Arabian nights of Gertrude Bell, The

Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2001 by Mullen, Alexandra

AH, THE MYSTERIOUS EAST! The romance of the desert and the glamour of sheiks and harems, camels and oases, date palms, loaves of bread, jugs of wine, and above all the Arabs, silently folding their tents and stealing away. For anyone of Queen Victoria's generation, Arabia was primarily a place of the imagination, mapped out in childhood, populated by Ali Baba, Sinbad, and Haroun al-Rashid out of the Arabian Nights. Open sesame! and anything could happen. As the pink bits of the globe expanded during Victoria's reign, one might have expected the magic to fade, but instead the mystique of the mysterious East grew as true adventure replaced fairy tale. The flamboyant Sir Richard Burton recounted his journey to the forbidden city of Mecca which he penetrated in disguise in his Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to ElMedinah and Meccah (3 volumes, 1855-56) and Charles Doughty described, in an almost indescribable self-created prose, the two years he spent among the nomadic Bedouin in Travels in Arabia Deserter (2 volumes, 1888). The pattern culminated in T. E. Lawrence's account, by turns factual and mystic, of the Arab War which was first printed privately in 1926 as The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (only one volume, but it's not short). These rivals to The Thousand and One Nights still tell tales of stratagems and spoils, but, as time passed and the empire grew, magic carpets and roc's eggs made way for mail routes and railways.

Another casualty of progress was Scheherazade, the teller but not the doer of adventures. "It's a bore being a woman when you are in Arabia," Gertrude Bell remarked.1 And Bell is the authority on being an Edwardian woman in Arabia. Every Macaulayan schoolboy knows that Ptolemy, like Caesar with Gaul, divided Arabia into three parts: Arabia Felix (the fortunately fruitful bit of the main peninsula), Arabia Petr-aea (the rocky part that includes the Sinai peninsula), and Arabia Deserter, the vast trackless wastes of sand and volcanic rock that make up the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. This last Arabia was the one to which Gertrude Bell devoted much of her life. She plotted its scanty ruins and wells before the First World War, helped divide and govern it after the war, and left L50,000 to the museum that would help preserve its artefacts after her death. Like her male fellow adventurers, Bell fell for the spell of the desert, and she was never boring.

Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was born with an iron spoon in her mouth at a time when iron production was very profitable. Her father, Sir Hugh Bell, was an industrialist baronet filled with the ideals of high Victorian liberalism, devotion to empire, and profit-these were not, to his mind, incompatible aims. Bell's stepmother (her mother having died when Bell was three) was a Frenchwoman who immersed herself seriously in some of the social issues of the day. At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town is still a useful portrait of the manufacturing townMiddlesbrough, in Northumbria-that made the Bells' fortune. Lady Florence Bell also wrote plays-mostly society comedies-and a few educational books for children including the pre-Rattigan French Without Tears. Gertrude was brought up to be physically fearless and intellectually confident. And she was also a systematic student of whatever she put her mind to. When she was sixteen, her parents agreed to send her to Queen's College, London, and, two years later, to Lady Margaret Hall, then only in its seventh year. She read Modern History and was the first woman to get a First in that subject. But after that coup, what then? The young men she met weren't all that interesting and she had no interest in becoming a don. Fencing lessons helped. Visits with her diplomat cousins the Lascelles in Romania and, later, Teheran honed her diplomatic skills and amateur intelligencegathering. Bell had learned Persian well enough to translate the poems of Hafiz (published in 1897), and she began on Arabic, too. As a reading language, it had seemed easy at first, but it turned out, she wrote her parents, to be rather difficult to speak: "The worst I think is a very much aspirated H. I can only say it by holding down my tongue with one finger, but then one can't carry on a conversation with your finger down your throat, can you?" (Persian and Arabic joined her French, Italian, German, and Turkish). Mountain climbing in the French and Swiss Alps (leaving behind "Gertrude's Peak") and the Rockies further developed her taste for intrepid-not to say foolhardy-tests of physical endurance. Globetrotting to Palmyra, Damascus, Cairo, Jerusalem, India, Singapore, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, Chicago, Niagara Falls, even Boston, enlarged her sense of possibilityand lack of it. For if all these experiences relieved the boredom of a well-brought-up young lady's life in Mayfair, they nonetheless proved a Barmecide feast. Bell hungered for a more substantial life.

In 1904, at thirty-six, Gertrude Bell determined to follow up her interests in a newly concentrated way. She gave up mountain climbing and returned to serious study, working under Salomon Reinach, a French archaeologist. Recognizing that "there is still much exploration to be done in Syria and on the edge of the desert," Bell planned to study "those vestiges of antiquity that catch the eye of a casual observer." But besides archaeology she was interested in social contacts, especially of the two groups of Arab people she had earlier found most fascinating: the Druze and the Bedouin. This journey became the basis for her best travel book, The Desert and the Sown (1907)-crammed with conversations and photographs, something between travel guide and ethnography with pauses for somewhat woolly political recommendations (the root of various difficulties within the Ottoman empire "lies in the disappearance of English influence at Constantinople"). Some serious archaeological work resulted from this trip too, appearing in Reinach's journal, the Revue Archeologique.