CHAPTER SEVEN
Her toes still swollen, Gertrude returned to the “horrid cold” of London, even in mid-August of 1902. She hired a personal maid, Marie Delaere, resumed her rounds of afternoon calls, and over dinner with Domnul, who was traveling frequently as foreign editor of The Times, planned a trip to Delhi. To celebrate Edward VII’s accession to the throne as King of England and Emperor of India, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, had announced an imperial durbar, an impressive gathering of notables. Resplendent, sumptuous, spectacular; no words were too profuse to describe the richness of this coming event. The great meeting of dignitaries, potentates and luminaries would regale the most populous subcontinent on earth with the grandeur of Empire. Replete with jewel-laden elephants and dazzling electric lights, the display of wealth and majesty would reinforce the image of British power to the Indian people and justify the notion of imperial possession. A confirmed imperialist herself, Gertrude looked forward to joining the festivities. For her and for her circle, her country’s unique position of strength was a noble necessity. The British, with their commerce, courage and conviction of superiority, were clearly meant to take charge of less fortunate souls.
She journeyed to India with her younger brother Hugo, in part for pleasure, in part to dissuade him from taking Holy Orders. Convinced that being a Christian was a foolish waste of time, Gertrude spent much of the seagoing trip engaged in intellectual argument. But to no avail. Hugo was determined to join the church. By the end of December 1902 their boat reached Bombay, and it was with great relief to both that they turned their attention from the religion of Christ to the religion of Empire.
It seemed that “all the world” had come for the brilliant durbar: family, friends, close officials, all installed, like her, in the privileged tents of the Viceroy, in front-row seats at parades, at the best receptions and the most lavish parties. And to her delight, Domnul, who had come by way of the Persian Gulf, introduced her to representatives of the venerable Indian Civil Service, that prestigious club of Oxford and Cambridge graduates that ruled the colony and its outposts, meted out justice, taught the natives how to pour a good wine and made sure that British business interests were always protected. In particular, she met the tall, distinguished-looking British Resident, the presiding British Consul in Muscat, Percy Cox.
Lunching together with trusty Domnul and the knowledgeable Cox, she learned the latest news from Central Arabia, an up-to-date report on the blood feud between the Emir of Nejd, Ibn Rashid, leader of the seminomadic clan of the Shammar tribe, and his powerful rival, Ibn Saud, head of the Bedouin clan that belonged to the Anazeh tribe. Two of the most powerful sheikhs in Arabia, between them they controlled the vast and vacant desert that formed the central plain of the Arabian peninsula, over which their clans had fought for generations. Years of warring had led in 1891 to the defeat of the Saudis by the Rashids; exiled to Kuwait, an emirate allied to the British, the Saudis had allowed their anger to fester with revenge against the Rashids. Now there was talk of Ibn Saud’s return.
Gertrude’s meeting with Cox was brief but important; it strengthened her determination to penetrate Arabia and marked the start of a long and important relationship with Percy Cox.
From India, Gertrude and Hugo continued on to Singapore and Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo. Crossing the Pacific, they reached Vancouver, where she climbed the Rocky Mountains and admired the beauty of Lake Louise, but as they worked their way down to the United States, she grew weary of the scenery. In Chicago she was overwhelmed “by the horribleness of its outside, the filth of the streets, the noise, the ugliness.” A few more days in America, at Niagara Falls and Boston, and she was eager to leave for home. On July 26, 1903, she landed at Liverpool and spent the rest of the year in England.
Once again, she faced the cold reality of spinsterhood. Her sister Molly had, like her, fallen in love with a man whom her father rejected. But a few months later, Gertrude introduced Molly to Charles Trevelyan, and on January 6, 1904, the couple was married. Gertrude ached, watching her younger sister walk down the aisle. The only men who seemed to be attracted to her were “good old things,” like Lord Dartrey, who, she had reported, had “fallen in love with her” on the ship to India, and who held no interest for her.
By March, when the brutal English snow and frost made her pine for a “nice desert where the sun shines,” she dreamed of a visit to Ibn Rashid. But her plans to go to Arabia were still on hold. Ibn Rashid, sponsored by the Turks, was at war and the area too dangerous to visit. Instead, in London, she attended another wedding, this one of her cousin Florence Lascelles to Cecil Spring-Rice, a diplomat; cultivated her social circle of Foreign Office officials; and pursued a friendship with John Singer Sargent. In August 1904 she decided to make another attempt at mountain climbing, at Zermatt. “Yes, as you say, why do people climb?” she wrote her mother, but she left the question open. Her answer lay in her actions. She climbed mountains as much to conquer her loneliness as to scale the heights.
