CHAPTER FIVE
Jerusalem. To Christians it was the way to God, the site of Christ’s Crucifixion and Ascension, the scene of the Last Supper, the Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross, close to Bethlehem, where Christ was born. To Muslims it was the opening to Allah, the third holiest city in Islam, the place where Muhammad was carried from Mecca on his legendary steed and where he rose mystically to heaven. To Jews it was the symbol of their homeland, the capital of ancient Israel, created by King David when he united the Hebrew tribes, and the resting place of the Ark of the Law, their covenant with God. To some people, such as sixteenth-century German mapmakers, it was the center of the world. To the Ottoman Empire, which ruled it now, it was a prized possession.
She arrived in Jerusalem to study Arabic, her goal to enter the Arab world. She had come to Palestine by ship, sailing from Marseilles with her steamer trunks, a new fur coat and a camera, docking first at Athens, where a friend of David Hogarth’s escorted her to the Acropolis and dined with her at the Grande Bretagne Hotel, then on to Smyrna, where dependable Domnul Chirol had notified the British Consul, Mr. Cumberbatch, to smooth her way past Turkish customs. She had booked herself, the only passenger with a cabin, on a dirty Russian boat crossing to Beirut, and looked on with amazement at three hundred peasants of the Czar camped out on the deck, the women huddled in wadded coats and high boots, babushkas wrapped around their heads, the men in thick coats and boots, their heads topped with astrakhan hats. Like tens of thousands of others—Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Baptists, Lutherans, Sunnis, Shiites and Jews—they were making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to expiate their sins. She, an atheist, had faith only in her family and the British Empire. Her doctrine lay in the righteous destiny of England, her conviction in the belief that the British were chosen to lead the world. At thirty-one, she was seeking a purpose for her life.
Gertrude rented a suite with a verandah at the Hotel Jerusalem, two minutes’ walk from the German Colony, where Friedrich Rosen now served as the Consul. Her plan was to stay four months, until April 1899. The Rosens—Friedrich, Nina and their two young sons—welcomed her as a member of the family, and each day she shuttled back and forth to their house for lunch and dinner.
Almost as soon as she arrived, Gertrude rearranged the furniture in her suite, removing an extra cot from the bedroom, realigning the sitting room to hold two armchairs, a big writing desk and a table that she piled with books; on the walls she hung an enormous Kiepert map of Palestine and pinned up photographs of her family. A carpet covered the tiled floors, a small wood stove nestled in a corner of the sitting room, and all in all, she wrote home, the place was “cozy.” The only things that she needed were a horse, which she quickly found, and a teacher, whom she engaged.
Arabic, which had seemed to come easily at first, now stymied her. “I find it awfully difficult,” she confessed to her family. She could converse comfortably at a dinner party in French, Italian, German, Persian and even Turkish, switching back and forth animatedly from one to the other, yet Arabic was strange: “The worst I think is a very much aspirated H. I can only say it by holding down my tongue with one finger, but then one can’t carry on a conversation with your finger down your throat, can you?”
She hired another teacher and studied Arabic four hours each morning and an hour or two each night, and then, between meals at the Rosens’, she sauntered around the city in her straw boater and lace-trimmed white blouse pinched at the waist, lifting her petticoats and long cotton skirts as she leapt gracefully over the mud. Sixty thousand people now lived in Jerusalem, a majority of them Jews, and many were building their homes outside the Old City walls. But it was inside the sixteenth-century Turkish ramparts that Gertrude spent much of her time.
Entering one of the city’s eight gates, she saw medieval life as it was still being lived by Christians, Armenians, Muslims and Jews. At the Jaffa Gate, dedicated to Suleiman the Magnificent, who built it in 1527, she marched along the road, newly paved by the Ottoman administrators for Kaiser Wilhelm II on his visit to Jerusalem the year before, in 1898.
