Desert Queen (16 page)

F
rom India, Gertrude and Hugo continued on to Singapore and Shanghai, Seoul and Tokyo. Crossing the Pacific, they reached Vancouver, where she climbed the Rocky Mountains and admired the beauty of Lake Louise, but as they worked their way down to the United States, she grew weary of the scenery. In Chicago she was overwhelmed “by the horribleness of its outside, the filth of the streets, the noise, the ugliness.” A few more days in America, at Niagara Falls and Boston, and she was eager to leave for home. On July 26, 1903, she landed at Liverpool and spent the rest of the year in England.

Once again, she faced the cold reality of spinsterhood. Her sister Molly had, like her, fallen in love with a man whom her father rejected. But a few months later, Gertrude introduced Molly to Charles Trevelyan, and on January 6, 1904, the couple was married. Gertrude ached, watching her younger sister walk down the aisle. The only men who seemed to be attracted to her were “good old things,” like Lord Dartrey, who, she had reported, had “fallen in love with her” on the ship to India, and who held no interest for her.

B
y March, when the brutal English snow and frost made her pine for a “nice desert where the sun shines,” she dreamed of a visit to Ibn Rashid. But her plans to go to Arabia were still on hold. Ibn Rashid, sponsored by the Turks, was at war and the area too dangerous to visit. Instead, in London, she attended another wedding, this one of her cousin Florence Lascelles to Cecil Spring-Rice, a diplomat; cultivated her social circle of Foreign Office officials; and pursued a friendship with John Singer Sargent. In August 1904 she decided to make another attempt at mountain climbing, at Zermatt. “Yes, as you say, why do people climb?” she wrote her mother, but she left the question open. Her answer lay in her actions. She climbed mountains as much to conquer her loneliness as to scale the heights.

She adored breaking new ground, being the center of attention, with everyone’s eyes and ears on her. But, no less fascinated by those whom she deemed of particular interest, she focused her own attention on the way they thought and behaved. At home, however, life had curdled from ennui. The English were too predictable; she could tell in advance what a politician might do or what her dinner partner might say. The one group she had met that was different was the Arabs; they excited her. They stimulated her imagination; they were romantic, exotic, mysterious, unplumbed.

B
y September she was in London, shopping furiously for fur boas and muffs, seeing friends, dining with Domnul. “It’s disgusting weather,” she told her mother, as she made plans to head for the East. This time, however, she sought another purpose to her travels. Intrigued by architecture and ancient civilizations, she arranged to study with a French archaeologist, Salomon Reinach, the Jewish scholar primarily responsible for the popular notion that civilization began in the East, where it nurtured the great ideas of mankind. Editor of the prestigious
Revue Archéologique
, Reinach also wrote extensively about the Romanesque and Gothic periods in France, and was director of the Saint-Germain Museum in Paris. Married and ten years her senior, “singularly plain, but an angel,” he took her under his wing. He taught her about Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine art and archaeology, treating her like a favored schoolgirl. “Reinach … loves me so dearly,” she wrote almost wistfully. “He has simply set all his boundless knowledge at my disposal and I have learnt more in these few days than I should have learnt by myself in a year.”

The school session soon over, she returned to London to ready herself for adventure. Her friend David Hogarth had just published a new book,
The Penetration of Arabia
, in which he had written about the enormous unknown desert “still in great part withdrawn from western eyes” and expressed the hope that Europeans would “complete the penetration of Arabia” as soon as the atmosphere was amenable. No one was more eager to carry out Hogarth’s wish than Gertrude, but as Percy Cox and others had advised her, the time was not yet ripe. Instead, she would retrace her journey of five years earlier, traveling east of the Jordan River “to that delectable region of which Omar Khayyam sings: ‘The strip of herbage strown that just divides the desert from the sown.’ ”

O
n January 4, 1905, Gertrude departed for the East, her interest reinforced by the knowledge she had gained under Reinach’s tutelage, her legitimacy strengthened by a scholarly letter she had published in the
Revue Archéologique
on the geometry of the cruciform structure. At Reinach’s urging, she aimed to make serious studies of Roman and Byzantine ruins, to weigh the impact of their civilizations on the Orient. In addition, she planned to take extensive notes on the people, make detailed observations of the Bedouin and the Druze. Her goal was to combine all the material—the archaeological and the anthropological, the social and the cultural, the ancient and the modern, along with dozens of photographs she would take—into a book.

She wanted to inform the English of the ways of the East. She would tell them about the Arab world and its culture: its people, Bedouin tribesmen and educated townsmen; its language, flowery and circuitous; its manners, both primitive and polished; its delicate art; its intricate architecture; its history of holy wars and conquests; its literature filled with symbolism and poetry; its politics fraught with internecine rivalries and tribal revenge; its religion of Islam; its wailing music; its food staples of flat bread and yogurt; its commerce of bazaar merchants and international traders; its agriculture of wheat farming and camel grazing; its fertile soil; its oil-rich sand; its terrain of palm trees, incidental water and endless desert.

