Desert Queen

by Janet Wallach

  After lunch the threesome walked to the tel to observe the digging. Gertrude had described the northern mound of Carchemish in Amurath to Amurath: “covered with the ruins of the Roman and Byzantine city, columns and moulded bases, foundations of walls set round paved courtyards and the line of a colonnaded street running across the ruin field form the high ridge.… It has long been desolate, but there is no mistaking the greatness of the city that was protected by that splendid mound.”

  As she reached the hill, she saw that trenches had been cut out; below the Roman remains could be seen foundations dating to prehistoric times. Still, she opined, there was “precious little” and the work was “bad.” Only a few weeks earlier she had observed the precise excavations and elegant reconstructions of some German archaeologists; now she watched as, under English tutelage, some eighty natives shoveled the earth, hacking away at the remains of ancient civilization, eager to find a treasure and receive a promised bonus. Gertrude was taken aback. “Prehistoric!” she exclaimed, and proceeded to lecture the two young men on the modern techniques of digging.

  The young scholars had readied themselves for the challenge.

  And so [Lawrence wrote the next day to his mother], we had to squash her with a display of erudition. She was taken (in 5 minutes) over Byzantine, Crusader, Roman, Hittite and French architecture (my part) and over Greek folk-lore, Assyrian architecture, and Mesopotamian ethnology (by Thompson); prehistoric pottery and telephoto lenses, Bronze Age metal techniques, Meredith, Anatole France and the Octoberists (by me): the Young Turk movement, the construct state in Arabic, the price of riding camels, Assyrian burial-customs, and German methods of excavation with the Baghdad railway (by Thompson). This was a kind of hors d’oeuvre: and when it was over (she was getting more respectful) we settled down each to seven or eight subjects and questioned her upon them. She was quite glad to have tea after an hour and a half, and on going told Thompson that he had done wonders in his digging in the time, and that she thought we had got everything out of the place that could possibly have been got: she particularly admired the completeness of our notebooks.

  So we did for her. She was really too captious at first, coming straight from the German diggings at Kalat Shirgat. Our digs are I hope more accurate, if less perfect. They involve no reconstruction, which ruins all these Teutons. So we showed her that and left her limp, but impressed. She is pleasant; about 36, not beautiful (except with a veil on, perhaps). It would have been most annoying if she had denounced our methods in print. I don’t think she will.

  Gertrude was indeed impressed; the conversation continued animatedly through dinner, and after pleasing Lawrence no end by presenting her hosts with two Meredith novels, which she had already finished, she spent the night at Carchemish. She awakened before dawn and rode out of camp at five-thirty A.M., somewhat bewildered by the villagers who came out to jeer; she had no idea that, in trying to calm them, Lawrence told them she was too plain to marry. Years later she laughed when she found out from Hogarth that Lawrence had given them such an excuse to keep his bachelorhood.

  The evening after she left Carchemish, Lawrence sent Hogarth a note, far more sympathetic than the one to his mother: “Thompson has dressed tonight and something of the sadness of the last shirt and collar is overtaking him, for Gerty has gone back to her tents to sleep. She has been a success: and a brave one. She called him prehistoric! (apropos of your digging methods, till she saw their result—an enthusiast … young I think).”

  At almost the same time, back in her own camp, Gertrude was writing to Florence, giving no hint at all of either the rivalry or the newfound friendship with T. E. Lawrence: “They showed me their diggings and their finds and I spent a pleasant day with them.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dick

  At home again in England in 1911 and 1912, Gertrude worked on her book about Ukhaidir, taking time out to write articles for academic journals on archaeology and book reviews for The Times, attend the coronation of George V in London and make speeches for the Anti-Suffrage League. But now it was Asiatic Turkey that consumed her interest. The Ottoman Government was suffering a quick decline, succumbing at home to the will of the Young Turks (the reformist group that rose against it in the name of nationalism), and in Europe to the fervor of independence of the Balkan states. During the costly Balkan Wars of 1912, the Sultan lost his hold over Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro. What would happen to the Ottoman interests in Asia? Gertrude worried. Syria, Mesopotamia, Arabia would all be up for grabs. “I should not be surprised if we were to see, in the course of the next ten years, the break-up of the empire in Asia also, the rise first of Arab autonomies,” she wrote presciently toward the end of 1912 to Domnul, just knighted and traveling in India after his recent retirement from The Times.

  She had been hearing much about Turkey from Richard Doughty-Wylie, who was now living in Constantinople. They corresponded frequently, she and he and his wife, Judith: Gertrude filling them in on her trips and her books, congratulating him on his heroic efforts to stop the Turkish massacre of Armenians at Adana; they telling her about events in Anatolia and in Constantinople, where he was posted during the Balkan Wars. Gertrude had seen him in England in 1908, when he came home for a brief visit, and again in 1912, when he was called back to London for a change in assignment. But before long, he went off again, in charge of the Red Cross relief effort in Turkey, where the Balkan states were allied and fighting to yank Macedonia away from Turkish rule. On Christmas Day 1912 she received a letter from him from the Turkish capital, and weeks after, in the early spring of 1913, Doughty-Wylie and his wife arrived in London. Gertrude took tea with them on an occasional afternoon, dined with them on an evening, chatted with them about events in the East.