Near the Zion Gate she walked through the Jewish Quarter to the Western Wall, following the bearded men as they shuffled along the alleyways, dressed, even in the scorching summer heat, in long black woolen coats and beaver hats. The squalid streets were roughly paved and covered with filth, animal dung and food refuse decaying in cisterns and open holes. Two years earlier, Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, had visited the ancient wall, where Jews prayed in front and Muslims prayed at the mosque above, and decried the area for the “hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary pervading the place.” For Herzl the ugliness and desecration were heresy. But for Gertrude it was anthropology. She ignored the filth and saw only the customs and the people.
She took it all in, snapping her Kodak as she walked by herself one Sunday from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to the Mount of Olives, with its view of the Dead Sea and the hills of Moab on one side and, on the other, the city of Jerusalem. As an atheist, she stood apart from the multifarious crowds and watched in amazement as factions fought over inches of holy turf. Turkish soldiers were stationed to keep the Christians from attacking one another. “It is comfort,” she said, “to be in a cheerful irreligious family again!”
Despite her scorn, it thrilled her to be there, elated by the sights and the people and even the moon. “Such a moon!” she extolled. “I have not seen the moon shine since I was in Persia.”
Perhaps for the first time since being romanced by Henry Cadogan, seven years before, she was content. She concentrated on her studies, losing herself in her work. “I am extremely flourishing, and so wildly interested in Arabic that I think of nothing else,” she wrote home. “It’s like a good dream to be in a place where one can at last learn Arabic. I only fear I may wake up some morning and find it isn’t true.” She could now read the story of Aladdin without a dictionary and found it tremendously gratifying to be able to read Dr. Rosen’s volume of the Arabian Nights “just for fun.”
At night, snuggled in her room, a cigarette and a cup of thick Turkish coffee at her side, she munched pistachio nuts and studied. After several weeks, the language that had thwarted her seemed conquerable. The warm days flew by, and she certainly did not miss the bleak English winter. In the middle of January she wrote home delightedly, “These two days have been as hot as an English June and far brighter.” The Middle East weather invigorated her, so unlike the endlessly gray skies and the damp, enervating air at home.
The news from home was hardly cheerful: Maurice had volunteered to fight in the Boer War, the violent struggle between the Afrikaners and the British over diamonds and gold mines. She worried about his going to South Africa to join an army that was untrained and undersupplied. “I have borne the departure of everyone else’s brother with perfect equanimity,” she noted, “but when it comes to my own, I am full of terrors.”
Only briefly, she considered going home, but realized it would do no good to return to England, and knowing, as always, that the more she engaged in her work, the better she felt. “Arabic is a great rock in time of trouble! If it were not for that, I think I should have packed up and come home, but that would have been rather a silly proceeding,” she informed her parents. “An absorbing occupation is the best resource.” So, with subscriptions arriving from The Times and the Daily Mail, a Bible and two dozen rolls of film received from England, and a gray felt hat trimmed with black velvet bows on its way, she stayed in Jerusalem.
The rites and rituals of the pilgrims fascinated her, and on a January day she rode down to the Jordan River to find an enormous crowd of people waiting to be baptized. Desert Arabs, Arab peasants, workers and servants, Turkish soldiers, Greek priests, Russian priests and Russian peasants wearing fur coats and high boots, all standing in the hot sun, wearing chains of beads and crucifixes around their necks. Amazed by their fervor and their ability to ignore the thick garments even in the broiling heat, Gertrude walked among them, photographing as she went. Then, after half an hour, a procession of priests holding lighted candles filed to the water’s edge. The crowd of people clambered down the muddy river banks and stood in water up to their waists. When the priest laid the cross three times on the water, guns went off, and everyone baptized himself by dipping and rolling over in the water. “It was the strangest sight,” she observed.
With Friedrich Rosen, who was born and raised in Jerusalem, she planned a series of solitary trips. His tales of adventure whetted her appetite: only the year before, he had crossed the desert and sipped coffee in the tent of the distinguished Anazeh chief and friend of the Turks, Fahad Bey; he had visited Babylon and met the eminent German archaeologist Dr. Koldewey; he had lived in Baghdad and knew the leading sheikhs and notables.
