Desert Queen (23 page)

It took ten days for mail to reach home and she could not afford the time. Instead, at the telegraph office near her hotel she wired home to Rounton, asking for extra money, explaining that she had used her next year’s income for the trip, promising her father that she would pay him back with earnings from the new book she hoped to write. Hugh Bell was always cautiously frugal, and Gertrude accounted for her spending like an obedient young wife. He had never stopped her before, of course, yet she always asked his permission. In an almost childlike way she wrote to him: “The desert is absolutely tranquil and there should be no difficulty whatever.… I hope you will not say No. It is unlikely that you will because you are such a beloved father that you never say No to the most outrageous demands.… Dearest beloved Father, don’t think me very mad or very unreasonable and remember always that I love you more than words can say.”

W
ith Bassam’s long list of suggested provisions in hand, Gertrude made forays past the great Ummayad Mosque and into the crowded Damascus
souk.
Almost everything she wanted—food, clothing, even camels—was available in the covered bazaar. In a new Parisian suit, and with the amiable Fattuh at her side, she tramped through the dirty passageways, brushing past pashas in gold-embroidered robes; sheikhs in gilt-edged cloaks; Turks covered in long silk coats with colorful turbans wound round their heads; Christians in frock coats, holding rosaries in their hands; Jews with long beards, their heads in turbans, their pants in Turkish style; Armenians and Greeks in colorfully embroidered tunics; old men proudly wearing the green turbans that announced they had made the pilgrimage to Mecca; Bedouin, just in from the desert, in their striped blue
abbas
and
kafeeyahs
; their women tattooed in indigo and veiled in dark blue cloth; and native boys hardly wearing anything at all.

She stepped carefully away from the piles of dung left by camels and mules parading through the labyrinth of alleys. The narrow streets were a storefront for fortune tellers reading palms, public scribes and seal engravers selling their services, vendors everywhere hawking their wares. A cacophony of cries from ragged beggars and sweaty street merchants and wailing muezzins rang in her ears. The sweet smell of Middle Eastern foods drew her on: carts piled high with pistachio nuts, roasted peas, sweet Damascene pastries, licorice, biscuits and all kinds of breads. The brim of her hat was nearly crushed as she dodged sherbet sellers in bright red aprons, butchers carrying carcasses on their shoulders, drink vendors lugging two-handled jars.

At the entrance to the covered lanes, close to the Ummayad Mosque, the aroma of spices wafted from the Souk ali Pasha; she looked in at the tobacco stalls and the coffee stands and she sampled fresh desert dates. She paid a visit to her friend the red-bearded Bahai, who owned a tea shop, and he welcomed her as always with a cup of sweet Persian blend. “Your Excellency is known to us,” he had told her years before when she first stopped in. When she had reached for her money he said, “For you there is never anything to pay.”

Fattuh headed for the Souk el Jamal, where the caravans came to buy and sell their camels. Paying no attention to the putrid stench, he haggled over the dromedaries, settling happily on an average of thirteen pounds apiece; next door he found the big leather saddles and tapestry saddlebags. Gertrude poked her way through the Souk el Arwam, where Greek merchants sat on the floor of their shops, calling out to her to offer weapons, armor, shawls, carpets and water pipes. She bargained skillfully in the clothing stalls, piling up armloads of cheap cloaks,
kafeeyahs
, cotton cloth and kerchiefs to give as presents along the way. And at the food markets they bought enough bread, butter, meat, eggs, cheese and water to last three or four weeks. Still there was more to be done. Camel drivers were needed, and with Sheikh Bassam’s help she hired Muhammad Murawi, an old guide said to have friends among every Arab tribe along the way.

T
he desert was thick with robbers. Lacking mercy for those in their own tribes, much less for Europeans, they would steal her money at the slightest chance; she could not risk carrying cash for restocking supplies. With her guide, Muhammad, she rode the electric tram to Maidan, just outside the city, to meet an agent of Ibn Rashid. If she gave the merchant two hundred pounds, he would give her a letter of credit she could draw on in Hayil.

The man was waiting at a native restaurant. A large party was with him, a dozen or so local men and visitors from the south, all curious to meet the lady, El Sitt. Their heads covered in braided cloths, their bodies clothed in robes, they greeted her: “
Salaam Aleikum.
” “
Aleikum salaam
,” she responded, as they made space at one of the wooden tables that filled the familiar-looking room—mosaic patterns on the tile floor, Islamic pictures on the whitewashed walls. A spread of hors d’oeuvres was set before her, plates of
lebeneh
—white cheese—with olive oil and dried mint,
taboule
, olives,
baba ghanoush
and more. Scooping some
humus
onto a leaf of flat bread, she savored the chickpeas and leaned forward to talk. She spoke knowledgeably, discussing antiquities, answering the men’s questions about ancient money, showing them how to write the early Sufaitic alphabet.

