Keeper Of The Mountains

by Bernadette McDonald

  Throughout Morocco, she was struck by the number of men who seemed to have nothing to do, and by the notable absence of women in public places. The exception appeared to be when there was heavy work to be done; here she saw heavily veiled women carrying weighty loads. Extreme poverty was evident everywhere. It was hard for her to accept, and disturbing to behold, that people here lived in conditions only slightly better than their animals.

  She continued her annual travels for the next three years, spending more and more time in the Middle East. On one of these trips, she fell in love with a Sudanese man named Mamoun El Amin in Khartoum. He was a tall, very dark, Muslim Arab. They met on a Nile steamer travelling upriver from Aswan to a town named Wadi Halfa, now at the bottom of Lake Nasser. They spent many hours together on the steamer deck, watching the palm trees glide by, talking, discovering each other.

  At the time, Sudan was officially the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, ruled jointly by Britain and Egypt. It had a British-trained, British-style civil service, and Mamoun was a senior administrator in Khartoum. He fascinated her. He was a study in contrasts – exotic, mysterious and educated, with a proper English accent. They spent hours in the cool of the evening sipping whisky on the veranda of her hotel and talking about his work and her travels. It was a short, intense romance. After she left Khartoum for Kenya (British East Africa, as it was then known), she never saw Mamoun again, although their correspondence reveals a deep emotional connection. Decades later, they exchanged letters again, trying to reconnect their lives. His began with “My dear Eliza.” Handling the faded letters, she admits he was one of the few men she ever considered marrying.

  After working for 11 years at Fortune, Elizabeth, at age thirty-four, was a little bored. By 1956 it was clear she wouldn’t advance any higher than a researcher, even though her work was appreciated and admired. Unsure what to do next with her life, and with no strong emotional ties, she decided the best thing was to get out of New York and really see the world. She took her profit-sharing funds from Time Inc., Fortune’s publisher, and set off for as long as the money would hold out. It was the beginning of a new life for Elizabeth Hawley, but one for which she was well prepared.

  And so in 1957 she embarked on an around-the-world journey, master of her own schedule, seeing what she wanted, going where she wished and when it suited her – no more assignments and deadlines as she had known them in New York. In order to be assured of meeting interesting people along the way, she collected numerous letters of introduction before departing. For the next two years she explored: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1957; the Middle East, Turkey, Israel, Iran and a number of Arab countries in 1958; and South and Southeast Asia, including Nepal and Japan, and finally back to the United States in 1959.

  She travelled with panache. In each new city, she would stroll into the office of the Time Inc. correspondent as though she were of a different stature – a higher one. She assumed a certain “presence” to pull it off time and time again. As a clever, curious woman travelling alone, she stood out and she met fascinating people wherever she went.

  She launched her journey on the SS Statendam, leaving New York on April 16. Using Paris as her initial base of operations, she caught a train for Warsaw, a lengthy journey that revealed a countryside and architecture in transition as she moved from the Western traditions of France and Germany into Czechoslovakia and Poland. Throughout her travels, trains were her preferred mode of transport in order to see and absorb the country at a civilized pace. Arriving in Warsaw, she was delighted to run into Judy Friedberg, her former travelling companion from Yugoslavia. Working on articles for American magazines, Judy already knew the lay of the land, so she introduced Elizabeth to several American, British and German journalists.

  Elizabeth’s first impression of Warsaw was one of shock – so much destruction, so many gaping empty spaces in the centre of the city where buildings once stood. But rebuilding had begun, and she walked the entire city, exploring the churches, the Palace of Culture and the old section that had been rebuilt in its original baroque style. The locals joked with her about the Palace of Culture – a gift from Stalin to Warsaw, and truly ugly. They told her that the best view in town was from the palace’s 30th-floor observation deck – because it was the only place in the city where it couldn’t be seen.

  Together with her new journalist friends, she attended the May Day parade, where there was enthusiastic response to the new party secretary, Gomulka. That was nothing compared to the frenzied response to the cardinal of Poland when he led a parade of half a million Poles in the town of Częstochowa for the annual dedication of Poland to the Virgin Mary. Recently released from three years’ imprisonment, Cardinal Wyszyński would soon appear on the cover of Time, courtesy of Judy Friedberg.

