A Woman in Arabia

by Gertrude Bell

  Leaving Damascus, December 19–21, 1913

  Already I have dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place; silence and solitude fall around you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon, the bustle of getting into camp, the talk round Muhammad’s coffee fire after dinner, profounder sleep than civilization ever knows—and then the road again. And as usual one feels as secure and confident in this lawless country as one does in one’s own village.

  The lawless element of the country soon made itself felt.

  December 22, 1913

  A preposterous and provoking episode has delayed us to-day. We had marched about 2 hours when we sighted camels and the smoke of tents. We took them to be (as indeed they were) Arabs of the Mountain, the Jebel Druze. . . . We tried in Dumeir to get one of the Jebel Druze Arabs as a companion and failed—and we suffered for it. Presently a horseman came galloping over the plain, shooting as he came. . . . He wheeled round us, shouting that we were foes, that we should not approach with weapons and then while he aimed his rifle at me or other of us Muhammad and Ali tried to pacify him, but in vain. He demanded of Ali his rifle and fur cloak, which were thrown to him, and by this time a dozen or more men had come galloping or running up, some shooting, all shouting, half dressed—one of them had neglected to put on any clothes at all—with matted black locks falling about their faces. They shrieked and leapt at us like men insane. One of them seized Muhammad’s camel and drew the sword which hangs behind his saddle with which he danced round us, slashing the air and hitting my camel on the neck to make her kneel. Next they proceeded to strip my men of their revolvers, cartridge belts and cloaks. My camel got up again and as there was nothing to be done but to sit quiet and watch events that’s what I did. Things looked rather black, but they took a turn for the better when my camel herd, a negro, was recognised by our assailants, and in a minute or two some sheikhs came up, knew Ali and Muhammad, and greeted us with friendship. Our possessions were returned. . . .

  The account she sent her parents of being detained at Ziza, and then obliged to absolve the Turkish authorities of responsibility for her, differs from that which she sent to Dick Doughty-Wylie (see “The Lover”). The British ambassador to Constantinople, Sir Louis Mallet, had already warned her not to go to Hayyil, telling her that if she went ahead, His Majesty’s Government (HMG) would disclaim all responsibility for her. She was more anxious than she appears here, and the Turks were more reluctant to let her go.

  January 9, 1914

  As I said before, paf! I’m caught. I was an idiot to come in so close to the railway, but I was like an ostrich with its head in the sand. . . . Besides I wanted my letters and Fattuh [arriving by train]. . . .

  I rode off to Mshetta, which is only an hour from my camp. As we came back Ali, the camel driver, looked up and said “Are those horsemen or camel riders going to our tents?” I looked, and they were horsemen and, what is more, they were soldiers, and when we rode in they were sitting round our camp fire. More and more came, to the number of 10, and last of all a very angry, rude (and rather drunken) little Jack-in-Office of a Chaowish [staff sergeant], who said they had been looking for me ever since I left Damascus.

  I sent off at once telegrams to Beyrout and Damascus to the two Consuls, but I had to send a man with them to Madeba and the Chaowish intercepted them and put the man, one of my camel drivers, into the Ziza castle, practically a prisoner. Thither he presently sent Fattuh also, on some imaginary insult (F. had said nothing) and then he ransacked our baggage, took possession of our arms, and posted men all round my tent. All this which he had not the slightest right to do I met with an icy calmness for which God give me the reward. . . . I am busy forging new plans for I am not beaten yet. . . . Fattuh [released that morning] observes cheerfully “I spent the first night of the journey in the railway station, and the second in prison, and now where?”

  January 14, 1914

  The Kaimmakam* not having arrived this morning, I came down to Amman and here I found him on his way to me, a charming, educated man, a Christian, willing and ready to let me go anywhere I like. . . . I have telegraphed to Damascus for permission to visit the ruins round Ziza and if I get that . . . , I shall have relieved my friend [the Kaimmakam] of all responsibility and shall be free. . . . I shall be glad when the permission comes.

  Amman, January 14, 1914

  I have to-day permission from the Vali to go when I like. The permission comes just in time for all my plans were laid and I was going to run away to-morrow night.

