Page 114 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

98 GERTRUDE BELL
his capital on the Euphrates, builds a city on the Orontes and
calls it after his Persian wife, and what manner of people walked
down its colonnades, keeping in touch with Athens and with
Babylon?’ Now she made her way to Aleppo, where she picked
up her guide Fattuh, an Armenian Catholic who was to become
her constant companion, and beyond to Konia, the Ottoman
vilayet which embraced Cilicia and Cappadocia. ‘What a country
this is!’ she wrote to Florence Lascelles, ‘I fear I shall spend the
rest of my life travelling in it.’ She crossed the Cilician plain by
horse, with only a very small caravan since her muleteer and
baggage animals, hired at Alexandretta, had disappeared en route,
arriving at Adana on April 23rd, where she was joined by Mr
George Lloyd, another of those itinerant Englishmen of the
East who were at that time gravitating to the same archaeological
focal points like moths circling a light. Since reading and review­
ing Strzygowski’s Kleiuasien: eiu Neuland der Kunstgeschichte,
Gertrude had been fascinated by the ruined Seljuk mosques and
the Byzantine churches of Anatolia, and she saw in this little-
known region an outlet for her passionate interest in architectural
history. She could not have chosen a better site for exploration
since Sir William Ramsay, the great ecclesiastical historian and
epigraphist, was there at the same time. She described Konia for
her father’s benefit; the burial place of Jelal ed-Din Rumi,
Persian founder of the order of Dervishes; conspiratorial chatter
with Pashas exiled by the Turkish Sultan over lunch with the
Loytveds, representatives of the German Empire; the Kara
Dagh, a great isolated mountain rising out of the plain, and at its
feet Maden Sheher and Binbirkilisse (Barata), the place of the
Thousand and One Churches, the number reflecting a fanciful
Turkish habit which found its way to the West of giving any
unknown number the figure 1001.
‘If you had read (and who knows? Perhaps you have!) the very
latest German archaeology books you would be wild with excite­
ment at seeing where I am,’ she told her father. As for the tomb
of the Jelal ed Din Rumi, the air was full of the music of his verse.
‘Ah listen to the reed as it tells its tale: Listen, ah, listen, to the
plaint of the reed. They reft me from the rushes of my home, my
voice is sad with longing, sad and low,’ Gertrude translated as
she went along.
Ramsay, the quiet Scot whom David Hogarth and many other
young archaeologists of the time sought to work with (he sent