A Woman in Arabia

by Gertrude Bell

  The second diary, with entries written a few days apart, was a thoughtful and polished account of her journey and feelings, kept solely for Dick—with the proviso that his wife might read them—and portraying her as a shade less robust in her attitude to dangers and setbacks. She bundled up these diary entries and sent them to Dick when she arrived at an outpost or town big enough to have a post office. As she now had to avoid the Turkish soldiers who were looking out for her, she often had to carry her papers with her for weeks until she could send them.

  She traveled on through all kinds of danger and difficulty but once again fell under the spell of the desert, terrifying and beautiful, with its roaring silence and jeweled nights.

  The caravan left Damascus on December 16, 1913. The journey was marred by torrential rain and bitter winds. Not a week later came a tribal attack in which shots were fired, and they were nearly robbed of all their rifles and possessions. Not long afterward, her camp was invaded by Turkish soldiers who demanded permits she did not have. They arrested her faithful servant, Fattuh, and her guide, Muhammad al-Ma’rawi. She managed to persuade the local governor, the qaimaqam, to get them released but was ordered to telegraph for permits to travel before the caravan could leave. Unfortunately, the British ambassador in Constantinople, Sir Louis Mallet, was the very man who had warned her against making the journey. He told her that His Majesty’s Government would disclaim all responsibility for her if she went farther. It was no more than she had expected, and she wrote in her diary that night: “Decided to run away.” Before she left she was obliged to write a letter absolving the Turks from responsibility for her welfare.

  The following extracts are taken from Gertrude’s diary, which was written expressly for Dick. Since he spoke Arabic, Gertrude did not bother to translate every word.

  January 16, 1914

  I have cut the thread. . . . Louis Mallet has informed me that if I go on towards Nejd my own government washes its hands of me, and I have given a categorical acquittal to the Ottoman Government, saying that I go on at my own risk. . . . We turn towards Nejd, inshallah, renounced by all the powers that be, and the only thread which is not cut though is that which runs through this little book, which is the diary of my way kept for you.

  I am an outlaw!

  February 11, 1914

  Yesterday . . . we began to see landmarks; but the country through which we rode was very barren. In the afternoon we came to a big valley, the Wadi Niyyal, with good herbage for the camels and there we camped. And just at sunset the full moon rose in glory and we had the two fold splendour of heaven to comfort us for the niggardliness of the earth. She was indeed niggardly this morning. We rode for 4 hours over a barren pebbly flat entirely devoid of all herbage. They call such regions jellad. In front of us were the first great sand hills of the Nefud [al-Nafud]. And turning a little to the west we came down into a wide bleak khabra* wherein we found water pools under low heaps of sand. The place looked so unpromising that I was prepared to find the water exhausted which would have meant a further westerly march to a well some hours away and far from our true road. We watered our camels and filled the water skins in half an hour and turned east into the Nefud. We have come so far south (the khabra was but a day’s journey from Taimah) in order to avoid the wild sand mountains (tu’us they are called in Arabic) of the heart of the Nefud and our way lies now within its southern border. This great region of sand is not desert. It is full of herbage of every kind, at this time of year springing into green, a paradise for the tribes that camp in it and for our own camels. We marched through it for an hour or two and camped in deep pale gold sand with abundance of pasturage all about us, through the beneficence of God. We carry water for 3 days and then drink at the wells of Haizan [Bir Hayzan]. The Amir, it seems is not at Hayyil, but camping to the north with his camel herds. I fear this may be tiresome for me; I would rather have dealt with him than with his wakil.* Also report says that he informed all men of my coming but whether to forward me or to stop me I do not know. Neither do I know whether the report is true.

  February 13, 1914

  We have marched for 2 days in the Nefud, and are still camping within its sands. It is very slow going, up and down in deep soft sand, but I have liked it; the plants are interesting and the sand hills are interesting. The wind driving through it hollows out profound cavities, ga’r they are called. You come suddenly to the brink and look down over an almost precipitous wall of sand. And from time to time there rises over the ga’r a head of pale driven sand, crested like a snow ridge and devoid of vegetation. These are the tu’us. At midday yesterday we came to a very high ta’s up which I struggled—it is no small labour—and saw from the top the first of the Nejd mountains, Irnan, and to the W. the hills above Taimah and all round me a wilderness of sandbanks and ti’as. When I came down I learnt that one of my camels had been seized with a malady and had sat down some 10 minutes away. Muhammad and the negro boy, Fellah, and I went back to see what could be done for her but when we reached her we found her in the death throes. “She is gone” said Muhammad. “Shall we sacrifice her?” “It were best” said I. He drew his knife out, “Bismillah allaha akbar!” and cut her throat. . . .

