Desert Queen (28 page)

But in contrast to the lazy British official, the local Muslim religious leader, the Naqib, was a man of great knowledge and authority and a loyal subject of the Turks. Gertrude had met him before and this time she spent two hours with him, writing afterward that she was “vastly amused, as ever, by his talk.”

In between her meetings, she read more letters from Dick. Another of her personal diaries had arrived, he told her, and he had spent the day reading it. “It’s perfectly wonderful and I love it and you. I kiss your hands and feet, dear woman of my heart. Let it be for a moment; in many thoughts, and many hours, perhaps in many lives, I’ll answer it.” He had written about her to his uncle Charles Doughty, and now he passed on to her the famous traveler’s good wishes. His note continued, adoringly:

“And the desert has you—you and your splendid courage, my queen of the desert—and my heart is with you.… It makes me humble, darling, such a perfect love as that—something that one has dreamt of as one dreams of dim glories, all a wonder. I am not worthy of such a gift. If I was young and free, and a very perfect knight, it would be more fitting to take and kiss you. But I am old and tired and full of a hundred faults. Ah, my dear, my dear, what things you say—they hold the heart—and to my soul you answer.”

Again he wrote about his lust: “You are right—not that way for you and me—because we are slaves, not because it is not the right, the natural way—when the passions of the body flame and melt into the passions of the spirit—in those dream ecstacies so rarely found by any human creature, those, as you say, whom God hath
really
joined—In some divine moment we might reach it—the ecstacy. We never shall. But there is left so much. As you say my dear, wise queen—all that there is we will take.”

His letters made everything she did seem worthwhile again. He made her feel brave, strong, courageous and, more than anything else, womanly. He had written to her again and again while she was in the desert, telling her of a meeting with her father in London, of his new assignment in Ethiopia, of his passionate love for her and of his joy in reading her special diary for him: “You said in the book you wanted to hear me say I loved you, you wanted it plain to eyes and ears, and in the book for me to lean on, you set it down.

“I love you—does it do any good out there in the desert? Is it less vast, less lonely, like the far edge of life? someday perhaps, in a whisper, in a kiss, I will tell you.…

“You give me a new world, Gertrude. I have often loved women as a man like me does love them, well and badly, little and much, as the blood took me, or the time or the invitation, or simply for the adventure—to see what happened. But that is all behind me.

“Where are you now?” he asked in despair. But almost cruelly he went on, “I love to think of you lonely, and wanting me.”

She had written to him of her distaste for infidelity and her desire for marriage. “There
is
a real marriage, a fidelity of the mind. Nothing touches that,” he answered; “fidelity of the body is a word only, the other is the meaning of it. I do not think anything of the one and the whole world rests on the other. Chastity is not a virtue at all, only if one loves one must say so with every pulse and heartbeat. I don’t know why I wrote this. I have come out of my kingdom by it, and can’t get back. But 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 to woman, a splendid thing enough after all. But what we have we will keep and cherish. Yes, we will be wise and gentle as you said.”

For now she could only read his words and dream of him. Dick had left England for the diplomatic posting in Ethiopia. There was no possibility of their seeing each other.

At the beginning of April 1914, Gertrude bade farewell to Baghdad on her way to Damascus and then to Constantinople, where she hoped to see Ambassador Sir Louis Mallet. Four months earlier he had tried to stop her journey, but she had valuable information for him now about Arabia and Ibn Rashid and Ibn Saud.

Before she left, she wrote to Domnul: “You will find me a savage, for I have seen and heard strange things, and they colour the mind. You must try to civilise me a little, beloved Domnul. I think I am not altered for you, and I know that you will bear with me. But whether I can bear with England—come back to the same things and do them all over again—that is what I sometimes wonder. But they will not be quite the same, since I come back to them with a mind permanently altered. I have gained much, and I will not forget it.

“I don’t care to be in London much.… I like Baghdad, and I like Iraq. It’s the real East, and it is stirring; things are happening here, and the romance of it all touches me and absorbs me.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

Rumblings of War

A
fter three weeks Gertrude left Baghdad and marched west across the desert to Damascus, ignoring the hardships that hinder most travelers. Her caravan was now smaller, easier to move: two small native tents for camping, with only a rug on the ground as her bed, and Fattuh, Sayyah and Fellah as her staff. They were in Anazeh territory, “the real Bedouin,” she called these camel people who wandered ceaselessly through the desert. “The others are just Arabs.” She was content to be with them, sitting with their sheikhs, drinking their coffee around their fire, although she remembered what one of her
rafiqs
had said around just such a campfire:

“In all the years when we come to this place we shall say: ‘Here we came with her, here she camped.’ It will be a thing to talk of, your
ghazai
. We shall be asked for news of it, and we shall speak of it, and tell how you came.” It made her anxious to think what they would say. “They will judge my whole race by me,” she reckoned.

She had no guide to lead her across the Syrian desert, but, she confessed, “it amuses me to run my own show. And so far all has gone well.”

