Bell of the Desert

by Alan Gold

  At night, they had slept in tents under the freezing sky of the desert. They had spoken about Paris, about Cairo, about the prospect of a becoming a king over a country he had never previously set foot in, about Lawrence and how his new-found fame might alter him, about Sir Percy Cox and the ways in which Faisal might work him and the British government, and much more.

  But what had returned to Faisal’s mind, time and again, were the ideas which Gertrude had put to him very early on, when she had first suggested to him that he become king of Iraq. At first, still bruised from his forced abdication from the throne of Syria, Faisal had resisted the idea that he might become king of another land. He had gone to London trying to gain British support to remove the French.

  But when Gertrude first contacted him, she assured him that, rather than Iraq being a second prize, it would instead be an historical completion of the circle which had begun one thousand, three hundred years earlier, with Faisal’s ancestor, Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad. The martyrdom of Hussein in Karbala in 680AD had caused the eruption of Shi’ism, and as the first king of a united Iraq, it would be incumbent on Faisal to mend the wounds, to complete the circle and to rule for all his people, whether they were Shi’ite, Sunni, Jewish, Christian, Assyrian, Turkoman, or Kurd.

  Slowly, cautiously, the idea began to grow in his mind, especially when she’d told him his elder brother, Abdullah, was to be made emir of a new country to the west of Iraq to be called Transjordan.

  Their progress had cemented Faisal in the minds of the Iraqi tribal leadership, and the Iraqi people in Faisal’s mind. The caravan had been an overwhelming success, despite the exhaustion it had caused her. But now was the time for the Coronation, and all the difficulties which had nearly prevented them reaching this point were distant memories. Indeed, the caravan had been a triumph of such outstanding proportions that, just months after her seduction of him to the throne of Iraq, he had managed to seduce all the officials, leaders, and demagogues into voting for him to be their king.

  And now, at six in the morning on August 23rd, in the twenty-first year of the century, Faisal, Sir Percy Cox, his advisors, aides-de-camp, and cabinet were standing on Persian carpets before a glittering crowd of almost two thousand people, ceremoniously establishing not just the king, but the kingdom.

  Faisal swallowed nervously, and scanned the crowd looking for a familiar face. He saw Gertrude, and instinctively began to smile, but he immediately realized he had to behave like a king—a King of Iraq—and smiling at an English woman, even one who was his friend, mentor, and partner in this new adventure, would not be appreciated by the many Arab dignitaries in the audience. So he looked away.

  But from the corner of his eye, Faisal allowed himself a surreptitious glance at her, and saw she was wearing an immaculate white dress, an ostrich feathered hat, a set of pearls, and standing proudly in the front row as the Dorset Regiment struck up an anthem. Although there had been time to create an Iraqi flag, there had been no time at all to write the music for an anthem, and so the band struck up the only tune which seemed appropriate, God Save the King. The newly designed Iraqi flag was raised, and as it ascended to the top of the flagpole, Faisal, Percy Cox, and Gertrude all saluted.

  Gertrude looked closely at Faisal’s face, an image she knew so well. They had worked together, cemented a nation together, traveled highways and byways of that nation together, relaxed and played together, and if she knew the mind and aspirations of any man, it was Faisal’s. She wanted to wish him strength and fortune, God’s speed and the very best of British luck. She wanted to tell him that now Iraq was a nation, a country whose creation owed itself to Gertrude Bell, she had decided to become one of its citizens. She wanted to tell him the conviction had been growing in her, stronger and stronger by the day, that just as much as the new nation of Iraq was a part of her, so she would be a part of it. She wanted to tell him she would ask to become its first convert, its first British subject to claim dual nationality. She wanted to tell him that just as Iraq now had a present, and would have a prosperous and secure future, it would be Gertrude Bell who would be the custodian of its past . . . that she would quit the British civil service, become a resident of Baghdad, and gather together all the archaeological wonders from the very earliest moments of mankind. That she would create the Baghdad Museum of Ancient Archaeology, a marvellous collection of artefacts which would make the entire world look in awe, not just at the present Iraq, but at the eight thousand year history on which the new country was built. She wanted to run over to His Serene Majesty, her friend and acolyte, Faisal I, and tell him all of these things.