  January 19, 1914

  We left Amman on the 15th, I have given the authorities at Amman an assurance that the Ott. Government was not responsible for me.

  At the end of February, after a daunting journey, Gertrude reached the desert city of Hayyil, where they refused to honor her promissory note. Without money or resources, she was held against her will (see “The Prisoner”). Finally reaching Baghdad at the end of March, she found that modern life had caught up with the ancient city.

  Baghdad, March 29, 1914

  The slow Tigris and the native boats loaded with steel rails, the steam cranes working under the palm trees, the great locomotives of the latest pattern standing in all stages of completion in the middle of a devastated palm garden, the blue clad, ragged Arabs working and singing as they worked and hauled, and among them the decisive military Germans, sharp of word, straight of carriage—it was the old East meeting the newest West and going down before it.

  Gertrude still had to cross some 450 miles of the Syrian Desert by camel back to Damascus. Tired when she started, she was totally exhausted by the time they reached the city. There she was taken in by friends and stayed some time convalescing.

  Fallujah, April 13, 1914, Diary

  . . . we are travelling very light. . . . I have a very small and light native tent, with my bed in a Wolseley valise and one chair—that’s all I have except a bagful of clothes. . . . My one luxury is my canvas bath! It’s hot now, you know, and it will serve to water the camels in if necessary. . . . This is not desert; my bed lies on grass. . . . But it is out under the open sky again and at once my heart leaps to it. . . . Here comes the great procession of the stars—Sirius sparkled out long ago—here is the Great Bear with his eternal interrogations, and the sicle of Leo—all my friends. The Twins, and there is Capella’s lovely face half veiled in heat haze; Aldebaran, and above me Procyon—a thousand welcomes!

  April 23–26, 1914

  . . . So far I have run my own show quite satisfactorily and it amuses me to be tongue and voice for myself, as I have been these days. But I am tired, and being anxious to get through and be done with travel, we are making long marches, 9 and 10 hours. Oh, but they are long hours, day after day in the open wilderness! I have come in sometimes more dead than alive, too tired to eat and with just enough energy to write my diary. . . .

  On the 24th we began the day by sighting something lying in the desert with an ominous flutter of great wings over it. Assaf [her road companion] observed that it was 3 dead camels and 2 dead men, killed ten nights ago—ghazu met ghazu, said he. . . .

  On the 26th . . . In the middle of the morning we met a man walking solitary in the desert. We rode up to him and addressed him in Arabic, but he made no answer. Assaf, my rafiq, said he thought he must be a Persian dervish. I spoke to him in Turkish and in what words of Persian I could muster, but he made no reply. Fattuh gave him some bread which he accepted and turned away from us into the rainy wilderness, going whither? . . . We are terribly bothered by wind, both marching and in camp, when it sheets us in dust. We march very long hours, and oh, I’m tired!

  EXCERPTS FROM GERTRUDE’S TRAVEL BOOKS

  Gertrude’s first travel book, Persian Pictures, is a collection of essays detailing her initial excursion into the East in 1892. She herself called it “extraordinarily feeble” and wished it to re
main unpublished, but her family was disappointed and she conceded. This extract, about a horseback excursion with an early boyfriend, stands out for the freshness and excitement of her first visit to a Zoroastrian “Tower of the Dead.”

  The Tower of Silence

  Hundreds of years ago, when the Persian race first issued from unknown Bactria and the grim Hyrcanian forests, passing through the Caspian Gates, they came upon a fertile land lying to the north-east of the country, which was subsequently named Media. There on the edge of the province known to-day as Khorasan they founded a city, which with the rolling centuries gathered greatness and riches and power; the Greeks (for her fame had penetrated to the limits of the civilized world) called her Rages. Key to Hyrcania and Parthia, the geographical position of the Median city lent her considerable importance. The Jews knew her well: in Rages dwelt that Gabelus to whom the pious Tobit entrusted his ten talents of silver in the days of the Captivity; there Tobias was journeying when the angel Raphael met him and instructed him in the healing properties of fishes; there, relates the author of the Book of Judith, reigned Phraortes whom Nebuchadnezzar smote through with his darts and utterly destroyed.