Desert travel itself was not so different in its way from her mountain climbing or even from academia: a test of endurance, it challenged her physical strength, her emotional equilibrium, her linguistic ability, her curiosity and cleverness and, not least of all, her courage. This would be her first real exploration on her own, and from the moment she mounted her horse and galloped across the bare, sweeping hills she felt free. Like a bird in an opened cage, she spread her wings and soared.
Sending ahead her hired cook and two muleteers, she rode alone on the dusty path from Jerusalem, past parades of donkeys laden with tents and supplies, past caravans of British tourists led by Thomas Cook’s. Halfway to Jericho, along the route that General Allenby and his forces would follow almost two decades later, her own guide, Tarif, joined her, and together they continued east through the bare valley, their figures like two tiny dots against the sweep of brown barren mountains. Exhausted, they made their camp. A hot soak in her canvas bath, followed by dinner prepared by her cook, and she crawled into bed, pleased with her independence and protected by a wisp of mosquito netting.
The following morning after breakfast, she mounted her horse and, crossing the wooden bridge that spanned the narrow Jordan River, rode into the Jordan Valley. The landscape had changed: where brown mountains had been before, the hillsides now sprouted grass, and the arid wilderness came alive with colorful fields. She gasped at the sight of the brilliant flowers, and later, in her letter home, she noted “the sheets and sheets of varied and exquisite color”: yellow daisies, sweet-scented mauve wild stock, splendid dark purple onions, white garlic, purple mallow, tiny blue iris, red anemone and scarlet ranunculus burst upon the scene.
On a grassy plateau her servants pitched camp, and her tent was quickly surrounded by a group of Arab women, their faces tattooed with indigo, their heads and bodies covered in blue cotton gowns. Unveiled and curious, they sold her a hen and some sour milk—yogurt—called laban.Hanna, the cook, served her afternoon tea, and that evening, after dining on soup made of rice and olive oil (“very good!”), an Irish stew and raisins, she jotted down the day’s events, adding gaily, “Isn’t it a joke being able to talk Arabic!” She not only enjoyed the language; she loved the way of life.
In order to continue her journey, she needed permission from the local Turkish authority, and after some haggling, a tall middle-aged Turk appeared. She invited him into her tent and with a great show of politeness offered him cigarettes (“You see a bad habit may have its merits!”) while her cook scurried to bring him a cup of thick, sweetened coffee. But the bribe did not work.
Determined to wait until the cigarettes and the coffee had relaxed him, she turned the conversation to other matters, speaking as best she could in her most diplomatic way. Seeing her camera, he confessed that his greatest wish was to be photographed with his soldiers. She jumped at the news, offered to take his picture and promised to send him copies the absolute minute she had developed them. Before he departed, he too had a gift for her. “For you,” he said, he would send a soldier the next day. “I think it’s rather a triumph to have conducted so successful a piece of diplomacy in Arabic, don’t you?” she beamed in her letter home.
The soldier escort arrived the next morning, a handsome, cheerful Circassian, red-haired and freckled, riding a strong white horse. She set off with him across the steppe on the way to visit the ruins of Mashetta. They passed flocks of storks munching on locusts and came upon scores of black tents of the Beni Sakhr, one of the most formidable Arab tribes and the last to submit to Ottoman rule. When they reached Mashetta, an uncompleted Persian palace, she found its beauty “quite past words … a thing one will never forget as long as one lives.”
But the image was jarred when, as Gertrude and her Turkish escort turned to go home, three of the Beni Sakhr came riding toward them, “armed to the teeth, black browed and most menacing.” Terrified, she could only wait and watch. She was in luck. Seeing the Turkish soldier, the Arabs quickly changed their attitude, salaamed the group and went on their way. Had she not had the soldier escort, she was sure, the meeting would have come to a different end. Her Turkish soldier threw back his head and laughed at the Bedouin. “That was Sheikh Faiz,” he sniggered, “the son of Talal,” head of the Beni Sakhr. “Like sheep, wallah!! Like sheep they are when they meet one of us.”