  In Łódź Elizabeth interviewed the chairman of a Jewish civic group in Poland whose family was in the process of emigrating to Israel, along with most of Poland’s seventy thousand other remaining Jews. He explained to her that anti-Semitism persisted in Poland and there was no future for them there. The family story was astonishing. The parents and one of the daughters had spent the last nine months of World War II hidden behind bookstacks in a convent library in Vilna (now known as Vilnius), which was in Poland before the war but was now the capital of Lithuania. Behind the bookstacks was a small room where they had lived with nine others. There were three beds and that was all. They could never raise their voices above a whisper and could only use an upstairs bathroom quietly and secretively at night. While they were in hiding, the Germans systematically destroyed the Vilna ghetto. Vilna’s Jewish population went from eighty thousand to five hundred, leaving only eight families intact, including the Łódź family. It was a chance for Elizabeth to become aware of a war experience she could not have imagined while living those war years in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Travelling around Poland was an extraordinary learning experience. It was a study in contrasts – a devoutly Roman Catholic nation struggling to build a socialist state. Contrasts also existed in the economic well-being of the people. It was an obviously poor country, yet there were some well-dressed people in the streets of Warsaw who ate as much caviar as they could manage. Finally, after three weeks in Poland, Elizabeth felt an “accumulation of drabness in her soul,” brought on by the greyness and dustiness and absence of anything well designed or in good working order. So it was with relief and a light heart that she moved on to Sweden and Finland. “They know a bit about colour and design,” she wrote her mother.

  While in Helsinki, Elizabeth was at the train station, press pass in hand, when Bulganin and Khrushchev arrived from Russia. It was a strange sensation to witness, stepping down from the train, a man whose picture she had seen a million times before – the president of the USSR. Later in the week, she spent an hour seated just below the two men at a union rally in the Olympic Stadium and, at a government reception, Bulganin actually smiled at her. She sensed a certain coldness in this man with his blank pale-blue eyes, but she found Khrushchev to be amiable, with shrewd and piercing deep-set eyes.

  From Helsinki, she took the train to Leningrad for a long-awaited, month-long trip to the USSR. She visited Moscow, Stalingrad (now Volgograd) and the provinces, always accompanied by a guide interpreter who seemed to think Elizabeth was some kind of working journalist in disguise. Therefore, he made sure she saw only the “best” sights. As always, she arranged to connect with people living in the area.

  She floated down the Volga and the romantic Don River to Rostov, and then ventured on to Georgia. On the flight to Tbilisi, Georgia, the snowcapped Caucasus Mountains and the deep, sun-baked valleys were impressive. Everything about this part of the world intrigued her, particularly the dark, fierce-looking Georgians. She tromped through monasteries and fortresses from the second and fifth centuries and visited Gori, where Stalin was born and where the crude house in which he spent the first four years of his life still stood, carefully preserved.

  Then it was on to Kiev an
d finally the long train journey back to Moscow. She was joined in her double compartment by a Muscovite, who became amorous during the night and attempted to molest her. She managed to fend him off, but found the event unnerving. It wasn’t the first time she had encountered this kind of harassment when travelling, but she recalls that it was rare. In general, she met a lot of men and most of them were intriguing. In fact, she preferred men. She didn’t meet many women in her travels and admits she found few among them to interest her. It was unusual at the time for a woman to travel alone, especially to such remote places, but Elizabeth was undaunted.

  Back in Moscow she met up with some friends from the New York Times who were gathering the pieces of a story about recent political machinations in the Central Committee. She tagged along with them to the telegraph office, fascinated to watch how they filed their stories, submitted them to the censors, waited for telephone lines to London to send them off and finally retired to a reporter’s apartment for a late evening of conversation, scrambled eggs and whisky. Here was her first taste of a foreign correspondent’s life and she loved it.