  But he wasn’t looking at her. She couldn’t seem to catch his eye. Instead, Faisal was staring over her head and over the heads of the assembled company who had journeyed to this newest of new kingdoms. There was a look of certainty, of determination, on his face, something which had been missing as they’d journeyed around. Faisal seemed to be looking towards some point she couldn’t see. Some point in the far distance. Some point in the future.

  EPILOGUE

  Baghdad, July 1926

  For four years, she had journeyed back and forth to England, Paris, and Teheran. She had cajoled wealthy men to give up the priceless artefacts they’d collected during their expeditions into Iraq so she could create a national museum as homage to the nation’s past, just as she was donating 3000 of her own priceless treasures from the archaeological digs she’d conducted for the past thirty years.

  She had been hosted at grand receptions by universities and noble institutions in England and Scotland and most recently she was wined and dined at a magnificent banquet to celebrate the signing of a treaty with Turkey. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to add the stellar Gertrude Bell to their invitation list. Everybody, that is, except those whom she most cared about. Her access to the British government was so limited she had to console herself with occasional meetings with parliamentary private secretaries or junior ministers, men whose chests were puffed out with self-importance but who carried no weight, and in Iraq her meetings with the king were all about teaching him Bridge and Chess, but when the subject of Iraq’s future or its politics came up, it was as though Faisal’s ears were closed to her.

  As the years progressed, life held fewer and fewer prospects for her. Gertrude was increasingly excluded from the orbits of power. Despite her lifetime of diplomacy, much of it spend in the epicentre of world events, she found herself caught between Faisal’s need to overcome accusations that he was a puppet of Great Britain, and England’s desire to prove to the world that their relationship with Iraq wasn’t that of puppet master.

  ~

  So she threw herself into the creation of an Iraqi museum which would be her legacy to the nation she had adopted as her own. Iraq was smaller and less impressive than the pan-Arab continent she had wanted to create. Once she had dreamed a dream of a mighty nation of Arabs led by a Saladin, but this had disappeared like a sandstorm which had blown itself out. So Gertrude had been forced herself to narrow her focus. Despite a lifetime of involvement, of shaping the new world, she had to eschew politics because politics had expunged her.

  And so she put all her energies into making hers into a small but imaginative replica of the British Museum. She worked there every day, and today she was filthy from dusting the exhibits. Her hair, normally spotlessly clean, gray tinged with white and shining in the sun, was dulled by the grime of the ancient antiquities, relics of a dozen ancient civilizations whose rulers had once commanded the lives of countless millions of men and women.

  Arrayed in front of her on the table were artefacts from Sumer and Akkad, from Babylonia and Ur, from the banks of the Euphrates and the fertile stretches of the Tigris. Potsherds, idols of different gods and goddesses, and wine and perfume jars which had adorned the home of some rich potentate or merchant who had been dead for four thousand years, were laid out like exhibits in a courtroom. Here were mirrors made of bronze, dull now but once shining bright in
the desert sun to reflect the image of a wife or priestess or daughter, or perhaps a prostitute who was dressing to please a man. Here were incense burners and combs and jewellery in enormous profusion. All things were there, all arrayed on her table, and all in dire need of cataloging. And Gertrude was the only one capable of cataloging them.

  Some months ago, she’d been joined by a couple of eager anthropologists from the Smithsonian Museum in America who had heard about the establishment of the Baghdad Museum, and decided to spend their summer vacation helping out. And some junior common room people from Baliol and Magdalene had come out from Oxford because Lawrence of Arabia had been trumpeting Gertrude’s virtues on his recent speech to the Oxford Union. But aside from those times of community with European experts, she was the only true intellectual in an Iraqi staff of willing but uneducated helpers.