  We have a wonderfully peaceful camp tonight in a great horseshoe of sand, with steep banks enclosing us. It is cloudy and mild—last night it froze like the devil—and I feel as if I had been born and bred in the Nefud and had known no other world. Is there any other?

  February 15, 1914

  We came yesterday to a well, one of the rare wells on the edge of the Nefud, and I rode down to see the watering. Haizan is a profound depression surrounded by steep sand hills and the well itself is very deep—our well rope was 48 paces long. They say it is a work of the . . . first forefathers, and certainly no Beduin of today would cut down into the rock and build the dry walling of the upper parts—but who can tell how old it is? There are no certain traces of age, only sand and the deep well hole. We found a number of Arabs watering their camels, the ’Anazeh clan of the Awaji who were camped near us. The men worked half naked with the passionate energy which the Arabs will put into their job for an hour or two—no more. I watched and photographed and they left me unmolested, though none had seen a European of any kind before. One or two protested at first against the photography, but the Shammar with me reassured them and I went on in peace. We go two days more through the Nefud because it is said to be the safest road and I am filled with a desire not to be stopped now, so near Hayyil. My bearings are onto Jebel Misma, which is but a few day’s journey from Ibn al Rashid. I want to bring this adventure to a prosperous conclusion since we have come so far salinum—in the security of God.

  February 16, 1914

  I am suffering from a severe fit of depression today—will it be any good if I put it into words, or shall I be more depressed than ever afterwards? It springs, the depression, from a profound doubt as to whether the adventure is after all worth the candle. Not because of the danger—I don’t mind that; but I am beginning to wonder what profit I shall get out of it all. A compass traverse over country which was more or less known, a few names added to the map—names of stony mountains and barren plains and of a couple of deep desert wells (for we have been watering at another today)—and probably that is all. I don’t know what tete [offer] the Rashid people will make to me when I arrive, and even if they were inspired by the best will in the world, I doubt whether they could do more than give me a free passage to Baghdad, for their power is not so great nowadays as it once was. And the road to Baghdad has been travelled many times before. It is nothing, the journey to Nejd, so far as any real advantage goes, or any real addition to knowledge, but I am beginning to see pretty clearly that it is all that I can do. There are two ways of profitable travel in Arabia. One is the Arabia Deserta way, to live with the people and to live like them for months and years. You can learn something thereby, as he [Charles Doughty] did; though you may not be able to tell it again as
he could. It’s clear I can’t take that way; the fact of being a woman bars me from it. And the other is Leachman’s* way—to ride swiftly through the country with your compass in your hand, for the map’s sake and for nothing else. And there is some profit in that too. I might be able to do that over a limited space of time, but I am not sure. Anyway it is not what I am doing now. The net result is that I think I should be more usefully employed in more civilized countries where I know what to look for and how to record it. Here, if there is anything to record the probability is that you can’t find it or reach it, because a hostile tribe bars your way, or the road is waterless, or something of that kind, and that which has chanced to lie upon my path for the last 10 days is not worth mentioning—two wells, as I said before, and really I can think of nothing else. So you see the cause of my depression. I fear when I come to the end I shall not look back and say: That was worth doing; but more likely when I look back I shall say: It was a waste of time. . . . That’s my thought tonight, and I fear it is perilously near the truth. I almost wish that something would happen—something exciting, a raid, or a battle! And yet that’s not my job either. What do ineffective archaeologists want with battles? They would only serve to pass the time and leave as little profit as before. There is such a long way between me and letters, or between me and anything and I don’t feel at all like the daughter of kings, which I am supposed here to be. It’s a bore being a woman when you are in Arabia.

  February 17, 1914

  We were held up today by rain. It began, most annoyingly, just after we had struck camp—at least I don’t know that it was so very annoying, for we put in a couple of hours’ march. But the custom of the country was too strong for me. You do not march in the rain. It was, I must admit, torrential. It came sweeping upon us from behind and passing on blotted out the landscape in front, till my rafiq said that he should lose his way, there were no landmarks to be seen. “No Arabs move camp today” said he “they fear to be lost in the Nefud.” And as he trudged on through the wet sand, his cotton clothes clinging to his drenched body, he rejoiced and gave thanks for the rain. “Please God it goes over all the world” he said and “The camels will pasture here for 3 months time.” The clouds lifted a little but when a second flood overtook us I gave way. We pitched the men’s tent and lighted a great fire at which we dried ourselves—I was wet too. In a moment’s sunshine we pitched the other tents, and then came thunder and hail and rain so heavy that the pools stood twinkling in the thirsty sand. I sat in my tent and read Hamlet from beginning to end and, as I read, the world swung back into focus. Princes and powers of Arabia stepped down into their true place and there rose up above them the human soul conscious and answerable to itself, made with such large discourse, looking before and after—. Before sunset I stood on the top of the sand hills and saw the wings of the rain sweeping round ‘Irnan and leaving Misma’ light-bathed—Then the hurrying clouds marched over the sand and once more we were wrapped in rain. No fear now of drought ahead of us.