  By July 12 Elizabeth was relieved to arrive in Vienna, a city she knew, a language that was at least a bit familiar, newspapers that carried stories that made sense to her, a comfortable room with a splendid bath featuring hot and cold running water, and a bed with a reading lamp! Life in Vienna was luxuriously lazy. She slept each day until 10:00 a.m., enjoyed hot chocolate and rolls in her room, read the New York Times and the Herald Tribune in a nearby park and then ate lunch. She worked a little on her report on Finnish socialism for Life, but more often than not became distracted by a book.

  She was also planning the next leg of her trip, this time to Romania and Czechoslovakia. She was disappointed when the Romanians informed her they weren’t accepting individual tourists that year. She had more luck with the Czechs and was in Prague by the end of July. Fortunate to have escaped a lot of destruction during the war, the city was mostly intact, with fabulous castles, towers, old bridges, palaces and churches.

  The next few months found Elizabeth travelling throughout Czechoslovakia, West Germany, Greece, Italy and Yugoslavia. Back in Belgrade she met up with New York Times reporter Elie Abel, so she was able to get in on the latest happenings and social functions. The city had transformed itself since her visit six years earlier: her hotel now had soap and stationery for its guests, street lights were working, new buildings had gone up and the shops were full of goods, many of them imported from Germany, Italy and France.

  She continued to hound the Romanian embassy for a visa to visit that country, only to be frustrated with endless delay tactics, along with a need to do everything multiple times. She described her Belgrade visit to her mother: “Just a mad social whirl by night – and the interior of the Romanian embassy by day.”

  She remained in Belgrade until mid-December and watched winter descend on the city with a blanket of snow. Walking in the streets was a joy. Each morning she strolled to a newsstand selling the international edition of the New York Times, which she would devour cover to cover. It was her way of keeping in touch with the rest of the world, a daily routine she treasured. It was a habit she would never break.

  CHAPTER 5

  Halfway to Asia

  There’s no reason I know of to hurry away.

  — Elizabeth Hawley

  By the end of 1957, tired of waiting for a decision from the Romanians, Elizabeth decided to move on to the next stage of her travels – the Middle East. Her mother’s interest in the life of British explorer and political power broker Gertrude Bell sparked her initial attraction to the region. Elizabeth had read Bell’s published letters recounting her desert escapades and nation building in the Middle East, and now she wanted to see this part of the world for herself. Beyond Gertrude Bell, however, a whole parade of wandering women inspired Elizabeth: Isak Dinesen, who had moved to Kenya and struggled to build a farm in Africa; Alexandra David-Néel, who had disguised herself as a pilgrim to wander throughout the wildest parts of Asia; and others. Years later she met Freya Stark in Kathmandu, where she listened to her tales of adventure. Elizabeth devoured all of their yarns, admired their bravery and curiosity and proceeded to create some stories of her own.

  She took the Balkan Express from Vienna to Yugoslavia and Greece and finally to Istanbul. It was a long journey made entertaining by the people she met. The Greeks were friendly to her, giving her advice and introducing her to Greek red wine. But they were critical of her plans to go to Turkey and warned her that Turkey was dirty, the Turks themselves were dirty and Istanbul smelled. She didn’t take them too seriously, though, because none of them had actually been to Turkey. In fact, most of those travelling through Greece to Turkey were Yugoslavian emigrants looking for a better life.

  In Istanbul Elizabeth marvelled at the skyline of minarets and rounded domes. The view up close was less romantic, since it was impossible to ignore the dirty alleys, the buildings in disrepair and a general state of grime. But it was lovely from a distance. Upon seeing the harem section of the old sultan’s palace, she confided to her mother that it must have been “fantastically lovely in its heyday, but an awful bore for the ladies.” And she was amused one afternoon to observe Premier Nuri al-Said of Iraq enjoying a parfait in the Hilton coffee shop. She wondered what he thought of it.

  From Istanbul she took a berth on the Taurus Express to Aleppo, Syria, home of desert explorer Gertrude Bell’s much-loved servant, and the beginning of some of Bell’s desert wanderings. In Aleppo Elizabeth befriended a young Armenian boy who took her around the city to mosques and palaces, the souk and a 13th-century citadel.

