CHAPTER SIX
In Yorkshire during the summer of 1900, and for most of the following twelve months, Gertrude spent time with her sisters Elsa and Molly and her brothers Hugo and Maurice, and cared for her father, ill with rheumatism. From time to time she took the train to London, lunched and shopped with various friends, and dined when she could with Domnul Chirol. Recently made the director of the Foreign Department at The Times, Domnul was devoted to her and always willing to lend her a fatherly ear. His concern and compassion, along with his dry wit and convivial attitude, made him her favorite companion. He shared her interests in languages, literature and art, understood her loneliness (he too was lonely) and cherished her friendship. He guided her in political affairs, gave her introductions to important people and encouraged her travels, and as she traveled, she reported back to him; he used the information in his editorials and as background for officials. The reports she made from wherever she went—Europe, the East—were highly detailed. Details almost obsessed her, and in her diaries and correspondence with family and friends, she rarely left out a color or a food or a flower or a description of an experience or a person.
But, except for confiding in Domnul, she avoided discussing how she felt about herself, the way her life was turning out or the loneliness that drove her. In the Victorian setting in which she was raised, she was taught not to brood over sadness but to push it away, to busy herself. And thus, in addition to reading history and literature, she wrote letters, articles and books, studied languages, learned about art, architecture and archaeology, took up photography, played tennis and golf, swam, went riding and played bridge, filling every vacant moment by doing something. She had proceeded thus after the loss of Cadogan, and so she continued to do, rushing from one exercise to the next, filling in whatever empty moments remained by writing things down in all their minutiae, intentionally leaving no time for introspection or self-analysis.
She found desert travel alluring, but the mountains gnawed at her too, their very existence summoning her to climb them. In 1899, at the age of thirty-one, she had climbed the Meije; the following summer, after her return from Jerusalem and Damascus, she set off for the Swiss Alps and Chamonix to climb peaks that had not yet been scaled. Arriving at her Swiss hotel at the beginning of August 1900, Gertrude settled into her room, unpacked her suitcase and wrote at once to her father: “I don’t think there is a more delightful sensation than that of opening an Alpine campaign—meeting one’s guide, talking over the great ascents that look so easy on the map; and laying out one’s clean new mountain clothes.”
After a few days of practice runs, she climbed Chamonix and then made the ascent up the Mer de Glacé, explaining in her letter home that the Sea of Ice was really a great mass of broken ice that continued to break and crack. The tougher the conditions, the more she enjoyed them, and within a week she wired home, “GREPONT TRAVERSED” and, a week later, “DRU TRAVERSED.” The weather turned foul, however, and the bigger peaks would have to wait for another visit.
In August 1901, she was off again to Switzerland, stopping first in London for dinner with Domnul, who cast a wary eye on her dangerous mountain climbing. She shrugged off his concerns and arrived at her Alpine hotel; from the window of her room she could see “the great rock of the Engelhorn opposite, the line of snows of the Wetter-horn, Mittelhorn and Rosenhorn—far away, Pilatus and the Jur touched by the sunlight. Phantom armies of light mists walking over the floor of cloud.”
At four A.M. the following morning, dressed in a blue climbing suit, Gertrude set out with her professional guides, Ulrich and Heinrich Fuhrer, two brothers respected for their ability and well known for their knowledge of the mountain peaks. First, hooking themselves to the same rope, the threesome began their ascent, working their way up the boulders, occasionally scaling rocks so smooth they offered no possibility of a foothold: good practice for the difficult peaks on the Engelhorn.
After several days of snowy weather, they launched a climb on the south side of the fifth peak of the Engelhorn, to a point where no one else had ever been. “[It] may be impossible, but I don’t think it is,” Gertrude informed her family. “They say it is, but we know that the experts may be mistaken.” She and the guides made their way up an easy buttress, and the Klein Engelhorn came into full view, looking “most unencouraging”; the bottom third was composed of smooth perpendicular rocks, the next section had a steep rock wall with a deep mountain gorge, which “turned out to be quite as difficult as it looked.” They climbed over the smooth precipitous rocks, “scrabbled up” a shallow crack and stopped at the bottom of an overhanging rock, difficult because it was so smooth and unprotected.
Then came the test of her daring. Ulrich tried climbing on Heinrich’s shoulder but could not reach anything to hold. Gertrude described the experience: “I then clambered up on to Heinrich, Ulrich stood on me and fingered up the rock as high as he could. It wasn’t high enough. I lifted myself still a little higher—always with Ulrich on me, mind!—and he began to raise himself by his hands. As his foot left my shoulder I put up a hand, straightened out my arm and made a ledge for him.”
Balancing himself on Gertrude’s arm, Ulrich called out: “I don’t feel at all safe—if you move we are all killed.”
“All right,” Gertrude assured him. “I can stand here for a week.” And with that he climbed up by her shoulder and her hand.
Heinrich stayed behind, but Gertrude and Ulrich continued the climb, struggling to the top, then working their way down. It was seven in the evening when they reached the foot of the peak and joined Heinrich again. After their fifteen-hour trek, the trio slept that night high up in the mountains, in the hayloft of a farm, breakfasting the next morning on a shepherd’s milk and coffee, polished off with their own bread and jam. The adventure ended with a pleasant walk home through the woods.
