Desert Queen (25 page)

She kicked her camel with her heels to make it go faster, but by the time they reached camp, ten soldiers on horseback were already at her tents. The drunken one in charge told her angrily that the Turkish authorities had been looking for her ever since she left Damascus. They warned her that she had better leave. She listened politely, scowling at herself for being like an ostrich in the sand, not realizing what a fuss there had been about her. “Paf!” she wrote to her parents, annoyed that she’d been caught. “I was an idiot to come in so close to the railway.”

As soon as the Turkish soldiers left, she wrote out telegrams to friends—the British Consuls in Beirut and Damascus—and gave them to Abdullah to take to town. But her man was stopped en route, the telegrams snatched, and the fellow sent to prison inside the Ziza castle. A few hours later Fattuh was jailed too. As Gertrude watched helplessly, the returning soldiers ransacked all the baggage, claimed all the weapons, and posted seven men around the tent. Angry and tired, she still refused to concede. “I am not beaten yet,” she wrote the next morning, as though it were all a contest. She and her men could go back to Damascus and start over on a different route through Palmyra. Fattuh responded cheerfully: “I spent the first night of the journey in the railway station, and the second in prison, and now where?” Gertrude told her parents, “It’s all rather comic,” but it wasn’t.

There was little laughter in her. The mail had brought letters from Doughty-Wylie telling her he was back in London and planning to see her mother. How she wished she were there with him! In another letter, he spoke tenderly about a diary she had kept and sent to him. “It’s perfectly wonderful and I love it and you. I kiss your hands and your feet, dear woman of my heart,” he wrote. “I cannot tell you how it moves me to hear you say—not that—to see it—written by you—that you might have married me, have borne my children, have been my wife as well as my heart. Thinking at all points—you yourself and me myself—each free, each independent, each intent to be one—Yes—I’ve dreamed these things.”

This was the last bit of mail before she left again for the desert. Forlorn, she read Dick’s words over and over: “I shall never be your lover, my dear, never. I read that beautiful and passionate book, and know it. Never your lover, that is man and woman.… But what we can have, we will keep and cherish. Yes, we will be wise and gentle as you said.

“I love you, but I shall never have you,—only always in the real world be your lover, your obedient servant, your loyal friend.… And I will try to be more like what your lover might be, and shortwise—but it will be sometimes hard, because I am an ordinary man—and follower of delights.”

She was distraught. What might have happened if she had given in to his desires? What if, in that moment of passion, she had let him take her? Would it all be different? Would they be together now? But she refused to let him make love to her as long as he was married to someone else. It was wrong. What’s more, she could have become pregnant. In her tent that evening, feeling desperate, she unleashed her feelings to Domnul:

“I have known loneliness in solitude now, for the first time.… Sometimes I have gone to bed with a heart so heavy that I thought I could not carry it through the next day. Then comes the dawn … and I walk on through the sunlight, comforted … taught at least some wisdom by solitude, taught submission, and how to bear pain without crying out.”

S
he moved her camp to the nearby town of Amman, once the capital of the Ammonites, later the city the Greeks called Philadelphia and now the home of Circassians—red-haired, fair-skinned Muslims from the north—driven from their mountain homes by the Russians and resettled here by the Turks. For the first time in three weeks she saw grass and green hills and crops growing, and she met friends and notables she had not encountered since her first desert trip, fourteen years before. Her Circassian friends invited her to a wedding and the fifteen Protestant families in town invited her to tea.

But the pleasure would not last. She learned that telegrams had been flying since December 17; Sir Louis Mallet, the British Ambassador to Constantinople, had informed the British Consul in Damascus that the Turkish Government begged that she not travel to Central Arabia. Wired Mallet, “In my private opinion she would be wise to desist from travelling in the countries of Ibn Saud and Ibn Rashid.” Mallet informed the Foreign Office in London: “There is considerable unrest among the Arabs.… Government have disclaimed all responsibility in the case of Miss Bell.” Gertrude was told that if she continued from Amman toward Nejd, her own government would wash its hands of her.

She puffed on a cigarette and read the wire from the Turkish Vali, the Governor, in Damascus. Mallet had informed the Ottomans of her journey, and the Turks insisted she sign a note acknowledging that she traveled at her own risk; they refused to take any responsibility for her safety. Putting pen to paper, she wrote her name cavalierly. But on the last night in Amman she lay in bed sleepless, twisting and turning with the thought that she was an outlaw. “The desert looks terrifying from without,” she scrawled in her diary.

The following day she left Amman, riding toward a farm three hours away that belonged to some Christian Arab friends. The last time she had seen them was in 1905, but the men boomed a hearty welcome and invited her to stay the night. Tall and broad-shouldered, they were as big in heart as in body: they slew a sheep to show her hospitality, piled up a platter of rice in her honor, and, since three of her men had quit in fear, they promised to provide her with camel drivers and new
rafiqs
to guarantee her safety from one tribal territory to another. In the warmth of their friendship, her terror disappeared. She had started a new diary for Doughty-Wylie, and in it she wrote: “The desert is clothed once more in abiding serenity. Thus we turn towards Nejd,
inshallah
, renounced by all the powers that be, and the only thread which is not cut is that which runs through this little book, which is the diary of my way kept for you.”