At her flowering campsite the next evening she bathed in a stream and watched her men catch fish by filling a basin with bread, weighing it down with heavy stones and covering it with a cloth. The hungry fish swam through the holes in the cloth to eat the bread, but caught in the trap, they couldn’t swim out.
She was eager to explore the Roman ruins of Petra, the ancient capital of the Nabateans, and after receiving permission from the Turkish authority, she ventured on. Two days more of travel and she reached the Bab es Sik, a narrow dirt passage more than half a mile long and less than ten feet wide, the entryway to Petra. On either side of her she could almost touch the red sandstone rocks and above her she felt their looming presence as they rose one hundred feet and arched over her head. Suddenly, as she rode along the narrow entrance path, she was struck by a spectacular sight. In front of her stood a great temple cut out of the solid pink rock. Corinthian columns soared “upwards to the very top of the cliff in the most exquisite proportions, carved with groups of figures almost as fresh as when the chisel left them—all this in the rose red rock, with the sun just touching it and making it look almost transparent.” The hidden city had been at the center of desert trade and was now a necropolis of seven hundred and fifty tombs. That night she camped amid a row of ornate tombs, three stories high, and felt as though she were in a fairy tale city.
By the time she returned to Jerusalem, after days in the glorious sun, her pale skin had turned brown.
A short while later she was off once more, this time with the Rosens, venturing north in Palestine through tiny mountain villages. The sun blazed and she wore a coat to keep out the heat, her head protected by her big, ribboned gray hat over which she had wrapped a white kafeeyah, a long cotton scarf; a blue veil covered her face, exposing only the slits of her eyes. After long stretches of sitting sidesaddle, her body ached, but Friedrich Rosen came to her rescue and showed her how to ride like a man. “No more feminine saddles for me on a long journey,” she announced to her parents. “Never, never again will I travel on anything else; I have never known real ease in riding till now.” Her new saddle carried an amusing bonus: “Till I speak the people always think I’m a man and address me as Effendim!” But she reassured her fashion-conscious mother, “You mustn’t think I haven’t got a most elegant and decent divided skirt, however, but as all men wear skirts of sorts too, that doesn’t serve to distinguish me.”
Looking like a Bedouin on her masculine saddle, dressed in her kafeeyah, coat and skirt, Gertrude parted from the Rosens about one hundred miles to the northeast of Jerusalem. Leaving behind the soft desert soil, she rode off across the bare, volcanic rocks of the Hauran plain, heading toward the mountains of the Druze. She was in uncharted territory, visited in the past by only a handful of Westerners, and never, in many parts, by a European woman. The region, running through the Galilee, Lebanon and southern Syria, was peopled by fierce warriors and was difficult to penetrate.
The Druze, a secret Muslim sect that combined the teachings of Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam with the tenets of Greek philosophy, the training of Roman fortitude and the trivialities of peasant life, were known to be militant and hostile. For two hundred years they had fought the ruling Ottoman Turks, and four years before Gertrude arrived, the Turks had suffered humiliating defeat: fourteen hundred Turks were dead while only five hundred Druze had been killed, making the Turks suspicious of anyone who wished to travel in Druze territory. In fact, the Turks did everything they could to prevent it.
But Gertrude feared neither Turks nor Druze. Indeed, she relished the adventure and wrote home confidently that she thought her chances of getting up into the Druze hills were pretty good: “I shall make a determined attack and unless the government stops me, I fancy I shall do it. Everyone in Jerusalem and Jericho told me it was quite impossible but, we shall see. I shall dodge the government as much as possible.” Her cat-and-mouse game with the Turks had begun.
The town of Bosrah on the Hauran plateau served as the administrative capital for the Turks and the place where they kept a cautious eye on the Druze. “I am deep in intrigues!” Gertrude announced within hours of her arrival at Bosrah. Anyone visiting the Druze roused the suspicion of the local Ottoman authorities, but she had already plotted her strategy. “One has to walk very warily with Orientals,” she explained. “They never say no, straight out; you must read between the lines.” She arrived in the courtyard of the Mudir, the Arab Governor of Bosrah, and, over coffee with him, she began to negotiate her trip in Arabic.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To Damascus,” she replied.