She had questions of her own: about the disposition of the Turks; about the terrain and oases of the desert; about the
ghazus
, the vicious raids that were the Bedouin’s game of life and death; about the politics of the desert tribes; and about the tribal wars. She asked anxiously, her eyes studying their black-bearded faces, searching for truth. One after another their turbaned heads nodded reassuringly, answering that all had become serene; tribes that had been at war for generations had come to terms and peace becalmed the desert.

One of the dark-eyed men murmured that, though there had been a dispute between the tribes of Ibn Rashid and Ibn Saud, all were now at peace. “Are the old enmities to be forgotten? Can you mold the desert sand into shape?” she wondered dubiously. She found it intriguing to watch the strange young man who spoke. Abd al Aziz was the agent of Ibn Rashid; tall and slight, with thin black hairs on his narrow face, his slim frame wrapped in a gold-embroidered cloak, his head covered in a huge camel’s hair robe bound in gold. There was something curious about the way he leaned back against the pillows, scarcely moving, hardly lifting his eyes, while his soft voice flowed in slow classical Arabic. Then she noticed his mood change, and gradually he began to stir, waving his thin hands and talking of Hayil and strange jewels that had been brought to the medieval city, about hidden treasures in the mosques at Karbala, about mysterious writings in Central Arabia. The others listened attentively: “Ya Satif! Ya manjud,” the men around her murmured. “O Beneficent, O Ever Present,” they purred, in admiration of his stories.

His tales left her somewhat skeptical; nevertheless, she paid close attention to the sly-looking Bedouin. This was the man she had come to meet. After a while, when he finished telling his stories, they broke bread to bind their friendship and shared salt as a promise of his tribe’s protection. She looked closely at his treacherous face; she could only hope that his word was good.

T
he morning before the journey was to begin, Fattuh complained of feeling ill. His temperature climbed deliriously; the doctor thought it was malaria. Always impatient, Gertrude nevertheless delayed her trip, restlessly filling the time by playing bridge, nervously eating too many helpings of sour curds. “I’ve grown fat,” she wrote home, from “the best food in the world.” A few days later she was told that Fattuh had typhoid. The waiting had become too much. She decided to hire a substitute servant and risk traveling along the railway line. In a week Fattuh could take the train and catch up.

At night in her hotel room she wrote feverishly, jotting details in her diary, drawing up descriptive letters to her parents and friends, dashing off a note to her fellow archaeologist T. E. Lawrence, writing that she would see him again at Carchemish on her way back in the spring. Drawing out fresh stationery from her leather case, wooden pen in hand, she dipped the steel tip into the inkwell and wrote another letter. Still desperate and depressed, mired in loneliness, wanting so badly to be with Dick, but knowing too well it was not her fate, she wrote her true feelings to Domnul:

“I want to cut all links with the world, and that is the best and wisest thing to do. Oh, Domnul, if you knew the way I have paced backwards and forwards along the floor of hell for the last few months, you would think me right to try for any way out. I don’t know that it is an ultimate way out, but it’s worth trying. As I have told you before, it’s mostly my fault, but that does not prevent it from being an irretrievable misfortune—for both of us. But I am turning away from it now, and time deadens even the keenest things.”

A
stack of mail arrived from home. She riffled through the envelopes and her eye caught a letter from the Balkans, from Captain Doughty-Wylie. Hastily she slit it open. It was four months since she had seen him! She scanned the pages eagerly, devouring his precious words:

It’s late and I’m all alone, and thinking of those things, of philosophy and love and life—and an evening at Rounton—and what it all meant. I told you then I was a man of the earth, earthy.… You are in the desert, I am in the mountains, and in these places much could be said under the clouds. Does it mean that the fence was folly, and that we might have been man and woman as God made us and been happy.… But I myself answer to myself that it is a lie. If I had been your man to you, in the bodies we live in, would it change us, surely not. We could not be together long, and there’s the afterwards sometimes to be afraid of.

Do you never think like this? I don’t know—probably not—as I told you, I am a man of the earth. And still it is a great and splendid thing, the birthright of everyone, for woman as for man, only so many of them don’t understand the divine simplicity of it. And I always have maintained that this curious, powerful sex attraction is a thing right, natural and to be gratified … and if it is not gratified, what then; are we any the worse? I don’t know.