The volume, she hoped, would establish her reputation as both a writer and a scholar. And, even more, she hoped it would establish her as a Person. She had experienced that status briefly in the East and in Switzerland; perhaps she would become a Person at home.

The
SS Ortona
left Marseilles and docked a week later at Beirut, in Syria. To her great delight, she found herself once again in the sort of danger that called for evasive action. Along with her books—Charles Doughty’s
Arabia Deserta
(filled with information about the Bedouin) and Hogarth’s
The Penetration of Arabia
—she had packed some highly suspicious articles: a revolver, a rifle and an assortment of maps, all questionable for a British subject to be lugging through Turkish territory. To ease her way through the customs house, she had sent a note to the British Consul in Beirut, asking for a
kavass
, a servant, to help her. An old friend appeared, a smiling man in a uniform, and they set off for customs, she with the revolver tucked in her pocket. She had “every possible sort of contraband,” she warned him, most anxious about her gun. She had packed the rifle, case and all, in her cabin trunk, wrapping it around with her lacy white petticoats. But if the Turks found the gun, they would confiscate it.

At the customs house she quickly engaged the chief officer in a friendly conversation about the weather while the
kavass
announced to everyone that she was “a very great lady.” Of course, he informed them, it was unnecessary to pay strict attention to her baggage. Case after case went by unquestioned. And when they opened a wooden packing crate, they found nothing but camp utensils.

But the next item of interest was her cabin trunk. “It is needless that they should search this very much,” she whispered nervously in Arabic to the
kavass.

“I have understood, O Lady,” he replied. Gingerly, he lifted her gowns, the white petticoats with their lacy edges (“aggressively feminine,” she called them) peeking out beneath. Then, just as the men were about to put back the drawer, one of them caught sight of a pile of maps—“very suspicious objects in Turkey”—that covered the end of the gun case. As he stooped down to look at the maps, Gertrude quickly turned to the chief officer and made a remark about the rain.

“By God, O Lady,” he answered, “it is as Your Excellency says: God alone knows when the rain will cease.” Then, with a brusque show of friendship, he ordered his man to stop.

The
kavass
quickly pushed in the drawer. “Y’allah, o boy!” he said. “Hasten! Shall we wait here till nightfall?” The dangerous wait was over.

With a polite
salaam
, she smiled at the chief. “I go, upon your pleasure,” she said.

“Go in peace,” he replied.

She had, she reported to her father, pulled off “a marvel of successful fraud.” She would give the
kavass
an extra tip.

The streets of Beirut were filled with mud, but the Oriental aroma made her feel at home. Within hours she was “deep in gossip”; and strolling through the bazaars, she felt the pleasure of being in the Levant. “A bazaar is always the epitome of the East, even in a half European town like Beirut,” she wrote home.

In talks with British officials she heard that Ibn Rashid had been driven out of his capital, Hayil, by Ibn Saud, but that Turkish troops were coming to help the Rashids. The Ottomans were making handsome payments to Ibn Rashid, ensuring his loyalty to them, while the British, under the rule of Lord Curzon in India and the watchful eye of Percy Cox in Muscat, were keeping Ibn Saud, along with his ally, the Sheikh of Kuwait, content.

At a dinner a few evenings later she was assured that Ibn Rashid was still at Hayil, holding on with his population of thirty thousand Arabs. The emir, her dinner partner said, was “very enterprising, very brave. He lets no foreigner into Nejd, absolutely impossible to enter, but if you could get in, you would never get out.” A more tempting dare would have been hard to find. It was not her plan to visit Central Arabia until the following year, but the challenge piqued her interest.

Her current journey, however, required certain arrangements. She bought horses and mules, and hired Muhammad, the Druze who was her former muleteer. He pledged to go with her “to the ends of the earth.” They were off, and a few days later she arrived in Jerusalem.

The British Consul, Mr. Dickson, informed her that Sir Mark and Lady Sykes, a most congenial couple, were also in town. It seemed that Gertrude and Mark Sykes had much in common: smart, enthusiastic and equally impatient, they both came from exceptionally rich Yorkshire families; both had been educated at the best British universities; both were able to travel freely; both were interested in the Levant; and both were destined to have an impact on the Middle East.

Although each was highly opinionated and competitive, for all their similarities they differed sharply. Gertrude was an atheist, Sykes a practicing Catholic; Gertrude had gone to Oxford, Sykes to Cambridge; Gertrude was opposed to her family using titles; Sykes was proud to use his; Gertrude was thirty-four, unmarried and not yet well known at home; Sykes was ten years younger, had already traveled throughout Asia and Turkey and had attracted much attention in England with his published accounts. Just as irritating to her, Sykes had only contempt for the people of the desert, while Gertrude held the Arabs in some esteem. A year earlier, in 1904, Sykes had written about the Arabs of Mosul and Damascus: “Eloquent, cunning, excitable and cowardly, they present to my mind the most deplorable pictures one can see in the East.” He called them “diseased,” “contemptuous,” “idle beyond all hope, vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit,” “insolent yet despicable.”