“God has made it! There is a fine road to the west,” he suggested, “very beautiful,” with interesting places.
“Please God I shall see them!” she exclaimed. “But I wish first to look upon Salkhad.” This was to the east, in the heart of the Druze country, where the Turks did not want her to go.
“Salkhad!” he answered. “There is nothing there at all, and the road is very dangerous. It cannot happen.”
“It must happen.”
“There has come a telegram from Damascus,” he lied, “to bid me to say the Mutussarif fears for the safety of your presence.”
“English women are never afraid,” she lied in turn. “I wish to look upon the ruins.”
The conversation continued until, finally, she told him she was staying in Bosrah for the day.
“You have honored me!” he said as he left.
“God forbid!” she answered politely and rode off to see the nearby Roman ruins.
She reveled in the challenge of the game. “It’s awfully amusing, and my servants fully enter into the fun of the thing,” she reported. “If only I could put myself into communication with the Druze, all would be well.” If not, she would start early the next morning and make a dash for it. Once she was inside the territory, it would be difficult for the Turks, so afraid of the Druze, to catch her. She and her men felt like conspirators.
Pretending to be asleep, when the Mudir, the Arab Governor, returned to her tent she hid in her bed and listened while he and her servant spoke.
“The lady has been awake since the rising of the sun,” said her servant; “all day she has walked and ridden, now she sleeps.”
“Does she march tomorrow?” asked the Mudir.
“I couldn’t possibly say, Effendim.”
“Tell her she must let me know before she goes anywhere,” the Mudir ordered.
“At your pleasure, Effendim.”
Waiting until two A.M., she rose and dressed hurriedly, shivering in the cold. Under the light of the stars her five servants packed up camp, and, with one of the men trembling in fear of both the Druze and the Turks, they all sneaked out of town. The evasion was a success. “I’ve slipped through their fingers,” she declared.
In the heart of the mountains called the Jebel Druze, she rode through one tiny village after another, causing a stir as she passed the white-turbaned, black-robed men. At Miyemir she stopped to water her horse. The veiled women, dressed in their long blue and red robes, were filling their earthenware jugs, dipping them into the pool. Gertrude dismounted, and a young man about nineteen approached; like all the Druze men and women, he had outlined his enormous eyes in black kohl. The beautiful boy took her hands, and, to her surprise, kissed her on both her cheeks. Other men followed, shaking her hand, eager to inspect the stranger.
With the boy as her guide, she continued in the mountains, past scattered ruins, riding through meadows, vineyards and cornfields, salaaming white-turbaned farmers, who saluted her back, and she laughed at the thought of the angry Turks. When they reached the town of Areh, she received a warm welcome from the village men. Druze style, she walked with them hand in hand, pinkies entwined, until they reached the nearest house. “Are you German?” the people asked warily as she entered. “I am English,” she replied, and they almost hugged her. They eyed the Germans as suspiciously as they eyed the Turks, fearful that they craved their land. The English had made a better impression; it was known that in Egypt they administered the country but left the local Arabs in control.
At Areh, the villagers quickly made her feel at home. They piled cushions for her to sit on, brought a stool for her feet and filled a pitcher with water so that she could wash her hands. The women were too shy to unveil their faces or to speak, but she drank good coffee with the men and regaled them with her tales of escape from the Turks. They asked questions about the Boer War, showing their knowledge of towns and generals, and when she told them about her brother Maurice, they listened sympathetically. Could she meet their sheikh? she asked finally. She had read about him in Murray’s guidebook. “Sheikh!” they said. “Yahya Bey is the head of all the Druze in the land; of course you must visit him.” He had just been freed after five years of prison, and they warned her that she must treat him with great respect.