  From there she took a seven-hour dolmush (car) ride to Beirut, where she settled in. Before a week had passed, she was reacquainted with old friends and had acquired a few new ones, including a curious young man named Kim Philby, who later became famous as a double agent for British Intelligence and the Soviet KGB. She also met his father, the famous Arabist John Philby, who had been the first European to visit the southern provinces of the Nejd. John had known Gertrude Bell, and commented to Elizabeth that he thought Gertrude’s much-lauded Arabic language skills were questionable. Elizabeth thought he was being a chauvinist.

  But the world’s politics were urging her to move on. February 21, 1958, was the date set for a plebiscite in Syria and Egypt to confirm the new union of the two countries; although the results were more or less a foregone conclusion, she was sure the event would be memorable and she wanted to be in Damascus to see it. Just then, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) offered her a six-month job writing articles about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and the work being done for them by UNRWA. The job would entail travelling to places where the refugees lived, such as Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. To support the refugees, UNRWA needed to raise money; therefore, they needed to raise their profile, particularly in the English-speaking world. How could she resist? She was pleased, not only because of the financial implications, but also because she wanted to see what she could accomplish as a writer.

  Before the job began, she had just enough time to go to Damascus for the plebiscite. She was disappointed with the city, which had been described to her as the loveliest Arab city. But the plebiscite produced the effect she was expecting. The city came alive when Egyptian president Nasser flew in from Cairo, with tens of thousands pouring in from all over Syria. Huge groups marched, shouting slogans in favour of Nasser, the Union and Arabism in general, and against Israel, Hussein of Jordan, Eisenhower and other symbols of imperialism. It spun out of control and eight small children were trampled to death in this spontaneous outpouring of support for Nasser. She found him to be tall, dark and handsome, a striking person with a commanding presence.

  But the atmosphere was tense. She believed she was being watched constantly, as in the Soviet Union. A military policeman even asked her to turn over the film in her camera. When she refused, she ended up arguing her case at mil
itary police headquarters – successfully, as it turned out. During the mob scene, a kind man had taken her under his wing to ensure she wasn’t swept away by the masses, but she later learned he too was a secret-police officer. Even her hotel concierge constantly asked where she was going and with whom.

  Back in Beirut Elizabeth luxuriated in the lack of surveillance, enjoying relaxing conversations in her hotel lobby and on the outdoor veranda, discussing current events with anyone of interest who came through. Subjects ranged from Nasser’s future to charges of Saudi plots, rumours of the assassination of Jordan’s King Hussein, the strengths and weaknesses of Iraq’s Premier Nuri Said and the general state of the Middle East. She was also looking forward to her new job, but then came an unpleasant surprise. While she was in Damascus, the job had vanished into thin air. Disappointed, she went back to her original plan and headed to Egypt on an Italian boat.

  She arrived in Cairo on March 17 and settled into the Semiramis Hotel, where she had a private veranda with a commanding view of the broad and placid Nile. She was immediately greeted by an Egyptian doctor she had met on her 1955 trip. Her rarely seen romantic side surfaced, and she plotted the next three weeks with an eye to ensuring she would be in Cairo when the full moon cast its magical light on the pyramids. She had worried that Cairo would be “another slightly quaint, slightly annoyingly Eastern city,” but that was not the case. It had many attributes: the Nile, palm trees, the sandy desert, the pyramids and the vivid colours of sand, sky and palm.

  Donning blue jeans, she climbed to the top of the highest pyramid, amazed by the views. Unused to physical exertion, her muscles protested with each step the following day. She attended political rallies, visited new friends at their homes, attended the Bolshoi Ballet and was entertained by her Egyptian doctor friend. The time passed agreeably and she decided to stay longer than originally planned. “There’s no reason that I know of to hurry away,” she wrote her mother. It was a cosmopolitan city filled with people of many nationalities, bringing with them many different ways of thinking. To Elizabeth, it felt like a meeting place experiencing a three-way awakening: Arab, Asian and African, all at the same time.