  Rages, the Ancient of Days, passed through many vicissitudes of fortune in the course of her long-drawn life. Under her walls fled the last Darius when Alexander’s army chased him, vanquished at Arbela, over the wide plains of Khorasan—fled to the mountains of the Caspian to seek a luckless fate at the hands of the cruel Bactrian satrap. At Rages, perhaps, the generous Alexander mourned the untimely death of his rival, from her palaces hurled his vengeance against Bessus, and saw the satrap dragged a captive to execution. Twice the city was destroyed, by earthquake and by Parthian invaders, twice to rise up afresh under new names. At length, in the twelfth century, an enemy more devastating than the Parthian hordes, more vindictive than the earthquake, swept over pleasant Khorasan and turned the fertile province into the wilderness it is to this day. Tartars from the uttermost ends of the earth left no stone of Rages standing, and the great Median city vanished from the history of men. A few miles to the north-east Tehran has sprung up to be the capital of modern Persia—a Persia to whom the glorious traditions of the past are as forgotten as the strength of Phraortes’ walls. “The Lion and the Lizard keep the courts where Jemshyd gloried and drank deep,” but the foundations of Rages, the mother of Persian cities, can be traced only by conjecture.

  Through waste and solitary places we rode one morning to the city and the citadel of the dead. It was still so early that the sun had not over-topped the range of eastern mountains. We rode out of sleeping Tehran, and took our way along the deserted track that skirts its walls; to our left lay the wilderness, wrapped in transparent shadow, and sloping gradually upwards to the barren foot-hills over which winds the road to Meshed. Before we had gone far, with a flash and a sudden glitter, the sun leapt up above the snow-peaks, and day rushed across the plain—day, crude and garish, revealing not the bounteous plenty of the cornfields and pastures which encircled Rages, but dust and stones and desert scrub, and the naked, forbidding mountains, wrinkled by many winters.

  To us, with the headlong flight of Darius and the triumph of the conqueror surging before our eyes, the broken ground round the site of the ancient stronghold piled itself into ruined turret and rampart, sank into half-obliterated fosse and ditch. Where we imagined the walls to have been, we discovered a solid piece of masonry, and our minds reeled at the thought that it was wildly possible Alexander’s eyes might have rested on this even brickwork. Time has made gates in the battlements, but the desert has not even yet established unquestioned rule within them. At the foot of the wall we came upon a living pool lying under the shadow of a plane-tree. Round such a pool the sick men of Bethsaida gathered and waited for the stirring of the waters, but in Rages all was solitude, “and the desired angel came no more.”

  Towards the east two parallel lines of hills rear themselves out of the desert, dividing it from the wider stretch of desert that reaches southward to Isfahan. Between the hills lies a stony valley, up which we turned our steps, and which led us to the heart of desolation and the end of all things. Half-way up the hillside stands a tower, whose whitewashed wall is a landmark to all the country round. Even from the far distant peaks of the opposite mountains the Tower of Silence is visible, a mocking gleam reminding the living of the vanity of their eager days. For the tower is the first stage in the weary journey of the dead; here they come to throw off the mantle of the flesh before their bones may rest in the earth without fear of defiling the holy element, before their souls, passing through the seven gates of the planets, may reach the sacred fire of the sun.

  The tower is roofless; within, ten or twelve feet below the upper surface of its wall, is a chalky platform on which the dead bodies lie till sun and vultures have devoured them. This grim turret-room was untenanted. Zoroaster’s religion has faded from that Media where once it reigned, and few and humble now are the worshippers who raise prayers to Ormuzd under the open heaven, and whose bodies are borne up the stony valley and cast into the Tower of Silence.

  We dismounted from our horses and sat down on the hillside. The plain stretched below us like a monotonous ocean which had billowed up against the mountain flanks and had been fixed there forever; we could see the feet of the mountains themselves planted firmly in the waves of dust, and their glistening peaks towering into the cloudless sky; the very bones of the naked earth were exposed before us, and the fashion of its making was revealed.