She followed them to the top of the little hill where the sheikh lived in his verandahed house. In the carpeted reception room she saw him: “the most perfect type of the Grand Seigneur, a great big man, very handsome and with the most exquisite manners … he’s a king, you understand, and a very good king too, though his kingdom doesn’t happen to be a large one.” She stood regally confident before him, her head high, her hair like a reddish crown, her eyes like brilliant jewels. He beckoned her to join his circle, where he sat eating with six or eight other men, and she folded her skirt and crossed her legs on the carpet. With the thin slabs of bread, she scooped up some laban and some of the mixture of beans and meat on the big plate, and talking nonstop, she told her tale again, hoping to gain his permission to travel freely around the Jebel Druze. She took his photograph, and by the time they said goodbye she had won his promise of an escort. Weeks after she left, when inquiring of her whereabouts, he was known to have asked a visitor: “Have you seen a queen traveling?”
By May 11, 1900, she had left the Jebel Druze and reached Damascus, the desert capital. In a moment of reflection, she wrote: “It is at times a very odd sensation to be out in the world quite by myself, but mostly I take it as a matter of course now that I’m beginning to be used to it. I don’t think I ever feel lonely, though the one person I often wish for is Papa. I think he really would enjoy it. I keep wanting to compare notes with him.” She felt differently about her mother: “You, I want to talk to, but not in a tent with earwigs and black beetles around and muddy water to drink! I don’t think you would be your true self under such conditions.”
With permission from her parents and a fresh supply of money (her yearly allowance and the income from her books had run out), she extended her journey, bought a deep-pocketed khaki jacket made for a man, and hired three Kurdish soldiers, along with a cook and a guide. When they reached the town of Jarad she went to the house of Sheikh Ahmed. “I lay on his cushions, and ate white mulberries and drank coffee,” she recalled contentedly. When they pressed a narghile on her, she firmly refused. She had tried it once in Jerusalem. “Never again,” she said of the water pipe; “it’s too nasty.”
By the following night the grassy plains had disappeared, and in their place stretched thousands of miles of sand. This was her first night to sleep in the silent, endless desert. “The smooth, hard ground makes a beautiful floor to my tent,” she wrote. “Shall I tell you my chief impression—the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of wind and far away water and falling ice and stones; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it, Father. But here nothing.”
The sun scorched the daytime air, so for the next two days she and her five men traveled at night, twelve hours each night, without water for either humans or horses. The ride was long and boring across the endlesss sands, and she almost fell asleep in her saddle, but her men kept her awake, telling her grisly tales of Bedouin raids and rumors of the cruel, unyielding desert emir, Ibn Rashid. Their stories whetted her appetite to visit the Nejd, the terrifyingly vacant desert she had read about in Arabia Deserta, a seminal work describing life with the Bedouin by the traveler Charles Doughty.
When they stopped on the third night and she finally could sleep, she climbed into a muslin bag she had made to protect herself from animal bites and sand flies. “I’m very proud of this contrivance,” she wrote, “but if we have a ghazu, a raid, of Arabs I shall certainly be the last to fly, and my flight will be as one who runs a sack race.”
After another day of riding, they reached a spring. She drank the clear, cold water, closing her eyes to avoid seeing the weeds and creatures swimming in it. Her cook made lunch, fried croquettes and a roasted partridge he had killed, and after tea, she climbed into a cave and slept on thistles. A few hours later they were off again, and by sundown the air had turned bitter cold. At the campsite, to keep warm she put on gaiters and a second pair of knickerbockers, and with a covert cloth coat under her thick winter coat, she rolled herself up in a blanket and cape and went to sleep.
The next day she reached the Roman ruins of Palmyra, a “singular landscape … a mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven. Beyond them is the immense Temple of Baal; the modern town is built inside it and its rows of columns rise out of a mass of mud roofs. And beyond all is the desert, sand and white stretches of salt and sand again, with the dust clouds whirling over it and the Euphrates five days away.”