  Gertrude Bell, First Director of the Baghdad Museum of Archaeology, surveyed the enormous building in which her exhibits would be placed, artefacts which she herself had dug and brought back to life, as well as material from the digs of other archaeologists. The exhibit cases had been constructed by local artisans according to her instructions, the floor had been wax-coated, the panels of instruction had been written in calligraphy in English, Arabic, French, and Italian, and signs had been erected at the entrance to the different halls signifying the ages of the growth of human development.

  She’d checked the signs carefully herself. They registered mankind’s ascent from pre-agricultural times to the earliest record of his settlement, and onwards towards his current supremacy, from the very earliest Stone Age discoveries through the Copper Age, the Bronze Age, the Age of Kings and Tyrants, then the Age of Iron, the Biblical Age of the Patriarchs, the Rise of Islam, ending at the Crusades. Her interest in humankind ended with the Crusades. That record could be safely left in the hands of historians, not archaeologists.

  With the rapidly approaching official opening the following week, Gertrude was instructing her staff as to where and how to place the newly dusted and cataloged exhibits in the cases.

  She heard a commotion at the front entrance of the museum. Frowning at the thought of visitors a week before the museum was due to open, she walked along an upper corridor, and stopped in her tracks, stunned by the appearance of a Rolls Royce outside the front door.

  Hurrying down, she saw the king of Iraq’s chauffeur enter the front portals, bearing a letter. He bowed as he handed it to her. It read simply,

  My dear Gertrude,

  I have something which I would like you to place on a plinth at the entrance to the museum when I open it in a few days’ time. Would you be kind enough to come to the palace tomorrow, and I will give it to you. It is an important artefact celebrating one of the great personages who is a part of Iraq’s history.

  Your friend,

  Faisal I

  She told the chauffeur she would be happy to visit the king tomorrow after four in the afternoon.

  Late that night, when her servants had left and she was alone in her house, she was again gripped by a splitting headache. Normally several whiskeys and sodas did the trick until she fell into a comatose sleep, aided by sleeping pills, but for some reason, four whiskeys hadn’t dulled the pain.

  She picked up the king’s note and re-read it. She was an expert in Mesopotamian history, but for the life of her, wracking her brains, she couldn’t think which artefact Faisal could possibly have and which personage was so great he must take pride of place in the entrance.

  Her desk was full of other correspondence. She picked up the letter from her father and re-read it for the tenth time. He was selling Rounton Grange following the death earlier in the year of her brother Hugo from typhoid. The long-running coal strike had devastated the family fortunes, and economies were forced on her father, who found them impossible to accept. Yet the bankers were in and clutching at his throat and they were insisting that she sell her jewellery and repatriate the money to England.

  Servants were being put out onto the street, houses sold, plans shelved. People whom she’d known all her life, who’d served her and her family with honor and distinction for decades, were suddenly expendable. And in his last letter, the one which had made her cry bitter tears, her aging father had begged her to return, to leave Iraq, to leave her friends and her museum, so she could be there for him and help him overcome the grief which Hugo’s death had caused.

  But what about her? What about her needs? Was her elderly father considering her in his grief, she wondered. And how could she leave Iraq now, after she had become a citizen and when her glorious museum was about to open? Just to return to England to become her father’s nursemaid? Great Britain was no longer the land of her youth. Since the war, it had changed beyond her recognition. Once-impenetrable barriers had broken and the class to which she’d been born was rapidly becoming an anachronism. And she had changed, because she could no longer be the daughter whom her father wanted her to be. She was a daughter of the desert, of Iraq, of an ancient and new people. Her home was the desert, and out of this desert and its people, she had created a nation.

  She looked at other letters arrayed over the desk. All through her life, her correspondence had been meticulously ordered and answered, but in the past year or more, she had allowed it to become haphazard and she knew many letters from old friends in England had gone unreciprocated. It was her shame pile, and looking at it through bloodshot eyes, she began to weep at the way she was allowing her new circumstances to undermine the rigid structure in which her entire life had been led. For without structure, without boundaries within which she could act, what was there for her?

