of pine needles and logs crackling in the fireplace. The little ones, having tiptoed down early from the nursery, would be bubbling with excitement over the goodies they had found in their stockings.
She pictured her father, Sir Hugh, tall, slim, with curly red hair and a straight sharp nose, his gold spectacles rimming his blue-gray eyes and lighting up his handsome bearded face, telling an amusing story about his latest speech for Labour; her mother, Florence, hair piled high, wearing a long black lace gown from Paris, keeping a stern eye on the manners of the grandchildren. Her brother Maurice would be talking of hunting, shooting and fishing, his favorite ways to spend his time; her sisters, Molly and Elsa, as pretty and charming as Virginia Woolf had commented when they were all vying for the same young men, now married and with children of their own; her brother Hugo, foolishly, Gertrude thought, now a minister in the church, was off, living in South Africa.
The six-story house would be filled with guests, as always, making the place lively, the conversation as spirited as Florence enjoyed. There would be diplomats, politicians, journalists, writers and actors; some would be upstairs playing billiards or chatting privately in Hugh’s red-carpeted study; others would be outdoors, at the squash courts or taking a brisk walk down the avenue of tall trees.
While the servants prepared dinner, family and friends would walk to the church in the village, some of them singing Christmas carols, some of them talking to Hugh while he pointed out a tree here and flowers newly planted there. Home again for lunch, they would take their places in the dining room, admiring the great tapestry on the wall, oohing and aahing as the cook sent out the most delicious food: an enormous dinner of roast turkey, warm plum pudding and mince pies. Later that day, masses of cousins would arrive for tea, and while the grown-ups gossiped, Hugh would give out his special presents to the children, a leather case filled with three different sizes of scissors for his granddaughter Valentine (named after Domnul, their good family friend), a scrapbook for this child, a diary for that one; Gertrude still kept her own diaries from childhood.
Far away in Burqa, Syria, Gertrude rose early on Christmas Day, and while the mercury edged its way up from 28 degrees Fahrenheit, she breakfasted outdoors next to her tent. At the Byzantine outpost, she spent the day doing archaeological work: finding evidence of Roman occupation, taking rubbings of Greek, Safaitic and Kufic inscriptions, measuring and planning out the ancient fortress, reconstructing it from the rocks that remained. After tea, she returned to the site to photograph the stones and take a latitude for her mapping. “I have had a profitable day,” she wrote home. “I have not had time to think whether it has been merry.”
The ruined castle at Qasr Azraq was the setting for her New Year’s Eve. “Who lived in this site?” she asked her guide Hamad. “We would learn from you. Who knows?” he replied. Instead of attending the formal ball her parents gave at home in England, she sat with her men around the campfire sipping bitter coffee; and while Faris, her new rafiq, told tales from the Arabian Nights, she looked at the men’s faces and saw, in the flickering light of the fire, the dreamy eyes of one man, the laughing face of another, the gleaming white teeth of a third. Her own blue-green eyes were filled with sadness. At last, when she rose to go, they all stood and sent her away to her tent with a blessing. Outside the tent a sliver of moon shone on the camels, lighting the palm trees and the black walls. “So the year ends,” she wrote in her diary, “with Arabs, Druze and the shades of Roman emperors and Mamluks. Heaven send a better one.”
There was no bathing for the new year of 1914, nor for several days after: the water supply was too low. Her hair and her clothes layered with dust, she felt as though she would never be clean again. But by the end of the first week in January she announced she was pleased with the way the journey had progressed: she had done some good archaeological studies, among them, an important castle at Kharaneh; she had taken bearings for her mapping for the Royal Geographical Society; and by now she had trekked some two hundred miles, coming as far as the railway line at Ziza. When she arrived at Ziza, to her delight, along with a stack of mail from home, she found Fattuh, pale and thin. She greeted him excitedly and welcomed him to her camp; she had “missed him dreadfully,” she said. He, too, was happy with the reunion.
