Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  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 mosq
uito 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 pla
ces.

  “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.”