Later, Ulrich confessed that if, when he asked, Gertrude had said she did not feel safe on the rock, he would have fallen and the three of them would have been killed. In truth, Gertrude admitted, she had hardly felt safe at all. Her air of confidence had merely been a cover for her own fear. Indeed, she said, “I thought I was falling when I spoke.” But despite the risks, she felt content: “I don’t think I have ever had two more delightful Alpine days.”
Within a fortnight they tackled two old peaks, seven new peaks, one new saddle ridge between two peaks, and traversed the 9,130-foot Engelhorn. Invigorated by her success, she informed her father that she hoped to climb one new Engelhorn peak and one of the high arêtes, the sharp, narrow ridges of the mountain: “I would like to have one of them to my name! It is a silly ambition, isn’t it! Still one does like to have the credit one really deserves.” Yet only a few weeks later, in mid-September, it was time to leave; sadly, she packed her belongings, but as she said farewell, she felt gratified to know that she was leaving behind a promontory that had already been named “Gertrude’s Peak.”
At the start of the new year, 1902, the East beckoned. Gertrude set sail from Liverpool with her father and her brother Hugo, stopping first in Algiers, where she wrote in her diary: “Even here there is enough of the East to give one the feel of it. I find it catching at my heart again as nothing else can, or ever will I believe, thing or person.” At Naples, she parted company from her family and continued on to Malta, where she joined an archaeological dig.
Poking around the Turkish island, she noted determinedly: “Some day, I shall come and travel here with tents, but then I will speak Turkish, which will not be difficult.” Most intriguing, however, was what she learned over a lunch at the British consulate: the day she had arrived in Smyrna, an influential uncle of the powerful sheikh Ibn Rashid had passed through town on his way back to Nejd. If only she had known. “I would have given worlds to meet him.” She was sowing plans for a trip to Arabia.
With Arabic still a challenge, she left Smyrna in March, sailing on the Cleopatra for Haifa, taking up residence on Mount Carmel, near the site of the great Crusader castle. She hired two sheikhs as tutors, one for Persian, which she found “perfectly delightful,” one for Arabic, over which she despaired once again: “I am soaked and sodden in it and how anyone can wish to have anything to do with a tongue so difficult when they might be living at ease, I can’t imagine. I never stop talking it in this hotel and I think I get a little worse daily.”
She visited Jerusalem and filled every day with lessons, excursions and afternoon teas, and as interesting as she found the local notables, they thought her even more intriguing. “I am a Person in this country,” she wrote excitedly to her parents. “I am a Person! and one of the first questions everyone seems to ask everyone else is, ‘Have you ever met Miss Gertrude Bell?’ ” But after two months it was time to leave, and by the end of May 1902, she was home in England, if only for a brief stay.
Once more the high peaks of Switzerland tempted her, and in little over a month she left for the Oberland, writing home delightedly that she was recognized by a guard on the Brünnig train. Was she “the Miss Bell who had climbed the Engelhorn last year?” he had asked. “This is fame,” she informed her family.
Soon after registering at the Kurhaus, her hotel in Rosenalui, she wanted to put herself in shape for serious climbs. Walking straight up a hill, she reached the edge of a glacier and sat down, thinking “what a lucky dog” she was to be there.
Dressed for the biting cold, she was off once again with her guides, the brothers Ulrich and Heinrich, making easy ascents up and down some “charming” little rocks of the Oberland. They tackled “the first of the impossibles, the Wellhorn arête,” 10,485 feet, running up the beginning of the Vorder Wellhorn, and after hours of climbing the smooth rocks, they came to a terribly dangerous precipice. “My heart sank,” she confessed. “I thought we should never do it.” Shivering with cold, they faced a rotting knife edge of rock that crumbled in masses as they went along, with steep precipices beneath them that threatened their every step. But with the aid of an iron nail and a double rope they reached the summit, returning happily to the inn to plan the next event.
In the course of her previous visits she and her guides had considered an ascent up the rocky face of the Finsteraarhorn glacier. Serious climbs were a means to stretch her athletic stamina, to prove her physical strength, to compete with her own sex as well as with males and, most important, to test herself. She was determined to achieve the highest possible position, no matter in which field of endeavor; mountain climbing (a popular sport for females) offered clear tasks and, quite literally, a chance to reach the heights. But if she was going to climb a mountain, she would do it the way she did everything else: not by following in other people’s footsteps, but by seeking to break new ground. She would find the untried and persevere to overcome it; otherwise, it was hardly worth the doing.
The climb up the face of the Finsteraarhorn was three thousand vertical feet, steeper and higher than almost any place in the Alps, a daring climb that had not yet been tried. “The arěte,” she explained, “rises from the glacier in a great series of gendarmes [spires], and towers, set at such an angle on the steep face of the mountain that you wonder how they can stand at all and indeed they can scarcely be said to stand, for the great points of them are continually overbalancing and tumbling down into the couloirs [the gaps], between the arêtes and they are all capped with loosely poised stones, jutting onto and hanging over and ready to fall at any moment.” The dangers were enormous, the rocks “exceedingly steep” and as they began their ascent at one A.M. on the fateful day of July 31, 1902, black clouds rolled up from the west. But “the game” had begun. Gertrude was determined to slash through the glacier to the peak.
