Desert Queen (17 page)

Gertrude would soon write empathetically: “The Oriental is like a very old child.… 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.”

G
ertrude left her calling card with Mark and Edith Sykes in Jerusalem. They received her “with open arms,” she reported; and after a good dinner and a merry evening, she declared them “perfectly charming.” Like Gertrude, Sykes was planning a visit to the notorious mountain Druze; the two travelers discussed their separate schemes.

However amusing they found each other that evening, within a few weeks Sykes had changed his mind. Writing a long letter to his wife, he denounced Gertrude bitterly, complaining that she had deliberately misled him. She “had taken the very route I told her I hoped to do,” he whined, “after she said she was going elsewhere.” Blaming Gertrude because the Turks tried to prevent him from traveling to the Druze, Sykes called her a “
Bitch
” and wished “10,000 of my worst bad words on the head of that damned fool.… Wherever she went,” he told his wife, she caused an “uproar” and was the “terror of the desert.” As brilliant as she was to some, to Sykes, Gertrude was a “silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering
ass!
”

G
ertrude had already set forth. “It was a stormy morning, the 5th of February,” as she later described the start of her adventure. “The west wind swept up from the Mediterranean, hurried across the plain where the Canaanites waged war with the stubborn hill dwellers of Judaea, and leapt the barrier of mountains to which the kings of Assyria and of Egypt had lain vain siege. It shouted the news of rain to Jerusalem and raced onwards down the barren eastern slopes, cleared the deep bed of Jordan with a bound, and vanished across the hills of Moab into the desert. And all the hounds of the storm followed behind, a yelping pack, coursing eastward and rejoicing as they went.

“No one with life in his body could stay in on such a day, but for me there was little question of choice.”

Along with her Christian cook, Mikhail (recommended by Mark Sykes), her party consisted of three muleteers: Ibrahim, an old and toothless Christian Maronite; his son Habib, handsome and broad-shouldered; and Muhammad, the Druze, large, lazy and charming. She was heading east for the Jordan Valley, “alone down the desolate road to Jericho.” To reach the Jebel Druze, she chose the route across the Jordan Bridge, “the Gate of the Desert,” she called it. She and her men pitched their tents the first night close to the wooden toll bridge and set off again in the morning, encountering a ragged Arab whose only dream was to go to America. “The same story can be heard all over Syria. Hundreds go out every year,” she wrote, noting they hoped to make a small fortune in America and then return to the East.

She rode across the frontier, ready to record in her diary any ruin or individual that might be of interest. Her observations would not only help her write her book, they would help her advise her friends in the British Government. Then, as now, archaeologists and writers ventured where others feared to tread. With her keen eye for detail and her ear for gossip, Gertrude provided information that was particularly valuable. Sending lengthy letters to the highly influential Domnul, reporting to diplomats in the Foreign Office and the India Office, she filled them in on the sorry state of Ottoman rule. The hand of the Turk reached down to Syria and Arabia, but its greedy fingers, so busy snatching bribes or spreading corruption, had spent little time administering the Arabs under it.

Eager to find a European sponsor to arm them against the Turks, the Druze considered the British their ally of first choice. By traveling without the requisite Turkish escort, Gertrude could, she hoped, rekindle the trust of the Druze whom she had visited before, gauge the depths of their discontent and the relative strength of their army. She knew that the Druze did “not play the game as it should be played, they go out to slay and they spare no one. While they have a grain of powder in their flasks and strength to pull the trigger, they kill every man, woman and child that they encounter.” It was partly such menace that intrigued her, sucking her in as though she were a child standing at the edge of the ocean, drawn to the giant waves.

Heading for danger, she crossed the desert, adding an Arab guide to her party. Namrud, a Christian, knew every sheikh of the area. Riding on days so raw and wet that her horses plunged through seas of mud, she inspected vestiges of the past—tombs, Roman coins, a ruined temple at Khureibet es Suk—and encountered a camp of the Beni Sakhr tribe in an ongoing feud with the Druze. “There is no mercy between them,” she observed. “If a Druze meets a Beni Sakhr, one of them kills the other.” Her main worry was Muhammad, her muleteer. If the Beni Sakhr, with whom she had camped that night, knew he was Druze, “they would not only kill him, they would burn him alive.” It was decided that Muhammad undergo a quick conversion to Christianity.

For the moment, at least, the Beni Sakhr were her friends. Five years earlier they had called her “a daughter of the desert.” Now, as she lunched in her tent, enjoying a meal of curry served on fine china, washing it down with a glass of wine, one of the Beni Sakhr joined her, and they sat together, drinking coffee, smoking her Egyptian cigarettes, talking of the bloodthirsty Druze. At nightfall the desert turned cold and wet; she wrapped herself in her fur, slipped a hot water bottle between her sheets and went to bed.