She adored breaking new ground, being the center of attention, with everyone’s eyes and ears on her. But, no less fascinated by those whom she deemed of particular interest, she focused her own attention on the way they thought and behaved. At home, however, life had curdled from ennui. The English were too predictable; she could tell in advance what a politician might do or what her dinner partner might say. The one group she had met that was different was the Arabs; they excited her. They stimulated her imagination; they were romantic, exotic, mysterious, unplumbed.
By September she was in London, shopping furiously for fur boas and muffs, seeing friends, dining with Domnul. “It’s disgusting weather,” she told her mother, as she made plans to head for the East. This time, however, she sought another purpose to her travels. Intrigued by architecture and ancient civilizations, she arranged to study with a French archaeologist, Salomon Reinach, the Jewish scholar primarily responsible for the popular notion that civilization began in the East, where it nurtured the great ideas of mankind. Editor of the prestigious Revue Archéologique, Reinach also wrote extensively about the Romanesque and Gothic periods in France, and was director of the Saint-Germain Museum in Paris. Married and ten years her senior, “singularly plain, but an angel,” he took her under his wing. He taught her about Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine art and archaeology, treating her like a favored schoolgirl. “Reinach … loves me so dearly,” she wrote almost wistfully. “He has simply set all his boundless knowledge at my disposal and I have learnt more in these few days than I should have learnt by myself in a year.”
The school session soon over, she returned to London to ready herself for adventure. Her friend David Hogarth had just published a new book, The Penetration of Arabia, in which he had written about the enormous unknown desert “still in great part withdrawn from western eyes” and expressed the hope that Europeans would “complete the penetration of Arabia” as soon as the atmosphere was amenable. No one was more eager to carry out Hogarth’s wish than Gertrude, but as Percy Cox and others had advised her, the time was not yet ripe. Instead, she would retrace her journey of five years earlier, traveling east of the Jordan River “to that delectable region of which Omar Khayyam sings: ‘The strip of herbage strown that just divides the desert from the sown.’ ”
On January 4, 1905, Gertrude departed for the East, her interest reinforced by the knowledge she had gained under Reinach’s tutelage, her legitimacy strengthened by a scholarly letter she had published in the Revue Archéologique on the geometry of the cruciform structure. At Reinach’s urging, she aimed to make serious studies of Roman and Byzantine ruins, to weigh the impact of their civilizations on the Orient. In addition, she planned to take extensive notes on the people, make detailed observations of the Bedouin and the Druze. Her goal was to combine all the material—the archaeological and the anthropological, the social and the cultural, the ancient and the modern, along with dozens of photographs she would take—into a book.
She wanted to inform the English of the ways of the East. She would tell them about the Arab world and its culture: its people, Bedouin tribesmen and educated townsmen; its language, flowery and circuitous; its manners, both primitive and polished; its delicate art; its intricate architecture; its history of holy wars and conquests; its literature filled with symbolism and poetry; its politics fraught with internecine rivalries and tribal revenge; its religion of Islam; its wailing music; its food staples of flat bread and yogurt; its commerce of bazaar merchants and international traders; its agriculture of wheat farming and camel grazing; its fertile soil; its oil-rich sand; its terrain of palm trees, incidental water and endless desert.
The volume, she hoped, would establish her reputation as both a writer and a scholar. And, even more, she hoped it would establish her as a Person. She had experienced that status briefly in the East and in Switzerland; perhaps she would become a Person at home.
The SS Ortona left Marseilles and docked a week later at Beirut, in Syria. To her great delight, she found herself once again in the sort of danger that called for evasive action. Along with her books—Charles Doughty’s Arabia Deserta (filled with information about the Bedouin) and Hogarth’s The Penetration of Arabia—she had packed some highly suspicious articles: a revolver, a rifle and an assortment of maps, all questionable for a British subject to be lugging through Turkish territory. To ease her way through the customs house, she had sent a note to the British Consul in Beirut, asking for a kavass, a servant, to help her. An old friend appeared, a smiling man in a uniform, and they set off for customs, she with the revolver tucked in her pocket. She had “every possible sort of contraband,” she warned him, most anxious about her gun. She had packed the rifle, case and all, in her cabin trunk, wrapping it around with her lacy white petticoats. But if the Turks found the gun, they would confiscate it.