Supplies were running short. Hours earlier Gertrude had sent four of her men to town to buy food and water and whatever else was needed. They had not yet returned, and she worried, briefly, but her thoughts were distracted by a delicious lunch brought by Fattuh from Damascus. Afterward, she and Ali rode for an hour to Mashetta to examine the ruins of the seventh-century winter palace built by the Persian King Khosroes II. On the way back, her guide spotted something moving across the empty landscape. “Are those horsemen or camel riders going to our tents?” Ali asked. Gertrude lifted her binoculars and scanned the horizon. “Horsemen,” she answered warily, now making out the uniforms of soldiers.
She kicked her camel with her heels to make it go faster, but by the time they reached camp, ten soldiers on horseback were already at her tents. The drunken one in charge told her angrily that the Turkish authorities had been looking for her ever since she left Damascus. They warned her that she had better leave. She listened politely, scowling at herself for being like an ostrich in the sand, not realizing what a fuss there had been about her. “Paf!” she wrote to her parents, annoyed that she’d been caught. “I was an idiot to come in so close to the railway.”
As soon as the Turkish soldiers left, she wrote out telegrams to friends—the British Consuls in Beirut and Damascus—and gave them to Abdullah to take to town. But her man was stopped en route, the telegrams snatched, and the fellow sent to prison inside the Ziza castle. A few hours later Fattuh was jailed too. As Gertrude watched helplessly, the returning soldiers ransacked all the baggage, claimed all the weapons, and posted seven men around the tent. Angry and tired, she still refused to concede. “I am not beaten yet,” she wrote the next morning, as though it were all a contest. She and her men could go back to Damascus and start over on a different route through Palmyra. Fattuh responded cheerfully: “I spent the first night of the journey in the railway station, and the second in prison, and now where?” Gertrude told her parents, “It’s all rather comic,” but it wasn’t.
There was little laughter in her. The mail had brought letters from Doughty-Wylie telling her he was back in London and planning to see her mother. How she wished she were there with him! In another letter, he spoke tenderly about a diary she had kept and sent to him. “It’s perfectly wonderful and I love it and you. I kiss your hands and your feet, dear woman of my heart,” he wrote. “I cannot tell you how it moves me to hear you say—not that—to see it—written by you—that you might have married me, have borne my children, have been my wife as well as my heart. Thinking at all points—you yourself and me myself—each free, each independent, each intent to be one—Yes—I’ve dreamed these things.”
This was the last bit of mail before she left again for the desert. Forlorn, she read Dick’s words over and over: “I shall never be your lover, my dear, never. I read that beautiful and passionate book, and know it. Never your lover, that is man and woman.… But what we can have, we will keep and cherish. Yes, we will be wise and gentle as you said.
“I love you, but I shall never have you,—only always in the real world be your lover, your obedient servant, your loyal friend.… And I will try to be more like what your lover might be, and shortwise—but it will be sometimes hard, because I am an ordinary man—and follower of delights.”
She was distraught. What might have happened if she had given in to his desires? What if, in that moment of passion, she had let him take her? Would it all be different? Would they be together now? But she refused to let him make love to her as long as he was married to someone else. It was wrong. What’s more, she could have become pregnant. In her tent that evening, feeling desperate, she unleashed her feelings to Domnul:
“I have known loneliness in solitude now, for the first time.… Sometimes I have gone to bed with a heart so heavy that I thought I could not carry it through the next day. Then comes the dawn … and I walk on through the sunlight, comforted … taught at least some wisdom by solitude, taught submission, and how to bear pain without crying out.”
She moved her camp to the nearby town of Amman, once the capital of the Ammonites, later the city the Greeks called Philadelphia and now the home of Circassians—red-haired, fair-skinned Muslims from the north—driven from their mountain homes by the Russians and resettled here by the Turks. For the first time in three weeks she saw grass and green hills and crops growing, and she met friends and notables she had not encountered since her first desert trip, fourteen years before. Her Circassian friends invited her to a wedding and the fifteen Protestant families in town invited her to tea.