The following evening, having reached the Druze, she was invited to the long black tent of their sheikh. She approached the men’s quarters and entered. It never would have occurred to her to enter the women’s side of the tent; to her the harem was a curiosity, a place to observe and photograph. She thought of herself as one of the men, expecting equal treatment, as honored a guest as any male. Indeed, the Arabs had dubbed her an “honorary man.”

She moved easily between rival tribes and between contrasting cultures, and that night she dined with the Druze sheikh, sitting cross-legged on the floor, using her hand to eat the meat, scooping the yogurt with flaps of bread. Sitting with the men around the fire after dinner, she drank coffee and smoked cigarettes, while her hosts told her tales of the desert and of Turkish oppression. Wide-eyed and eager, she listened to the Druze stories of a recent
ghazu
, a raid, by the Beni Sakhr.

They had swept across the countryside, carrying off five thousand sheep from the flocks of the Druze. A few days later she learned that two thousand Druze were going to retaliate against the Beni Sakhr. At camp that night, she finished dinner, and while debating whether or not it was too cold to write in her diary, she heard the ugly sounds of a war song drumming in the dark. She looked up and, from the castle walls that rimmed the hilltop, saw a huge flame leap into the sky, a beacon to tell the news of the coming raid to the Druze villages scattered below. She asked the Druze soldier sitting guard in her camp if she could join the militia gathering at the bonfire. “There is no refusal; honor us,” he answered. They scrambled to the top of the sandy mountain.

On the edge of the castle moat a group of Druze, men and boys, armed with clubs and swords, were singing a brutal chant. She joined them with her guide and listened as over and over again they sang the call to war:

O Lord our God! upon them! upon them!
that the foe may fall in swathes before our swords!
Let the child leave his mother’s side
,
let the young man mount and be gone.

The singing came to an end and, holding hands, the men created a circle; three young Druze stepped inside. Moving around the circle, they stopped in front of each man and, shaking their bare swords, demanded: “Are you a good man? Are you a true man?”

With the moon lighting their faces, each one shouted in turn: “Ha! ha!” It was a sound of rejoicing for blood and war.

One of the young men noticed Gertrude. He strode up and raised his sword above his head. “Lady!” he cried, “the English and the Druze are one.”

“Thank God! We too are a fighting race,” she answered, swept up in the passion to kill the enemy.

Then, still holding hands, the men ran down the hill, Gertrude running with them, holding hands, ready to join the raid. Suddenly she realized that if the Turkish Governor of Damascus got wind of her participation, he would hardly believe that the rest of her work was innocent. Turning into the darkness, she ran down to her tent. Somewhat sadly, she wrote, she “became a European again, bent on peaceful pursuits and unacquainted with the naked primitive passions of mankind.”

She stayed three weeks in the mountains, some days doing little else but drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, gossiping with the Turkish officials who patrolled the area. They soon became her friends. She could go where she liked, and no one would do anything but help her.

Two days later she was out of the Druze country, heading toward Damascus. She arrived in the desert capital on Sunday, February 26, 1905. Dust-covered and sunburned, surrounded by her caravan of ragged Bedouin—a wild-looking bunch, with matted hair and bearded faces, their bodies draped with rifles, daggers and clubs—a string of mules and camels behind them, she entered the bustling city of nearly three hundred thousand people, luxuriant, with mountains on three sides, orchards and running water on the fourth. It was said that when the prophet Muhammad arrived in Damascus, he left at once, thinking that he had just seen Paradise; he was afraid to harm his chances of returning after death. As Gertrude rode through the town, the great Ummayad Mosque stood, as it does today, a symbol of Islamic power.

A warm bath and a good rest at a clean hotel, and Gertrude went off to meet the Turkish Governor. He had sent her an anxious note. It seemed the government had been nervous about her stay in the Jebel Druze. They had received telegrams three times a day reporting on her activities, but never knew what she was going to do next. Not only was the governor interested in her; she had become well known in Syria. Wherever she went, crowds of Arabs followed her, through the narrow city streets, into the noisy bazaar. “I have become a Person in Syria!” she declared.

Droves of notables came to visit at her hotel, and every afternoon she held a reception. “Damascus flocks to drink my coffee and converse with me,” she reported with delight. During a meeting with one family, the Abdul Kadirs, she discussed her future plans to visit Ibn Rashid, and won a promise that they would help her in her journey. Most important, she learned that the French Orientalist René Dussaud was also planning a trip to Rashid headquarters in Hayil; it stirred her competitive juices. “I must hurry up!” she exclaimed, hoping to beat him there.

But for the moment it was Damascus that intrigued her, “with the desert almost up to its gates, and the breath of it blowing in with every wind, and the spirit of it passing in through the city gates with every Arab camel driver. That is the heart of the whole matter,” she wrote.