  February 20, 1914

  God is merciful and we have done with the Nefud. The day after the rain—oh but the wet sand smelt good and there was a twittering of small birds to gladden the heart!—we came in the afternoon to some tents of the Shammar and pitching our camp not far off we were visited by the old shaikh, Mhailam, who brought us a goat and some butter. Him we induced to come with us as rafiq. He is old and lean, gray haired and toothless, and ragged beyond belief; he has not even an ’agal to bind the kerchief on his head and we have given him a piece of rope. But he is an excellent rafiq—I have not had a better. He knows the country and he is anxious to serve us well. And next day we rode over sand to the northern point of Jebel Misma’. Then Mhailam importuned me to camp saying there was no pasturage in the jellad, the flat plain below; and Muhammad al-Ma’rawi backed him for he feared that we might fall in with Hetaim raiders if we left the Nefud. But I held firm. Raiders and hunger were as nothing to the possibility of a hard straight road. For you understand that travelling in the Nefud is like travelling in the Labyrinth. You are forever skirting round a deep horseshoe pit of sand, perhaps half a mile wide, and climbing up the opposite slope, and skirting round the next horseshoe. If we made a mile an hour as the crow flies we did well. Even after I had delivered the ultimatum, my two old parties were constantly heading off to the Nefud and I had to keep a watchful eye on them and herd them back every half hour. It was bitter cold; the temperature had fallen to 27° [-2.8°C] in the night and there was a tempestuous north wind. And so we came to the last sand crest and I looked down between the black rocks of Misma’ and saw Nejd. It was a landscape terrifying in its desolation. Misma’ drops to the east in precipices of sandstone, weathered to a rusty black; at its feet are gathered endless companies of sandstone pinnacles, black too, shouldering one over the other. They look like the skeleton of a vast city planted on a sandstone and sand-strewn floor. And beyond and beyond more pallid lifeless plain and more great crags of sandstone mountains rising abruptly out of it. Over it all the bitter wind whipped the cloud shadows. “Subhan Allah!” said one of my Damascenes, “we have come to Jehannum.”* Down into it we went and camped on the skirts of the Nefud with a sufficiency of pasturage. And today the sun shone and the world smiled and we marched off gaily and found the floor of Hell to be a very pleasant place after all. For the rain has filled all the sandstone hollows with clear water, and the pasturage is abundant, and the going, over the flat rocky floor, is all the heart could desire. In the afternoon we passed between the rocks of Jebel Habran, marching over a sandy floor with black pinnacled precipices on either hand, and camped on the east, in a bay of rock with khabras of rain water below and pasturage all round us in the sand. We have for neighbours about a mile away a small ferij of Shammar tents, and lest there should be anyone so evil minded as to dream of stealing a camel from us, Mhailam has just now stepped out into the night and shouted: “Ho! Anyone who watches! come in to supper! . . . Let anyone who is hungry come and eat!” And having thus invited the universe to our bowl, we sleep, I trust, in peace.

  February 24, 1914

  We are within sight of Hayyil and I might have ridden in today but I thought it better to announce my auspicious coming! So I sent in two men early this morning. Muhammad and ’Ali, and have myself camped a couple of hours outside. We had . . . a most delicious camp in the top of a mountain, Jebel Rakham. I climbed the rocks and found flowers in the crevices—not a great bounty, but in this barren land a feast to the eyes. . . . Yesterday we passed by two more villages and in one there were plum trees flowering—oh the gracious sight! And today we have come through the wild granite crags of Jebel ’Ajja and are camped in the Hayyil plain. From a little rock above my tent I have spied out the land and seen the towers and gardens of Hayyil, and Swaifly lying in the plain beyond, and all is made memorable by Arabia Deserta. I feel as if I were on a sort of pilgrimage, visiting sacred sites. And the more I see of this land the more I realize what an achievement that journey was. But isn’t it amazing that we should have walked down into Nejd with as much ease as if we had been strolling along Piccadilly!