  With the silence of an extinct world still heavy upon us, we made our way to the upper end of the valley, but at the gates of the plain Life came surging to meet us. A wild hollyhock stood sentinel among the stones; it had spread some of its yellow petals for banner and on its uplifted spears the buds were fat and creamy with coming bloom. Rain had fallen in the night, and had called the wilderness itself to life, clothing its thorns with a purple garment of tiny flowers; the delicious sun struck upon our shoulders; a joyful little wind blew the damp, sweet smell of the reviving earth in gusts towards us; our horses sniffed the air and, catching the infection of the moment, tugged at the bit and set off at racing speed across the rain-softened ground. And we, too, passed out of the silence and remembered that we lived. Life seized us and inspired us with a mad sense of revelry. The humming wind and the teeming earth shouted “Life! life!” as we rode. Life! life! the bountiful, the magnificent! Age was far from us—death far; we had left him enthroned in his barren mountains, with ghostly cities and out-worn faiths to bear him company. For us the wide plain and the limitless world, for us the beauty and the freshness of the morning, for us youth and the joy of living!

  In the preface to The Desert and the Sown,* Gertrude’s 1907 book about her experiences in Syria, she chose to write from an unusual perspective. As noted by Rosemary O’Brien in her introduction to the book, other European travelers regarded and described the foreign world with the inborn conviction that their own civilization was superior, and the interviews they reported in their books were with the locally eminent and powerful. Gertrude relates “the actual political conditions of unimportant persons” and analyzes the roots and causes of disaffection. The book cemented her early fame as a traveler and a writer.

  Those who venture to add a new volume to the vast literature of travel, unless they be men of learning or politicians, must be prepared with an excuse. My excuse is ready, as specious and I hope as plausible as such things should be. I desired to write not so much a book of travel as an account of the people whom I met or who accompanied me on my way, and to show what the world is like in which they live and how it appears to them. And since it was better that they should, as far as possible, tell their own tale, I have strung their words upon the thread of the road, relating as I heard them the stories with which shepherd and man-at-arms beguiled the hours of the march, the talk that passed from lip to lip round the camp-fire, in the black tent of the Arab and the guest-chamber of the
Druze, as well as the more cautious utterances of Turkish and Syrian officials. Their statecraft consists of guesses, often shrewd enough, at the results that may spring from the clash of unknown forces, of which the strength and the aim are but dimly apprehended; their wisdom is that of men whose channels of information and standards for comparison are different from ours, and who bring a different set of preconceptions to bear upon the problems laid before them. The Oriental is like a very old child. He is unacquainted with many branches of knowledge which we have come to regard as of elementary necessity; frequently, but not always, his mind is little preoccupied with the need of acquiring them, and he concerns himself scarcely at all with what we call practical utility. 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. You will find in the East habits of intercourse less fettered by artificial chains, and a wider tolerance born of greater diversity. Society is divided by caste and sect and tribe into an infinite number of groups, each one of which is following a law of its own, and however fantastic, to our thinking, that law may be, to the Oriental it is an ample and a satisfactory explanation of all peculiarities. A man may go about in public veiled up to the eyes, or clad if he please only in a girdle: he will excite no remark. Why should he? Like every one else he is merely obeying his own law. So too the European may pass up and down the wildest places, encountering little curiosity and of criticism even less. The news he brings will be heard with interest, his opinions will be listened to with attention, but he will not be thought odd or mad, nor even mistaken, because his practices and the ways of his thought are at variance with those of the people among whom he finds himself. “’Adat-hu:” it is his custom. And for this reason he will be the wiser if he does not seek to ingratiate himself with Orientals by trying to ape their habits, unless he is so skilful that he can pass as one of themselves. Let him treat the law of others respectfully, but he himself will meet with a far greater respect if he adheres strictly to his own. For a woman this rule is of the first importance, since a woman can never disguise herself effectually. That she should be known to come of a great and honoured stock, whose customs are inviolable, is her best claim to consideration.