  The more she saw of him, the more attracted she was. No one she knew intrigued her like Doughty-Wylie. He was the consummate male of the British Empire, a decorated soldier-statesman, a sensitive, literate scholar who loved to quote poetry, a shrewd political analyst, a lustful man who roused her deepest desires. In July, she invited him to her Yorkshire house, and in a prurient moment when his wife was away, he accepted her invitation and came. It was a daring move for Gertrude. Rounton was home, intimate. She would be bringing him into her most personal world, showing him her most emotional treasures, revealing herself in a way that she never would have done in London.

  She introduced him to her family, showed him around the favorite house of her childhood, the flower beds she had nursed, the rock garden she had created, the library where, even as a young girl she had read voraciously. They talked and talked, she, about the loneliness of being unmarried; he, about the loneliness of being unhappily married; she, about the joy she found in solitude; he, about the joy he found in sex. She sensed his profound hunger and felt the thrill of his passion. They stood in her bedroom, close to each other, her heart pounding, her cheeks turning hot, and as his blue eyes burned with desire, he took her in his arms. He wanted her, but she refused.

  A few days later he wrote from London to thank her for the visit. It was to be the first of dozens of letters between them, each an intense display of fervor and passion. There were never love letters like these between other couples, she would later tell a friend; never letters of such depth and pain and beauty. In this first round of their new correspondence, Dick told her how he loved seeing her in her “vital setting,” surrounded by the people, the house, the gardens that meant so much to her. He loved talking to her, hearing what she cared about most. He had always wanted to be her close friend, he said, ever since they met in Anatolia. “Now I feel as if we had come closer, were really intimate friends.… I must write something, something to show you how very proud I am to be your friend. Something to have meaning, even if it cannot be set down, affection, my dear, and gratitude and admiration and confidence, and an urgent desire to see you as much as possible.… Yours ever, R.”

  But as quickly as he roused her hopes, he dashed them. A note came the following
day to say that once again he was being posted abroad. She sat in her room at Rounton and wrote, telling him of the pleasure she felt in the early morning hours in her garden, of the joy she felt at being near him. Her letters reached him at his old bachelor quarters in London, where he was staying while Judith was away in Wales.

  “While I am alone, let’s be alone,” he teased in reply. “Ah yes, my dear, it’s true enough what I said about solitude, on every hill, in every forest, I have invoked, and welcomed her.… And you, too, know the goddess well, for no one but a worshipper could have written what you did about the hush of dawn in the garden. But for all that, we shall meet and say nothing, and go on as before.”

  But he was troubled, he said, by a recurring dream: “Rounton ghosts visited me the next night also. Is there any history of them?… some shadowy figure of a woman, who really quite bothered me, so that I turned on the light. It wasn’t your ghost, or anything like you; but something hostile and alarming.” He ended the letter, “Dick.”

  She was a spinster of forty-five, alone, aching for a husband, yearning for children. He was a married man, grounded to a woman of wealth and social position. The situation seemed impossible, ridden with ghosts and guilt. Yet even as he spoke of the hopelessness of it all, her desire grew. When was he leaving? she wanted to know. What would happen to them? Should she still write to him after he left? Should she write only to him or to Judith too?

  He informed her calmly that she had better write to them both. Having read her letters before, his wife would find it odd if she were suddenly barred from seeing their correspondence. After all, “on voyages one lives at close quarters—not even with you would I like it, that is, not always, but only when we wanted to.… But what’s the good of writing like this?” he asked.

  He was nearly ready to leave for the Balkans, prepared to say goodbye to Gertrude, taking away any hope of another rendezvous. And yet he continued to rouse her, telling her “we shall still meet in thoughts and fancies,” and taunting her with his lust. He ended the letter: “Last night, a poor girl stopped me—the same old story—and I gave her money and sent her home.… So many are really like me, or what I used to be, and I’m sorry for them.… These desires of the body that are right and natural, that are so often nothing more than any common hunger—they can be the vehicle of the fire of the mind, and as that only are they great; and as that only are they to be satisfied.”

  And then it was time for him to go. Please write, he begged. She should call him Dick, and he would call her Gertrude, and even if his wife read the letters, their intimacy would seem to be nothing at all. Many people call each other by their first names, he told her. But as for the passionate words she had written over the past few weeks, he vowed: “Tonight I shall destroy your letters—I hate it—but it is rightful. One might die or something, and they are not for any soul but me. Even though I hide in the silent room, they pursue me. Goodbye, my dear, I kiss your hands.”

  It had been the most intense, most extraordinary few weeks in her life. Finally she had met a handsome, intelligent, sophisticated man who shared her passions for the East, the desert, the Arabs, ancient worlds, modern politics, poetry, literature, solitude. He, like no one else, understood and loved them as much as she did. Now he was gone, and she was left with anguished memory.