But the pleasure would not last. She learned that telegrams had been flying since December 17; Sir Louis Mallet, the British Ambassador to Constantinople, had informed the British Consul in Damascus that the Turkish Government begged that she not travel to Central Arabia. Wired Mallet, “In my private opinion she would be wise to desist from travelling in the countries of Ibn Saud and Ibn Rashid.” Mallet informed the Foreign Office in London: “There is considerable unrest among the Arabs.… Government have disclaimed all responsibility in the case of Miss Bell.” Gertrude was told that if she continued from Amman toward Nejd, her own government would wash its hands of her.
She puffed on a cigarette and read the wire from the Turkish Vali, the Governor, in Damascus. Mallet had informed the Ottomans of her journey, and the Turks insisted she sign a note acknowledging that she traveled at her own risk; they refused to take any responsibility for her safety. Putting pen to paper, she wrote her name cavalierly. But on the last night in Amman she lay in bed sleepless, twisting and turning with the thought that she was an outlaw. “The desert looks terrifying from without,” she scrawled in her diary.
The following day she left Amman, riding toward a farm three hours away that belonged to some Christian Arab friends. The last time she had seen them was in 1905, but the men boomed a hearty welcome and invited her to stay the night. Tall and broad-shouldered, they were as big in heart as in body: they slew a sheep to show her hospitality, piled up a platter of rice in her honor, and, since three of her men had quit in fear, they promised to provide her with camel drivers and new rafiqs to guarantee her safety from one tribal territory to another. In the warmth of their friendship, her terror disappeared. She had started a new diary for Doughty-Wylie, and in it she wrote: “The desert is clothed once more in abiding serenity. Thus we turn towards Nejd, inshallah, renounced by all the powers that be, and the only thread which is not cut is that which runs through this little book, which is the diary of my way kept for you.”
“You now must make acquaintance with the members of the expedition,” Gertrude jotted on Sunday, January 18, 1914, as her caravan headed in the direction of Arabia: first, there was Muhammad Murawi, who had ridden with Ibn Rashid; his nephew Salim, an all-around helper; the affable Fattuh, “the alpha and omega of all, with his eye on everything, although it never appears to be off me.” There was Ali, “an idle dog” but “brave as a lion”; Muhammad’s nephew, Said, the head camel driver; and under him Meskin, of the Agail tribe; Mustafa, a peasant from Jerusalem; and the black-skinned Fellah, who worked in the men’s tent and “has the good word of everyone.”
With eight men plus two rafiqs, Gertrude left the high ground and rode six to eight hours a day across the Beni Sakhr territory, flint-covered land scattered with herds of camel and flocks of sheep. The trek was wearying, and as they rode her men told tales of bloodthirsty raids—the endless cycle of tribal revenge. In the evening Gertrude sat in her tent composing reassuring letters to her family, jotting notes in her journal, and making longer, more intimate entries in her diary for Dick. She did not mention to her parents that she had seen her first scorpion that day. To Dick she wrote, “I am really beginning to enjoy it all,” admitting that she had been so unhappy on the first part of the trip, she had seriously considered turning back. “But when two days ago I cut myself loose from civilization I felt as if I had cast down all binders.”
Years earlier a young Arab boy had helped her see beyond the surface of the landscape, to “read the desert.” She noted the beds used by Arab boys, hollow squares made with big stones; the half-moon nests in the earth scooped out by camel mothers for their young. She knew the names of the plants and the uses to which they were put: the utrufan, used by the Arabs to scent their butter; the prickly krusa’aneh, for an excellent salad; the dry sticks of the billan, for camels’ food; and the gali, for making soap.
She stopped at Tubah to photograph the Ummayad Palace; a few days later she measured the castle near Bair. She had now reached the land of the Anazeh, the most powerful of all the Bedouin tribes. The route of her caravan ran close to water wells, making it vulnerable to raiding parties that met at the pools. Her men were afraid to go to sleep at night, but Gertrude brushed off the danger: “I should sleep but little in the next few weeks if I were to be disturbed by such things.”