She spent two days exploring Palmyra, and then set off in the early morning for her return to Damascus. Outside the ancient city of Palmyra she came across a camp of Agail Arabs, a band of dark-skinned, unkempt Bedouin driving a caravan of camels to the flowering capital. They were led by Sheikh Muhammad, who came from Nejd, the cruel desert of central Arabia. But instead of hiding in fear of the scruffy Bedouin, she took a second breakfast with them: dates, camels’ milk and the bitter black coffee of the Arabs (“a peerless drink,” she called it), and talked excitedly with two of the men about Baghdad and the desert. “The interesting part of it is that the Agail are some of Ibn Rashid’s people,” she reported, “and I’m going to lay plans with Sheikh Muhammad as to getting into Nejd next year.” But it was 1900, and the trip she hoped to make to Nejd would not take place for another fourteen years.
“Please God, who is great,” the Agail sheikh said. He and his men wanted to travel with her; they needed the protection of her soldiers. She agreed, and, looking like a man in her oversized khaki coat, her tanned brown face half hidden in her kafeeyah, she took off, surrounded by the pack of burly Bedouin. On the road to Damascus she caught up with two English ladies, neat and tidy, traveling in a carriage across the desert from Jerusalem, a dragoman on top to guide them, a pack of mules trailing behind with their tents. She was pleased to see them. “I liked them and it’s pleasant to meet some one in the desert, but I felt rather disreputable with a troop of Agail on their dromedaries round me and no dragoman and no nothing.” The women gave her ginger biscuits (for which she blessed them) and made plans to meet her in Damascus. But she hardly looked forward to tea and biscuits with the fair-skinned English ladies; she much preferred the bitter coffee and adventurous company of the bearded Arab men. Their world felt more natural to her; “a daughter of the desert,” they had called her.
The following day a large group of the Hassinah tribe pitched their camp near hers, and their twenty-year-old sheikh, Muhammad, appeared at her tent. A “handsome, rather thick lipped, solemn fellow,” she judged him, his hair hanging in braids from under his kafeeyah, in his hand an enormous silver-sheathed sword. He greeted her and left. Sheikh Muhammad, not one to be sneered at, had hundreds of tents, countless horses and camels and a house in Damascus.
Gertrude paid a return courtesy call at his tent. While she drank coffee, the Hassinah made a circle around her, their half-hidden eyes staring out at her from under their kafeeyahs, their bodies dirty and almost naked. A fire fueled by camel dung smoldered in the air, and one of the men took out a single-stringed instrument and played it with a bow, singing “weird, sad,” melancholy songs.
After a long while she stood up to leave, but one of her soldiers reprimanded her. The Hassinah had killed a sheep for her and were preparing it for dinner. In the etiquette of the desert, she was supposed to share their food, and in return for the privilege, she should give them a present. “You can give nothing to an Arab but arms and horses,” she noted and, back in her own tent, decided to give the sheikh a pistol belonging to one of her men (“net value two pounds”).
She returned to the Hassinah later that night and sat down again on the carpets. This time, besides the bitter black coffee, they offered her “white coffee”—hot water, sweetened and flavored with almonds. She talked with an Agaili about Baghdad and about the mysterious Ibn Rashid, the powerful desert ruler whom she yearned to meet. A black slave brought in a water jar, and as they all held out their hands, he poured the water over their fingers. And then at last came dinner: five men carried in an enormous platter heaped with rice and the meat of a whole sheep. They placed it on the ground in front of her, and she and ten men sat around the platter, eating the food and flat bread with the fingers of their right hand. Behind them stood the black slave holding a glass, which he filled with water whenever someone needed it. Her only disappointment was that the men ate so little; she was still hungry when they finished. There was more hand washing, this time with soap, and then she made her bows and left to go to bed. “It was rather an expensive dinner,” she noted dryly, “but the experience was worth the pistol.”
Her adventure to Jerusalem and beyond had come to an end, and before heading home, she picked up some pine cones from the famous cedars of Lebanon. “Shall we try and make them grow at Rounton?” she asked. She had been looking forward to a respite in England. “But you know, dearest Father,” she continued, “I shall be back here before long! One doesn’t keep away from the East when one has got into it this far.” By June she was planting the pine seeds on the lawn at Rounton.