  She made plans to return to the desert. There was never a year more favorable for a journey into Arabia, or so they said in Damascus. Miss Gertrude Bell arrived in the city on November 27, 1913, eager to hear such news. Looking a bit weary after her voyage—by boat from England to France, a week aboard ship on the Mediterranean, then by rail from Beirut—the slightly agitated, forty-five-year-old Miss Bell stepped impatiently from her carriage, smoothed the wisps of ginger hair peeking out from her feathered hat, straightened her hobble skirt and marched briskly into the lobby of the Damascus Palace Hotel. She preferred this centrally located hotel, although it was first class and not deluxe, for she enjoyed the good rates and the good service, and the solicitous manager, who remembered her, of course; and although he might have forgotten how haunted her green eyes appeared, or how sharply pointed her nose, he recalled at once the commanding tone in her voice and the authority in her bearing. Flustered by the arrival of the famous lady (everyone in Damascus knew of the intrepid Englishwoman who traveled alone through the desert), he welcomed her with a profusion of bows and salaams, and she returned them routinely.

  Gertrude signed her name at the register and, as always, with shoulders erect and head held high, proceeded to her room. A string of Arab boys in caftans scuffled behind, struggling to carry the heavy steamer trunk that Marie, her maid, had packed with smart French gowns, pegged skirts, fur coats, tweed jackets, fringed shawls, frilly blouses, plumed hats, parasols and linen riding clothes. One of the servants toted her toiletries case fitted with silver brushes and cut-glass flacons, their polished caps twisted tight to prevent any lotions from spilling. Two more boys bore the suitcase carefully stuffed with lacy corsets and petticoats, a masquerade for her maps, cameras, film, binoculars, theodolite and guns.

  The rest of her baggage consisted of crates filled with Wedgwood china, crystal stemware, silver flatware, table linens, rugs, blank notebooks, sets of Shakespeare, archaeology texts by de Vogue and Stryzgowski, history books collected since her student days at Oxford, Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, Hogarth’s The Penetration of Arabia, the Blunts’ Pilgrimage to Nejd, guidebooks, quinine, camphor, boric ointment, a remedy for diarrhea, bandages, soaps and flea powder. It would take two weeks in Damascus to reorganize before moving forward into the desert.

  As soon as she settled in her room, simple but adequate, she sent for one of the Arab boys and, handing him some baksheesh, some coins, instructed him to deliver her calling cards, not to any Turkish officials, she warned, but to a few European acquaintances like Lütticke, the head of the well-known banking house, and Loytved, the German Consul, and to local Arabs she knew she could trust.

  She arranged her clothes as best she could and smiled to herself as she took out her shoes and felt for the bullets inside them. “I need not have hidden the cartridges in my boots!” she wrote home. “We got through customs without having a single box opened.” She had foiled the Turks again.

  After the sun set over the Syrian hills, she pinned up her hair, changed into a gown and checked to see that her cigarette case was in her evening purse before going downstairs to dinner. She was greeted warmly in the hotel restaurant, where full pension, but not wine, was included in the ten-franc daily room rate. The waiters hovered attentively, bringing her food that was reliable if not remarkable, as Murray’s guidebook had promised. After coffee she excused herself from the Bruntons, an English couple at her table, and went to her room, making a few notes in her leather diary before retiring.

  In bed that first night in the city, she could hardly keep from thinking about the journey to Central Arabia that lay ahead. She had cherished the idea of this expedition for more than a dozen years. Time and again she had tried to organize the voyage, but in the past the warnings of friends like Sir Louis Mallet in the Foreign Office or Willie Tyrrell, the Secretary of State, had forestalled her. Four years ago Percy Cox, the British Resident in the Gulf who worked for the Intelligence office of India Civil Service, had cautioned her again; it was far too dangerous for anyone to cross the desert.

  But she had never given up her desire to uncover the mystery of Central Arabia. She was well aware that its vast, relentless desert, the Nejd, was fraught with hazards. She knew she might face endless days parched from lack of water, and endless days soaked from floods, as heavy rains drenched the impervious ground. It was winter and there would be weeks when the temperature dropped below freezing at night and weeks when the sun blazed furiously at noon. She knew she would have to fight off hordes of fleas that hovered around the camels, and that she would find snakes and scorpions stalking the sand. And there would be the inevitable sand; sand as far as the eye could see, sometimes bleak blac
k sand, sometimes yawning yellow mounds of sand, sometimes hard, gray, unforgiving sand.

  And yet, she loved the desert. For her it meant escape. She had written years before: “To those bred under an elaborate social order few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel. The gates of the enclosed garden are thrown open, the chain at the entrance of the sanctuary is lowered … and, like the man in the fairy story, you feel the bands break that were riveted about your heart.” Indeed, the bands around her heart were not just the obstacles of English society but the shackles that constrained her love for a married man. Travel would let her break free.

  The morning brought good news. Fattuh, the loyal Armenian who had served her on a decade of desert journeys, had arrived from his home in Aleppo. There was much to be done before she could set out from Damascus, and they went off together to see one of the people who could assist her the most, Sheikh Muhammad Bassam, a man she had met in the desert long ago. Rich and well-connected, Bassam shared the friendship of the Bedouin sheikhs as well as the confidence of the notables in town. He could help her hire the most experienced guide, help her find the best and cheapest camels, help her lay out a path in the shifting Arabian sands.