  March 2, 1914

  What did I tell you as to the quality most needed for travel among the Arabs? Patience if you remember; that is what one needs. Now listen to the tale of the week we have spent here. I was received with the utmost courtesy. Their slaves, ’abds, slave is too servile and yet that is what they are—came riding out to meet me and assured me that Ibrahim, the Amir’s wakil was much gratified by my visit. We rode round the walls of the town and entered in by the south gate—the walls are of quite recent construction, towered, all round the town—and there, just within the gate I was lodged in a spacious house which Muhammad ibn Rashid had built for his summer dwelling. My tents were pitched in the wide court below. Within our enclosure there is an immense area of what was once gardens and cornfields but it is now left unwatered and uncultivated. The Persian Hajj* used to lodge here in the old days. As soon as I was
established in the Roshan, the great columned reception room, and when the men had all gone off to see to the tents and camels, two women appeared. One was an old widow, Lu.lu.ah, who is caretaker in the house; she lives here with her slave woman and the latter’s boy. The other was a merry lady, Turkiyyeh, a Circassian who had belonged to Muhammed al Rashid and had been a great favourite of his. She had been sent down from the qasr* to receive me and amuse me and the latter duty she was most successful in performing. In the afternoon came Ibrahim,* in state and all smiles. He is an intelligent and well educated man—for Arabia—with a quick nervous manner and a restless eye. He stayed till the afternoon prayer. As he went out he told Muhammad al-Ma’rawi that there was some discontent among the ’ulema* at my coming and that etc etc in short, I was not to come further into the town till I was invited. Next day I sent my camels back to the Nefud borders to pasture. There is no pasture here in the granite grit plain of Hayyil and moreover they badly needed rest. I sold 6, for more than they were worth, for they were in wretched condition; but camels are fortunately dear here at this moment, with the Amir away and all available animals with him. And that done I sat still and waited on events. But there were no events. Nothing whatever happened, except that two little Rashid princes came to see me, 2 of the 6 male descendants who are all that remain of all the Rashid stock, so relentlessly have they slaughtered one another. Next day I sent to Ibrahim and said I should like to return his call. He invited me to come after dark and sent a mare for me and a couple of slaves. I rode through the dark and empty streets and was received in the big Roshan of the qasr, a very splendid place with great stone columns supporting an immensely lofty roof, the walls white washed, the floor of white juss, beaten hard and shining as if it were polished. There was a large company. We sat all round the wall on carpets and cushions, I on Ibrahim’s right hand, and talked mostly of the history of the Shammar in general and of the Rashids in particular. Ibrahim is well versed in it and I was much interested. As we talked slave boys served us with tea and then coffee and finally they brought lighted censors and swung the sweet smelling ’ud* before each of us three times. This is the signal that the reception is over and I rose and left them. And then followed day after weary day with nothing whatever to do. One day Ibrahim sent me a mare and I rode round the town and visited one of his gardens—a paradise of blossoming fruit trees in the bare wilderness. And the Circassian, Turkiyyeh, has spent another day with me; and my own slaves (for I have 2 of my own to keep my gate for me) sit and tell me tales of raid and foray in the stirring days of ’Abd al Aziz, Muhammad’s nephew; and my men come in and tell me the gossip of the town. Finally I have sent for my camels—I should have done so days ago if they had not been so much in need of rest. I can give them no more time to recover for I am penniless. I brought with me a letter of credit on the Rashid’s from their agent in Damascus—Ibrahim refuses to honour it in the absence of the Amir and if I had not sold some of my camels I should not have had enough money to get away. As it is I have only the barest minimum. The gossip is that the hand which has pulled the strings in all this business is that of the Amir’s grandmother, Fatima, of whom Ibrahim stands in deadly fear. In Hayyil murder is like the spilling of milk and not one of the shaikhs but feels his head sitting unsteadily upon his shoulders. I have asked to be allowed to see Fatima and have received no answer. She holds the purse strings in the Amir’s absence and she rules. It may be that she is at the bottom of it all. I will not conceal from you that there have been hours of considerable anxiety. War is all round us. The Amir is raiding Jof to the north and Ibn Sa’ud is gathering up his powers to the south—presumably to raid the Amir. If Ibrahim chose to stop my departure till the Amir’s return (which is what I feared) it would have been very uncomfortable. I spent a long night contriving in my head schemes of escape if things went wrong. I have however two powerful friends in Hayyil, shaikhs of ’Anezah, with whose help the Rashids hope to recapture that town [Jof]. I have not seen them—they dare not visit me—but they have protested vigorously against the treatment which has been accorded me. I owe their assistance to the fact that I have their nephew with me, ’Ali the postman who came with me 3 years ago across the Hamad.