“Y
ou now must make acquaintance with the members of the expedition,” Gertrude jotted on Sunday, January 18, 1914, as her caravan headed in the direction of Arabia: first, there was Muhammad Murawi, who had ridden with Ibn Rashid; his nephew Salim, an all-around helper; the affable Fattuh, “the alpha and omega of all, with his eye on everything, although it never appears to be off me.” There was Ali, “an idle dog” but “brave as a lion”; Muhammad’s nephew, Said, the head camel driver; and under him Meskin, of the Agail tribe; Mustafa, a peasant from Jerusalem; and the black-skinned Fellah, who worked in the men’s tent and “has the good word of everyone.”

With eight men plus two
rafiqs
, Gertrude left the high ground and rode six to eight hours a day across the Beni Sakhr territory, flint-covered land scattered with herds of camel and flocks of sheep. The trek was wearying, and as they rode her men told tales of bloodthirsty raids—the endless cycle of tribal revenge. In the evening Gertrude sat in her tent composing reassuring letters to her family, jotting notes in her journal, and making longer, more intimate entries in her diary for Dick. She did not mention to her parents that she had seen her first scorpion that day. To Dick she wrote, “I am really beginning to enjoy it all,” admitting that she had been so unhappy on the first part of the trip, she had seriously considered turning back. “But when two days ago I cut myself loose from civilization I felt as if I had cast down all binders.”

Years earlier a young Arab boy had helped her see beyond the surface of the landscape, to “read the desert.” She noted the beds used by Arab boys, hollow squares made with big stones; the half-moon nests in the earth scooped out by camel mothers for their young. She knew the names of the plants and the uses to which they were put: the
utrufan
, used by the Arabs to scent their butter; the prickly
krusa’aneh
, for an excellent salad; the dry sticks of the
billan
, for camels’ food; and the
gali
, for making soap.

She stopped at Tubah to photograph the Ummayad Palace; a few days later she measured the castle near Bair. She had now reached the land of the Anazeh, the most powerful of all the Bedouin tribes. The route of her caravan ran close to water wells, making it vulnerable to raiding parties that met at the pools. Her men were afraid to go to sleep at night, but Gertrude brushed off the danger: “I should sleep but little in the next few weeks if I were to be disturbed by such things.”

But her men’s fears were not without good reason. On the morning of January 21 they discovered a Bedouin’s body. “He was killed,” her
rafiq
Sayyah observed. Looking down at the corpse she could see that the cotton
kafeeyah
was covered with blood. “Occasionally I wonder whether I shall come out of this adventure alive,” she commented, adding despondently to Dick, “But the doubt has no shadow of anxiety in it—I am so profoundly indifferent.”

The earth had turned dry and black, thickly strewn with flints; gleaming, yet bare and forbidding. Her thermometer registered the temperature, fluctuating from the freezing point in the morning to seventy degrees in the midafternoon. She spied a lone geranium flowering on the low ground: courageous, she thought. Another day and the caravan was low on water. They had not bathed or washed in days. Then, coming out of a wide valley, they spotted fresh camel footprints in the sand. Ali announced there must be Arabs nearby. “Tonight we shall hear their dogs,” he said.

They settled in camp, and Gertrude followed her
rafiqs
, climbing the hills to scout. It reminded her of a game she and Maurice had played when they were young, wandering around the house, up and down the stairs, hiding from the housemaids.

“There is smoke!” Sayyah called out. The black plume curling over the hill was a certain sign of a campsite, probably that of a raiding party. Inspecting the area nervously, she and her men encountered flocks of sheep and some shepherds of the Howeitat tribe. They were known throughout the Euphrates, from Arabia to Syria and Mesopotamia, for their terrifying
ghazus
, campaigns of plunder and warfare that had made them rich and powerful. Every one of their men and boys was called into service for a major raid, and sometimes as many as five thousand camel riders were assembled. Riding for days on end, they rarely slept or ate. Once they reached their destination, they would swoop down on the enemy camp like a whirlwind, screaming war cries and creating wild confusion. Tents were overturned, sheep and goats stampeded and any person who stayed behind was sliced to death.

Gertrude knew there was only one thing to do: ask the Howeitat for protection before they discovered her and made their kill. The following morning she rode her camel into the camp. Finding the largest black tent, she approached the sheikh’s home. She kneeled her animal, hitting it on the neck to make it sit, then waited for a servant to invite her inside. She followed him into the tent of Sheikh Harb; inside she saw the carpets on the floor and the camel saddles covered with sheepskin to make them comfortable for leaning. A true Bedouin, Harb welcomed his honored guest, offering coffee poured from a brass pot into tiny cups, inviting her to return later for the evening meal.

At sundown, freshly bathed in water from the Howeitat well, feeling clean for the first time in days, Gertrude donned her dinner gown and returned to the tent with a gift for her host. They sat—she and her guides, Harb and his men—cross-legged in a circle, before them a large copper tray piled high with boiled rice cooked in grease from sheep’s milk, topped with a roasted male sheep, slain in her honor, sprinkled with raisins, almonds and onions. Before they began, Gertrude was offered the prize delicacy, the eye of the sheep. Murmuring gratefully for such hospitality, she quickly swallowed the organ, then reached with her hand to take some meat. Later the leftovers would be served to the others.

As dinner went on, another guest arrived: Muhammad Abu Tayyi, cousin of Audah, the greatest sheikh of the Howeitat; “magnificent,” Gertrude described him, “tall and big with a flashing look, the Howeitat reputation for dare-devilry written on his face.” Like his famous cousin (who kept count of the men he killed) now away raiding the Shammar, Muhammad Abu Tayyi had dark skin, high cheekbones, a black mustache and small goatee. He served as an agent of the Ottomans, in charge of collecting the camel tax, and responsible, too, for a portion of the distant Hejaz Railway.