At the customs house she quickly engaged the chief officer in a friendly conversation about the weather while the kavass announced to everyone that she was “a very great lady.” Of course, he informed them, it was unnecessary to pay strict attention to her baggage. Case after case went by unquestioned. And when they opened a wooden packing crate, they found nothing but camp utensils.
But the next item of interest was her cabin trunk. “It is needless that they should search this very much,” she whispered nervously in Arabic to the kavass.
“I have understood, O Lady,” he replied. Gingerly, he lifted her gowns, the white petticoats with their lacy edges (“aggressively feminine,” she called them) peeking out beneath. Then, just as the men were about to put back the drawer, one of them caught sight of a pile of maps—“very suspicious objects in Turkey”—that covered the end of the gun case. As he stooped down to look at the maps, Gertrude quickly turned to the chief officer and made a remark about the rain.
“By God, O Lady,” he answered, “it is as Your Excellency says: God alone knows when the rain will cease.” Then, with a brusque show of friendship, he ordered his man to stop.
The kavass quickly pushed in the drawer. “Y’allah, o boy!” he said. “Hasten! Shall we wait here till nightfall?” The dangerous wait was over.
With a polite salaam, she smiled at the chief. “I go, upon your pleasure,” she said.
“Go in peace,” he replied.
She had, she reported to her father, pulled off “a marvel of successful fraud.” She would give the kavass an extra tip.
The streets of Beirut were filled with mud, but the Oriental aroma made her feel at home. Within hours she was “deep in gossip”; and strolling through the bazaars, she felt the pleasure of being in the Levant. “A bazaar is always the epitome of the East, even in a half European town like Beirut,” she wrote home.
In talks with British officials she heard that Ibn Rashid had been driven out of his capital, Hayil, by Ibn Saud, but that Turkish troops were coming to help the Rashids. The Ottomans were making handsome payments to Ibn Rashid, ensuring his loyalty to them, while the British, under the rule of Lord Curzon in India and the watchful eye of Percy Cox in Muscat, were keeping Ibn Saud, along with his ally, the Sheikh of Kuwait, content.
At a dinner a few evenings later she was assured that Ibn Rashid was still at Hayil, holding on with his population of thirty thousand Arabs. The emir, her dinner partner said, was “very enterprising, very brave. He lets no foreigner into Nejd, absolutely impossible to enter, but if you could get in, you would never get out.” A more tempting dare would have been hard to find. It was not her plan to visit Central Arabia until the following year, but the challenge piqued her interest.
Her current journey, however, required certain arrangements. She bought horses and mules, and hired Muhammad, the Druze who was her former muleteer. He pledged to go with her “to the ends of the earth.” They were off, and a few days later she arrived in Jerusalem.
The British Consul, Mr. Dickson, informed her that Sir Mark and Lady Sykes, a most congenial couple, were also in town. It seemed that Gertrude and Mark Sykes had much in common: smart, enthusiastic and equally impatient, they both came from exceptionally rich Yorkshire families; both had been educated at the best British universities; both were able to travel freely; both were interested in the Levant; and both were destined to have an impact on the Middle East.
Although each was highly opinionated and competitive, for all their similarities they differed sharply. Gertrude was an atheist, Sykes a practicing Catholic; Gertrude had gone to Oxford, Sykes to Cambridge; Gertrude was opposed to her family using titles; Sykes was proud to use his; Gertrude was thirty-four, unmarried and not yet well known at home; Sykes was ten years younger, had already traveled throughout Asia and Turkey and had attracted much attention in England with his published accounts. Just as irritating to her, Sykes had only contempt for the people of the desert, while Gertrude held the Arabs in some esteem. A year earlier, in 1904, Sykes had written about the Arabs of Mosul and Damascus: “Eloquent, cunning, excitable and cowardly, they present to my mind the most deplorable pictures one can see in the East.” He called them “diseased,” “contemptuous,” “idle beyond all hope, vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit,” “insolent yet despicable.”
Gertrude would soon write empathetically: “The Oriental is like a very old child.… He is not practical in our acceptation of the word, any more than a child is practical, and his utility is not ours. On the other hand, his action is guided by traditions of conduct and morality that go back to the beginnings of civilisation, traditions unmodified as yet by any important change in the manner of life to which they apply and out of which they arose. These things apart, he is as we are; human nature does not undergo a complete change east of Suez, nor is it impossible to be on terms of friendship and sympathy with the dwellers in those regions. In some respects it is even easier than in Europe.”