But her men’s fears were not without good reason. On the morning of January 21 they discovered a Bedouin’s body. “He was killed,” her rafiq Sayyah observed. Looking down at the corpse she could see that the cotton kafeeyah was covered with blood. “Occasionally I wonder whether I shall come out of this adventure alive,” she commented, adding despondently to Dick, “But the doubt has no shadow of anxiety in it—I am so profoundly indifferent.”
The earth had turned dry and black, thickly strewn with flints; gleaming, yet bare and forbidding. Her thermometer registered the temperature, fluctuating from the freezing point in the morning to seventy degrees in the midafternoon. She spied a lone geranium flowering on the low ground: courageous, she thought. Another day and the caravan was low on water. They had not bathed or washed in days. Then, coming out of a wide valley, they spotted fresh camel footprints in the sand. Ali announced there must be Arabs nearby. “Tonight we shall hear their dogs,” he said.
They settled in camp, and Gertrude followed her rafiqs, climbing the hills to scout. It reminded her of a game she and Maurice had played when they were young, wandering around the house, up and down the stairs, hiding from the housemaids.
“There is smoke!” Sayyah called out. The black plume curling over the hill was a certain sign of a campsite, probably that of a raiding party. Inspecting the area nervously, she and her men encountered flocks of sheep and some shepherds of the Howeitat tribe. They were known throughout the Euphrates, from Arabia to Syria and Mesopotamia, for their terrifying ghazus, campaigns of plunder and warfare that had made them rich and powerful. Every one of their men and boys was called into service for a major raid, and sometimes as many as five thousand camel riders were assembled. Riding for days on end, they rarely slept or ate. Once they reached their destination, they would swoop down on the enemy camp like a whirlwind, screaming war cries and creating wild confusion. Tents were overturned, sheep and goats stampeded and any person who stayed behind was sliced to death.
Gertrude knew there was only one thing to do: ask the Howeitat for protection before they discovered her and made their kill. The following morning she rode her camel into the camp. Finding the largest black tent, she approached the sheikh’s home. She kneeled her animal, hitting it on the neck to make it sit, then waited for a servant to invite her inside. She followed him into the tent of Sheikh Harb; inside she saw the carpets on the floor and the camel saddles covered with sheepskin to make them comfortable for leaning. A true Bedouin, Harb welcomed his honored guest, offering coffee poured from a brass pot into tiny cups, inviting her to return later for the evening meal.
At sundown, freshly bathed in water from the Howeitat well, feeling clean for the first time in days, Gertrude donned her dinner gown and returned to the tent with a gift for her host. They sat—she and her guides, Harb and his men—cross-legged in a circle, before them a large copper tray piled high with boiled rice cooked in grease from sheep’s milk, topped with a roasted male sheep, slain in her honor, sprinkled with raisins, almonds and onions. Before they began, Gertrude was offered the prize delicacy, the eye of the sheep. Murmuring gratefully for such hospitality, she quickly swallowed the organ, then reached with her hand to take some meat. Later the leftovers would be served to the others.
As dinner went on, another guest arrived: Muhammad Abu Tayyi, cousin of Audah, the greatest sheikh of the Howeitat; “magnificent,” Gertrude described him, “tall and big with a flashing look, the Howeitat reputation for dare-devilry written on his face.” Like his famous cousin (who kept count of the men he killed) now away raiding the Shammar, Muhammad Abu Tayyi had dark skin, high cheekbones, a black mustache and small goatee. He served as an agent of the Ottomans, in charge of collecting the camel tax, and responsible, too, for a portion of the distant Hejaz Railway.
Together they enjoyed a dessert of dates and buttermilk, but over the coffee, made with cardamom, the conversation turned sour. Had she come with or without Turkish permission? the Turkish agent wanted to know. Feeling uneasy, Gertrude got up to go, leaving her men behind to calm the atmosphere. As she lay in her tent, she could hear shouting and arguing. In the morning she learned it was over some private matter, and she sighed with relief.