They rode quickly, sometimes for eleven hours a day, and for the first time she succeeded in sleeping on her camel. Only a few days out, however, they saw telltale footprints of a raiding party. It was dangerous to relax. Riding across land that was “flat, flat and flat,” they stopped at a well and learned that the raiders were Shammar who had stolen forty camels from the local Anazeh tribe. The victims had pursued the thieves, she was told by a young boy, and had seized ten of their mares. What’s more, they killed one of the leaders. “Did his companions stay to bury him?” Gertrude asked, suddenly picturing the corpse in the open desert. “No,
Wallah
,” the boy answered; “they left him to be eaten by the dogs.” The image was gruesome. “I could not get him from my thoughts,” she wrote to Dick, “the dead man lying on the great plains till the dogs came to finish the business.”

Half-drawn, half-repelled by a sea of sinister dots in the distance, she and her men made their way toward the black tents of the Anazeh. They spent the night on a grassy patch of plain near grazing herds of camel, and in the sharp cold air of the early morning they saw the encampment spread out before them. They counted a hundred and fifty goatskin tents on the plain; as many more lay behind the green ridges under a giant cliff. Arriving at the heart of the Anazeh camp, Gertrude rode up to the largest tents, knowing they belonged to the reigning sheikh. Dismounting, kneeling her camel in front of the Bedouin’s coffee tent, she hid her nervousness and strode confidently into the quarters of Fahad Bey ibn Hadhdhal, Paramount Chief of the Anazeh.

The formidable leader of the desert’s most aristocratic tribe, Fahad Bey was an old man with a reputation for ruthlessness and the badges of brutality to prove it. He wore an air of dignity, stemming in part from his powerful position among the Anazeh, in part from the palm fields he owned near Karbala and in part from the notable title his father had won from the Turks. The sheikh was small and slim, his beard bleached to snow, his face deeply browned from almost seventy years in the sun. Beneath his robes he bore the wounds of a youthful raid. A huge hole had been carved in his breast, the work of an enemy lance that, thrust in his back, went straight through his chest. “No one but an Arab of the desert could have recovered,” Gertrude later wrote.

Spreading fine carpets on the ground, he motioned for her to sit. She rested against a wooden camel saddle, watched by a falcon perched behind Fahad Bey and by a greyhound lying beside him. While servants brought them thick coffee and dates, she and the Arab talked. He asked if Iraq was quiet and she answered no, describing the uneasiness with the Turks. They discussed the city of Basrah in southern Iraq and its well-known politician, the ruthless Sayid Talib. And then Fahad Bey questioned her more closely. Why did she want to travel? he asked. “There is lying among Islam,” he continued, “but not among the English. Tell me the truth. Why do so many travelers come into the desert. Is it for profit or for industries?” She told him it was for knowledge and curiosity. He could not believe it, he said. The traveler “might die”; “it was dangerous”; “it was toilsome.” But she insisted that the English made no profit from the desert. They did not like to sit at home much; they liked to see the world. “
Sadaq
,” she said, “believe me.” “
Sadaq
,” he answered, “I believe you.”

He showed her his harem, the long tent where the women stayed, and introduced her to his latest wife and their children. They posed and she took their picture. Later in the day she rallied her servants and went off to take the measure of an ancient site. While they were on the way back to camp, the skies blackened and the heavens poured hailstones and rain. After the storm passed, Fahad Bey came to her tents, and his servants prepared the best meal she had ever been served by an Arab sheikh. They dined on roast lamb stuffed with curried rice, and on bread, yogurt and meat patties resting on a pile of rice.

Afterward they drank coffee and smoked, and she gave him news of the Naqib and other acquaintances in Baghdad and Basrah and answered more of his questions about the mood in the cities and the feelings about the Turks. She filled him with information from the European capitals and tickled him with gossip, from the salons of Constantinople to the palace inside Hayil. When she left the next day he urged her to take an escort. She was touched by his kindness, but she had no idea how important an ally he would become.

O
nly a few days later another fierce storm struck the desert. “Malicious scuds of rain” hit the earth, she wrote, and in her diary she asked Dick, “Do you remember Shelley’s song to the Spirit of Delight?

“
I love snow and all those forms of the radiant frost
I love wind and rain storms, anything almost
That is Nature’s and may be
Untouched by man’s misery.
”

On the morning of May I she arrived in Damascus, too weary even to celebrate the sight of the vineyards and orchards. She had never felt so tired. She went to sleep early and slept for an hour or two, but her mind was filled with camels marching across her dreams. During her stay in the city she heard frightening news from Hayil. The Emir’s uncle, Ibrahim, had been murdered, his throat slit with a sword.

Word came from Constantinople that Sir Louis Mallet welcomed a meeting with her. He would be interested in hearing what she had learned in Arabia.

Taking a boat from Beirut to Constantinople, she arrived four days later, at a time when the capital of the Ottoman Empire was in upheaval. The Young Turks—university students and young men from the military academy who had banded together in 1908 and forced the Sultan, Abdul Hamid, to reinstate the constitution and then to resign—had only recently overthrown the War Ministry and taken control of the government. In addition, the seven-hundred-year-old empire, which once extended over Asia, Europe and Africa, had been greatly diminished.