Gertrude left her calling card with Mark and Edith Sykes in Jerusalem. They received her “with open arms,” she reported; and after a good dinner and a merry evening, she declared them “perfectly charming.” Like Gertrude, Sykes was planning a visit to the notorious mountain Druze; the two travelers discussed their separate schemes.
However amusing they found each other that evening, within a few weeks Sykes had changed his mind. Writing a long letter to his wife, he denounced Gertrude bitterly, complaining that she had deliberately misled him. She “had taken the very route I told her I hoped to do,” he whined, “after she said she was going elsewhere.” Blaming Gertrude because the Turks tried to prevent him from traveling to the Druze, Sykes called her a “Bitch” and wished “10,000 of my worst bad words on the head of that damned fool.… Wherever she went,” he told his wife, she caused an “uproar” and was the “terror of the desert.” As brilliant as she was to some, to Sykes, Gertrude was a “silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!”
Gertrude had already set forth. “It was a stormy morning, the 5th of February,” as she later described the start of her adventure. “The west wind swept up from the Mediterranean, hurried across the plain where the Canaanites waged war with the stubborn hill dwellers of Judaea, and leapt the barrier of mountains to which the kings of Assyria and of Egypt had lain vain siege. It shouted the news of rain to Jerusalem and raced onwards down the barren eastern slopes, cleared the deep bed of Jordan with a bound, and vanished across the hills of Moab into the desert. And all the hounds of the storm followed behind, a yelping pack, coursing eastward and rejoicing as they went.
“No one with life in his body could stay in on such a day, but for me there was little question of choice.”
Along with her Christian cook, Mikhail (recommended by Mark Sykes), her party consisted of three muleteers: Ibrahim, an old and toothless Christian Maronite; his son Habib, handsome and broad-shouldered; and Muhammad, the Druze, large, lazy and charming. She was heading east for the Jordan Valley, “alone down the desolate road to Jericho.” To reach the Jebel Druze, she chose the route across the Jordan Bridge, “the Gate of the Desert,” she called it. She and her men pitched their tents the first night close to the wooden toll bridge and set off again in the morning, encountering a ragged Arab whose only dream was to go to America. “The same story can be heard all over Syria. Hundreds go out every year,” she wrote, noting they hoped to make a small fortune in America and then return to the East.
She rode across the frontier, ready to record in her diary any ruin or individual that might be of interest. Her observations would not only help her write her book, they would help her advise her friends in the British Government. Then, as now, archaeologists and writers ventured where others feared to tread. With her keen eye for detail and her ear for gossip, Gertrude provided information that was particularly valuable. Sending lengthy letters to the highly influential Domnul, reporting to diplomats in the Foreign Office and the India Office, she filled them in on the sorry state of Ottoman rule. The hand of the Turk reached down to Syria and Arabia, but its greedy fingers, so busy snatching bribes or spreading corruption, had spent little time administering the Arabs under it.
Eager to find a European sponsor to arm them against the Turks, the Druze considered the British their ally of first choice. By traveling without the requisite Turkish escort, Gertrude could, she hoped, rekindle the trust of the Druze whom she had visited before, gauge the depths of their discontent and the relative strength of their army. She knew that the Druze did “not play the game as it should be played, they go out to slay and they spare no one. While they have a grain of powder in their flasks and strength to pull the trigger, they kill every man, woman and child that they encounter.” It was partly such menace that intrigued her, sucking her in as though she were a child standing at the edge of the ocean, drawn to the giant waves.
Heading for danger, she crossed the desert, adding an Arab guide to her party. Namrud, a Christian, knew every sheikh of the area. Riding on days so raw and wet that her horses plunged through seas of mud, she inspected vestiges of the past—tombs, Roman coins, a ruined temple at Khureibet es Suk—and encountered a camp of the Beni Sakhr tribe in an ongoing feud with the Druze. “There is no mercy between them,” she observed. “If a Druze meets a Beni Sakhr, one of them kills the other.” Her main worry was Muhammad, her muleteer. If the Beni Sakhr, with whom she had camped that night, knew he was Druze, “they would not only kill him, they would burn him alive.” It was decided that Muhammad undergo a quick conversion to Christianity.