In the Bedouin custom she stayed three days with Harb. Then, accompanied by a new rafiq and Muhammad Abu Tayyi, she went on to the territory of the Ruwallah tribe. The fierce Muhammad slept in the tents of Gertrude’s men and dined with her by candlelight at her gleaming table. He brought her gifts of an ostrich skin and a lamb. “I can scarcely bear the thought of sacrificing it,” she wrote of the baby sheep. “Yet I cannot well carry it with me like Byron’s goose.”
They rode toward the hills of the Jebel Tubaiq and, at Muhammad’s suggestion, stopped at a ruin, which she photographed. They reached the camp of Audah Abu Tayyi. He was not there, but Muhammad, an important man on his own, offered her hospitality. She was eager to get on to Hayil, but, intrigued by the great camp, the largest she had ever seen, and allured by his charm, she agreed to stay. He showed her into the harem and introduced her to his wives, their bodies covered in blue cloth, their dark faces tattooed in blue, their lips dyed with indigo. Privately, they complained to Gertrude of “the burden of woman” in nomadic life. The Bedouin women were expected to rise with the early morning light and begin their chores at once: to feed the sheep, milk the camels, bake the bread, repair the tents, spin the sheeps’ wool and weave the camels’ hair, all the while taking care of their babies. And when it was time to move on, it was their job to strike the tents, pack up the belongings and, babies held tight, march on. Gertrude listened attentively to their woeful stories, photographing their painted faces as they spoke.
In the evenings she dined with Muhammad. Sitting on fine woven rugs spread across the soft sand, she, in her French gown and fur coat, puffed cigarettes through her ivory holder, while he, wrapped in a sheepskin cloak, a white linen kafeeyah over his dark brows, smoked a narghilebetween his thick lips. Men of all ages joined them around the big fire, and with pungent smoke filling the air, they talked for hours about the politics of the desert and the daring exploits of Audah Abu Tayyi. As Muhammad’s black eyes flashed, he told her romantic adventures of the princes of the Nejd.
Long after sunset, when the nagas, the camel mothers, had come home, Muhammad rose, drew his fur cloak around him, went out into the dark night with a huge wooden bowl and filled it to the brim with camel’s milk. He brought it to Gertrude, who drank it with relish. “I fancy that when you have drunk the milk of the naga over the campfire of Abu Tayyi, you are baptised of the desert and there is no other salvation for you,” she wrote to Dick. When she walked back to her tent in the frosty night, a falling star whizzed by.
On the following day it was time to leave; Muhammad Abu Tayyi gave her a gift of half a load of corn, and she gave him a pair of Zeiss binoculars. She had observed him act as a judge before his tribe. “He is a man, and a good fellow; you can lay your head down in his tents, and sleep at night and have no fear,” she said. “I learnt much of the desert and its people. The Howeitat are great people.” He had showered her with kindness and over the course of three days she and Muhammad had become “great friends.” It was a friendship that would be highly valuable later, when she worked with T. E. Lawrence to organize the revolt against the Turks.
They were twenty nights from Hayil. The land had turned reddish-gold and sandy, and the gray-green shrubs of the desert blossomed with pale flowers. Gertrude met up with a rich Shammar family wanting to return to the Nejd. In exchange for acting as her safeguard against the Shammar, they asked for protection against the local tribes. Now, along with her own men, her party included Arab aristocrats with their camels and flocks of sheep, plus members of the Sherarat tribe; all, she noted, trekking across a world of “incredible desolation, abandoned of God and man.” In her diary to Doughty-Wylie she wrote:
“I think no one can travel here and come back the same. It sets its seal upon you, for good or ill.… I wish you were here to see this wide desolate landscape, and breathe an air which is like a breath from the very fountain of life.” This was the real desert, vacillating sand heaped in long low hills or spilling in shallow valleys: “In spite of the desolation, and the emptiness, it is beautiful—or is it beautiful partly because of the emptiness? At any rate I love it, and though the camels pace so slowly, eating as they go, I feel no impatience, and no desire to get anywhere.”