Tied to one another on a rope, she and the guides pushed their way up the arěte for several hours, past some of the terribly difficult “chimneys,” narrow clefts in the cliff, until, at a thousand feet below the summit, they were in sight of the final two spires. White flakes started to fall, and they sat down to eat a few mouthfuls of snow; refreshed, they crept along the knife edge of a narrow pass. The snow was coming down faster, furious and blinding, swirling in a small avalanche; they could see nothing of the mountainside either to the right or to the left, and the slope was too slippery with the fresh snow. They had had no choice but to turn back. They knew it would be only slightly less precarious than going up.
They reached a sloping rock ledge, but it offered little relief; from there they would have to drop eight feet down onto deep snow. They fixed an extra rope and tumbled down, one after the other, onto the snow. “It felt awful,” Gertrude reported; “I shall remember every inch of that rock face for the rest of my life.” It was six in the evening, and their goal was to work down to the most difficult of the narrow clefts while it was still layered with only a little snow. But after they toiled for several more hours down the rocks, a furious thunderstorm began. They were completely vulnerable. “We were standing by a great upright on the top of a tower when suddenly it gave a crack and a blue flame sat on it for a second,” she wrote. “My ice axe jumped in my hand and I thought the steel felt hot through my woollen glove—was that possible? I didn’t take my glove off to see! Before we knew where we were the rock flashed again.” They “tumbled down a chimney as hard as ever we could, one on top of the other, buried our ice axe heads in some shale at the bottom of it and hurriedly retreated from them. It’s not nice to carry a private lightning conductor in your hand in the thick of a thunderstorm.”
There was no way to continue in the dark and no place to take shelter from the storm, but somehow, linked together on their rope, they squeezed into a tiny crack between the rocks and huddled together. Gertrude sat at the back on a pointed bit of rock, Ulrich sat on her feet to keep them warm, and Heinrich sat just below him, the brothers’ feet in a knapsack, the snow coming down, the thunder booming fast behind every strike of lightning. “At first the thunderstorm made things rather exciting,” she explained. “The claps followed the flashes so close that there seemed no interval between them. We tied ourselves firmly on to the rock above, lest, as Ulrich philosophically said, one of us should be struck and fall out. The rocks were all crackling round us and fizzing like damp wood … and as there was no further precaution possible I enjoyed the extraordinary magnificence of the storm with a free mind: it was worth seeing.” She managed to doze. Gradually the skies cleared, the stars came out, and they talked about the sunrise. But the sun never rose; gray skies hung over the day.
For sixteen hours, from four A.M. until eight the next evening, they were on the arěte; they carried nothing to drink but two tablespoons of brandy and a mouthful of wine, and the only food they had was what was left in their knapsacks: five gingerbread biscuits, two sticks of chocolate, a slice of bread, a scrap of cheese and a handful of raisins, doled out during the course of the day. The climb down was slow and torturous, almost every yard requiring an extra rope: “You can imagine the labour of finding a rock at every 50 feet round which to sling it, then of pulling it down behind us and slinging it again.”
It snowed all day, and they watched the white sheets whirl down the precipices, knowing, helplessly, that the snow was likely to start an avalanche. They tackled the next chimney, the iced rope slipping like butter through their hands, and then worked their way down an icy slope of rock covered with four inches of new snow and split by broad gaps. “The rock was too difficult for me, the stretches too big, I couldn’t reach them.… I handed my axe down to Heinrich and told him I could do nothing but fall, but he couldn’t, or at any rate, didn’t secure himself and in a second we were both tumbling head over heels down the couloir.” Somehow Ulrich held them. “But it was a near thing and I felt rather ashamed of my part in it.” She thought then that it was “on the cards we should not get down alive.”
The cold was bitter, the snow had turned to rain, their clothing was soaked and they shivered all day as they worked their way down, only to find themselves at nightfall still on the glacier. They had no matches to light their lantern and no shelter from the driving rain. Nevertheless, they found a spot in which to sink their axes, and they sat on them and she slept a bit, thinking how her brother Maurice had slept through the rain during the war in South Africa.
When morning came they could hardly stand, but they managed to take a few steps, and by six o’clock, they were safe enough to free themselves from the rope. At ten A.M. on August 3, 1902, they reached the hotel. Gertrude’s toes had swelled and she had frostbite, but she announced, “I am perfectly absolutely well except for my toes—not so much as a cold in the head. Isn’t it remarkable!” She had made the trip despite Domnul’s gloomy forebodings, which, she acknowledged, “came very near to being realised, and I am now feeling some satisfaction in the thought that my bones are not lying scattered on the Alpine mountain cold.” She had not reached the pinnacle, but in the face of death-defying danger, she had escaped unharmed. Later on, her guide Ulrich would say, “Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished.” Of all the amateur climbers he had known, he added—men and women—no one had equaled her “in coolness, bravery and judgement.”