For the moment, at least, the Beni Sakhr were her friends. Five years earlier they had called her “a daughter of the desert.” Now, as she lunched in her tent, enjoying a meal of curry served on fine china, washing it down with a glass of wine, one of the Beni Sakhr joined her, and they sat together, drinking coffee, smoking her Egyptian cigarettes, talking of the bloodthirsty Druze. At nightfall the desert turned cold and wet; she wrapped herself in her fur, slipped a hot water bottle between her sheets and went to bed.
The following evening, having reached the Druze, she was invited to the long black tent of their sheikh. She approached the men’s quarters and entered. It never would have occurred to her to enter the women’s side of the tent; to her the harem was a curiosity, a place to observe and photograph. She thought of herself as one of the men, expecting equal treatment, as honored a guest as any male. Indeed, the Arabs had dubbed her an “honorary man.”
She moved easily between rival tribes and between contrasting cultures, and that night she dined with the Druze sheikh, sitting cross-legged on the floor, using her hand to eat the meat, scooping the yogurt with flaps of bread. Sitting with the men around the fire after dinner, she drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, while her hosts told her tales of the desert and of Turkish oppression. Wide-eyed and eager, she listened to the Druze stories of a recent ghazu, a raid, by the Beni Sakhr.
They had swept across the countryside, carrying off five thousand sheep from the flocks of the Druze. A few days later she learned that two thousand Druze were going to retaliate against the Beni Sakhr. At camp that night, she finished dinner, and while debating whether or not it was too cold to write in her diary, she heard the ugly sounds of a war song drumming in the dark. She looked up and, from the castle walls that rimmed the hilltop, saw a huge flame leap into the sky, a beacon to tell the news of the coming raid to the Druze villages scattered below. She asked the Druze soldier sitting guard in her camp if she could join the militia gathering at the bonfire. “There is no refusal; honor us,” he answered. They scrambled to the top of the sandy mountain.
On the edge of the castle moat a group of Druze, men and boys, armed with clubs and swords, were singing a brutal chant. She joined them with her guide and listened as over and over again they sang the call to war:
O Lord our God! upon them! upon them!
that the foe may fall in swathes before our swords!
Let the child leave his mother’s side,
let the young man mount and be gone.
The singing came to an end and, holding hands, the men created a circle; three young Druze stepped inside. Moving around the circle, they stopped in front of each man and, shaking their bare swords, demanded: “Are you a good man? Are you a true man?”
With the moon lighting their faces, each one shouted in turn: “Ha! ha!” It was a sound of rejoicing for blood and war.
One of the young men noticed Gertrude. He strode up and raised his sword above his head. “Lady!” he cried, “the English and the Druze are one.”
“Thank God! We too are a fighting race,” she answered, swept up in the passion to kill the enemy.
Then, still holding hands, the men ran down the hill, Gertrude running with them, holding hands, ready to join the raid. Suddenly she realized that if the Turkish Governor of Damascus got wind of her participation, he would hardly believe that the rest of her work was innocent. Turning into the darkness, she ran down to her tent. Somewhat sadly, she wrote, she “became a European again, bent on peaceful pursuits and unacquainted with the naked primitive passions of mankind.”
She stayed three weeks in the mountains, some days doing little else but drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, gossiping with the Turkish officials who patrolled the area. They soon became her friends. She could go where she liked, and no one would do anything but help her.
Two days later she was out of the Druze country, heading toward Damascus. She arrived in the desert capital on Sunday, February 26, 1905. Dust-covered and sunburned, surrounded by her caravan of ragged Bedouin—a wild-looking bunch, with matted hair and bearded faces, their bodies draped with rifles, daggers and clubs—a string of mules and camels behind them, she entered the bustling city of nearly three hundred thousand people, luxuriant, with mountains on three sides, orchards and running water on the fourth. It was said that when the prophet Muhammad arrived in Damascus, he left at once, thinking that he had just seen Paradise; he was afraid to harm his chances of returning after death. As Gertrude rode through the town, the great Ummayad Mosque stood, as it does today, a symbol of Islamic power.
A warm bath and a good rest at a clean hotel, and Gertrude went off to meet the Turkish Governor. He had sent her an anxious note. It seemed the government had been nervous about her stay in the Jebel Druze. They had received telegrams three times a day reporting on her activities, but never knew what she was going to do next. Not only was the governor interested in her; she had become well known in Syria. Wherever she went, crowds of Arabs followed her, through the narrow city streets, into the noisy bazaar. “I have become a Person in Syria!” she declared.