  In a pile on the top left hand corner of her desk, were six letters from Winston Churchill’s secretary. Each one a rejection of her and of their friendship.

  ~

  The Chancellor of the Exchequer has asked me to thank you for your note, and sends you his warmest personal regards, but the pressure of his timetable during the General Strike and Labor Emergency necessitates his having to concentrate all of his energies on the settlement of the industrial disputes affecting Great Britain at this present moment. He trusts you understand why he is unable to answer you personally.

  Not Winston Churchill, not Thomas Lawrence, her Saladin who was now signing his letters as Lawrence of Arabia, nor even Faisal, was any longer in regular touch with her. She was pushing constantly for recognition, but being rejected. Just like almost every man had rejected her. She felt for the idol Arinnitti which she’d once worn constantly around her neck, but it wasn’t there. To whom had she given it? She couldn’t remember, but as she tried to think, she saw Henry’s face, smiling at her. She opened her eyes, and his youthful image disappeared. She closed her eyes, but he was gone from her darkness.

  Her head was pounding. She poured another glass of whiskey and soda and spilled some down her dress. She giggled. Why was it funny? Now her servant would have to wash the damn thing. The drums thumped in her forehead. She opened her bottle of sleeping pills. It was the only way she’d be able to get some sleep. Tomorrow was . . . what was tomorrow? And what did it matter?

  ~

  The Royal Palace, Iraq

  Faisal listened to what the doctor was saying, and nodded. He swallowed and fought back tears. Was he responsible? Could he have done more?

  “Did she do it deliberately?” he asked, his soft voice quivering, as he tried not to cry

  “It’s impossible to say, Highness. But her breath smelled heavily of alcohol, and the bottle of sleeping pills was empty. In my report, I will say it was an accidental overdose, brought on by stress.”

  The king nodded, and smiled, dismissing the doctor with a wave of his hand. He looked at the bronze bust which he was going to give to her in just a few hours. He had been imagining her face as he unveiled it and she read the inscription. Tears welled up in his eyes. But it was all too late.

  He beckoned to his chauffeur, who stepped forward, and lifted the heavy bust from the table.
/>   “Have this placed at the very entrance to the museum, so it’s the first thing visitors see when they enter,” he ordered.

  The chauffeur nodded, and looked at the severe face of the statue. He covered it again with the cloth, bowed to the king, and carried it out to the car. It sat next to him on the front bench of the Rolls Royce as he drove through the frenetic streets of Baghdad. Before him were Arabs and English, French and Germans, Shi’ite and Sunni, Jews and Christians, Assyrians and Turkomen and Kurds. All were walking or running, laughing or arguing, cursing or blessing.

  Here were men and women and children from many different parts of the world, some dressed in clothes which defined their ancestry, some dressed as citizens of a modern world. It was a cauldron of humanity, as it had been in the days of the bible, in the days of the rise of Islam, and at the time of the Crusaders. And now again, with Arabic nationalism, Baghdad was a centre of Arab pride.

  It was approaching midday and the sun was high in the sky, scorching the newly tarmacadamed roads along which he drove. Above his head, electricity lines carried energy to all the newly constructed buildings. And before he could turn right to where the museum was located, a policeman, bringing order to the chaos, held up his hand and stopped the flow of carts and horses and donkeys and the occasional car to allow a party of school children to cross towards the river. The delay enabled the chauffeur to pick up the bust and read the inscription written on its base. In English and Arabic, it said, simply,

  Gertrude Bell. A Woman of Iraq.

  First Director of the National Museum.

  Presented by a grateful King and People.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Gertrude Bell is just one of countless numbers of women throughout the ages whose names and deeds have been expunged from history. Some of these women are remembered by historians and other academics, but most are rarely if even mentioned by name.