There were fewer ruins now and less to photograph, but she continued to do her mapping, walking behind the caravan, taking her bearing with her compass. Traveling on, she heard from a passing Howeitat that Sheikh Sayah, a well-known ruffian of the Wad Suleiman, was camped a few hours to the east. It was better to approach and ask for his protection than hide and risk being robbed. She advanced toward his tent. The one-eyed sheikh received her cordially, offering her coffee and dates. But when he questioned her reasons for coming there, Gertrude became suspicious. A short while later he paid a visit to her camp: any hint of courtesy had disappeared. The rogue rifled through her belongings, examined all her possessions and demanded each item for himself. Bristling with anger, she refused; he moved on to the men’s tent. A few minutes later he came back, Muhammad in tow, swearing angrily that no Christian woman had ever been in this territory before and had no right to be there. He demanded her binoculars and pistol. Night was coming, and she yielded, handing over her revolver in exchange for the promise of a rafiq.
In the morning he returned, this time threatening to send them away without an escort if she did not give up her own binoculars. A bitter wind blew, and as she sat anxiously on the side, shivering in the cold, her men negotiated the ransom. She could overhear the talk, and the waiting became more frightening when the one-eyed brute told two of her men that he planned to kill her. If they helped him, they could share the spoils. Her servants refused, but in the end she was forced to give up both her valuable binoculars and her gun. About to leave, she mounted her camel and glowered down at the thief. He had reverted to his friendlier ways. “Why do you not say hal [how are you]?” he asked with a smile. “I would say no word to you,” she snarled. In her diary she wrote, “May God deprive him of the other eye.”
Still a week away from the Nejd, the harshest desert of all, she now felt perfectly safe. But at the wells of the Haizan, where she stopped to water the camels, she heard bad news. The Emir Ibn Rashid was not at Hayil. He was away in the northern desert, the Nefud, raiding the Shammar. The Emir had informed his men of her imminent arrival, but she would rather have dealt with the leader than with his deputies.
One of her camels refused to stir. Thinking the animal was weary, Gertrude brought it food and tried to coax it up. But the camel was writhing in the agony of death. “She is gone,” Muhammad said. “Shall we sacrifice her?” Animals had always meant much to her. Even as a child she had mourned the death of her pets, organizing their funerals, marching in solemn parades to their graves. She quivered at the sight of the dying animal. “It were best,” she answered. Muhammad slit the camel’s throat.
As they marched now across the empty wasteland of the Nefud, the days were tedious, the nights infinitely lonely. Except for the harrowing stories around the campfire told by her men, there was little conversation. She felt frustrated by the lack of work and isolated by the lack of friendly people. Overwhelmed with the monotony and still nine days away from Hayil, she wrote to Dick that she was suffering from bouts of severe depression. Was the adventure, she wondered:
worth the candle. Not because of the danger—I don’t mind that; but I am beginning to wonder what profit I shall get out of it all. A compass traverse over country which was more or less known, a few names added to the map.… The net result is that I think I should be more usefully employed in more civilised countries, where I know what to look for and how to record it. Here, if there is anything to record the probability is that you can’t find it or reach it, because a hostile tribe bars the way, or the road is waterless, or something of that kind.… I fear, when I come to the end, I shall say: “It was a waste of time.” It’s done now, and there is no remedy, but I think I was a fool to come.…
There is such a long way between me and letters, or between me and anything, and I don’t feel at all like the daughter of kings, which I am supposed to be. It’s a bore being a woman when you are in Arabia.
The heavens opened up, shaking thunder, pouring hail and rain. Gertrude sat in her tent reading Hamlet, and as she read the tragic story of greed and deceit in the royal house of Denmark, so much like the bitter rivalry in the desert, the world came into focus. “Princes and powers of Arabia stepped down into their true place,” she wrote to Dick, “and there rose up above them the human soul, conscious and answerable to itself.”
A few days’ more travel and she reached the end of the Nefud. At the top of the last sand bank she looked down. The desolate landscape was terrifying: black lifeless sand whipped by a bitter wind. This was the Nejd, the threatening desert of Central Arabia. “Subhan Allah!” said one of her men. “We have come to Jehannum; we have come to Hell.”