Droves of notables came to visit at her hotel, and every afternoon she held a reception. “Damascus flocks to drink my coffee and converse with me,” she reported with delight. During a meeting with one family, the Abdul Kadirs, she discussed her future plans to visit Ibn Rashid, and won a promise that they would help her in her journey. Most important, she learned that the French Orientalist René Dussaud was also planning a trip to Rashid headquarters in Hayil; it stirred her competitive juices. “I must hurry up!” she exclaimed, hoping to beat him there.
But for the moment it was Damascus that intrigued her, “with the desert almost up to its gates, and the breath of it blowing in with every wind, and the spirit of it passing in through the city gates with every Arab camel driver. That is the heart of the whole matter,” she wrote.
The rest of her trip she spent in Asia Minor visiting Roman and Byzantine churches. At Anavarz, where thousands of mosquitoes and three-foot-long snakes had taken lodging in the ruins, she copied inscriptions, noted archaeological and architectural details and photographed the remains. Her work would be published in a series of articles in the Revue Archéologique.
Along the way she hired a Christian servant from Aleppo, a round-faced fellow of medium height and mild temperament. “Fattuh, bless him!” she wrote, soon after the Armenian started working for her. “The best servant I have ever had, ready to cook my dinner or pack a mule or dig out an inscription with equal alacrity … and to tell me endless tales of travel as we ride … for he began life as a muleteer at the age of ten and knows every inch of ground from Aleppo to Baghdad.” He would be at her side through her most dangerous expeditions.
In Konia she met William Ramsay, a famed archaeologist, and his wife, doing excavations in the area. The meeting was fortuitous: she showed him some of the inscriptions she had copied at Bin Bir Kelesse, the Turkish area of a Thousand and One Churches, an important site for archaeologists, and he confirmed her work, laying a path for their future collaboration.
At Constantinople, her final stop, she talked Turkish politics with British officials, and discussed their major concern, the encroaching power of Germany, manifested in the Kaiser’s plan for a Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway. The Germans and Turks were becoming closely aligned in a region the British held dear. The alliance foreshadowed the bloody world war to come. But for the moment, all was quiet. By early spring, Gertrude was back in England, at work on her book about Syria and the Druze. She had come away with some strong thoughts on the East:
Islam is the bond that unites the western and central parts of the continent, as it is the electric current by which the transmission of sentiment is effected, and its potency is increased by the fact that there is little or no sense of territorial nationality to counterbalance it. A Turk or a Persian does not think or speak of “my country” in the way that an Englishman or a Frenchman thinks and speaks; his patriotism is confined to the town of which he is a native, or at most to the district in which that town lies. If you ask him to what nationality he belongs he will reply: “I am a man of Isfahan,” or “I am a man of Konia,” as the case may be, just as the Syrian will reply that he is a native of Damascus or Aleppo—I have already indicated that Syria is merely a geographical term corresponding to no national sentiment in the breasts of the inhabitants.
It would take her until the end of December 1906 to complete The Desert and the Sown, the book that made it amply clear that not only in the East—in Syria, Arabia, Mesopotamia and Turkey—but in England, too, Miss Gertrude Bell was a Person. For the two years that she worked on the book, Rounton Grange became the center of her life. Both of her grandparents had died, and although Florence Bell was never content in the country (she much preferred London life to the provinces), Hugh had moved his family into the landmark house in Yorkshire. For Gertrude, Rounton was bliss; it had always been her favorite place, and she gave it loving care, nursing her flower beds, creating a huge rock garden that won several awards and working in her study.
She struggled over the book, wrote articles and book reviews for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement, and did social work in the town of Clarence, helping the wives of the Bell Brothers’ ironworkers. A steady stream of house guests kept her from being lonely: socialites such as Lady Russell, who brought the gossip from town, or the American actress Elizabeth (Lisa) Robins, who appeared in Florence’s plays; the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, posted in Washington; Friedrich Rosen, still a member of the German Foreign Ministry; Sir Alfred Lyall, the British Administrator in India; Sir Frank Swettenham, the High Commissioner of the Malay States. There was the educator Dr. Daniel Bliss, founder of the American University in Beirut; the archaeologist William Ramsay; and the punctilious Domnul, whose political analyses were held in high esteem.
Indoors, in the big Common Room, the guests arranged themselves on the comfortable blue-and-green-patterned sofas designed by William Morris, and, with Gertrude at the center, the heated conversations bounced off the dark, silk-covered walls, jumping to the tiger skin on the floor, to the piano, and out the high arched windows to the sprawling garden. The discussions covered the globe, from Japan’s ability to supplant the Europeans in cheap foreign markets, to the hopelessness of the Russian economy and the probability of a revolution against the Czar, and also the danger of the German Kaiser and the economic threat to Britain from the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway.
At tea in the garden on a lovely summer day, Frank Swettenham revealed one of the secrets of his remarkable career as a diplomat. “Whatever success I have had in life,” he told an attentive Gertrude, “I owe to having been willing to accept information from any source. It only meant a little trouble, being nice to people, and polite when they came to me with news, and rewarding them for it when it was worth having. The government offices won’t accept information except from official sources. I know hundreds of people in the Far East who could give them the most valuable information, but they won’t take it.”
Gertrude took careful note of his words. She felt no hesitation in talking to anyone. Whether with shopkeepers, desert sheikhs or British dignitaries, she radiated confidence. Like a skilled diplomat, she could start a conversation with ease and establish her own credentials with lightning speed, ticking off the influential names, reeling out the right tidbits of knowledge, dishing up the latest gossip, sprinkling her sentences with whom she knew and where she had been, imparting generous pieces of information, but cleverly gathering in more than she gave. Her talent was invaluable, whether in formal drawing rooms or flapping desert tents.
After two years she was eager to return to the East. On a brief visit with Saloman Reinach to have him go over her writings for the Revue Archéologique, she met René Dussaud, who showed her Nabathean and Safaitic inscriptions and discussed what was to be found in the Nejd, the Arabian desert of Ibn Rashid.
But the timing was still not right; the desert was still dangerous, and the British Government would not give her permission to travel there. Instead, she proposed a trip to William Ramsay, boldly offering to pay his expenses if they could work together in Turkey and jointly write a book about their excavations. Although his assistants, ordinarily, were much more experienced than she, Ramsay agreed, and in March 1907 Gertrude went off to meet him in Asia Minor.
She left, basking in the glow of reviews for her newly published book, The Desert and the Sown. Its ebullient prose and careful analysis, her extensive photographs, and a color frontispiece, “Bedouins of the Syrian Desert,” by John Singer Sargent, made it an immediate success. The work was deemed “among the dozen best books of Eastern travel” by David Hogarth, who placed it in importance alongside Arabia Deserta, the now classic work by Charles Doughty. It was called “brilliant” by The Times and “fascinating” by The Times Literary Supplement, which noted: “Women perhaps make the best travellers, for when they have the true wanderer’s spirit they are more enduring and, strange to say, more indifferent to hardship and discomfort than men. They are unquestionably more observant of details and quicker to receive impressions. Their sympathies are more alert, and they get into touch with strangers more readily.” The New York Times remarked: “The ways of English women are strange. They are probably the greatest slaves to conventionality in the world, but when they break with it, they do it with a vengeance.”
If not with vengeance, at least with determination, Gertrude plunged into her work with Ramsay, knowing that collaborating with him would help confirm her reputation as a serious archaeologist.
She arrived at the British consulate in Konia, stopped to pick up her mail and make arrangements, and met Major Charles (Richard) Doughty-Wylie, the British official in residence. Almost at once she wrote to Domnul, “You know there is an English V. Consul here now, a charming young soldier with a quite pleasant little wife. He is the more interesting of the two, a good type of Englishman, wide awake and on the spot, keen to see and learn. Will you tell Willie T. [William Tyrell in the Foreign Office] I congratulate him on the appointment.”
After her work with Ramsay was finished, she returned to Konia and stayed with the Doughty-Wylies. Mrs. Wylie, a gracious host, took her to the bazaar to buy kilims and accompanied her to a church to measure the floor plan. But it was back at the consulate villa that Gertrude spent hours pleasuring a burgeoning friendship with the tall, blue-eyed officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Major Doughty-Wylie. The sympathetic vice-consul was the nephew of Charles Doughty, whose Arabia Deserta served as Gertrude’s bible. Meeting Doughty’s nephew was more than just good luck. It was a gift from heaven. The charming fellow—virile, funny, chivalrous—tantalized her with stories of his uncle and entertained her with heroic tales of his own, as both a soldier and statesman. Sitting under the trees in the big garden, they sipped tea and traded thoughts on the Turks, the Arabs and the East. By the time she left Konia, she pronounced the Doughty-Wylies “dears, both of them.”