Page 118 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

102 GERTRUDE DELL
‘Speech,’ she observed, ‘does not serve the same purposes cast
and west.’

Ramsay wrote the first and fourth parts of the book and Gertrude
the second and third parts, and they dedicated it to Professor
Josef Strzygowski whose book was ‘our constant companion
during many weeks in Maden Sheher’. Remarkably, it was
Gertrude who, sitting in her study at Rounton on her return to
England and working alongside the man who was acknowledged
to be the foremost authority on such matters, wrote the most
detailed architectural notes, taking each church as she went and
dissecting it, technically and historically. Maden Sheher, she
noted, is really made up of two parts, Binbirkilisse and Deghile,
the cities of the valley and the hill, sixty miles south-east of Konia
itself in ancient Iconium. An island of volcanic mountain, oval
in shape, rises out of the Lycaonian plain; the Kara Dagh or
Black Mountain. Its highest peak is called Mahaletch, which
Ramsay and Gertrude thought was a corruption of the Christian
St Michael, for it was crowned at a height of 7,000 feet by a great
church with a monastery attached to it. From there they gained a
magnificent view across the plain to the snow-clad Taurus ridge.
At the nordiern base of the Black Mountain lay Maden Sheher,
a stretch of fertile land, cultivated in part, and Binbirkilisse, the
place of the churches they had come to record. It was fortunate
that they arrived when they did, for two years later when Ramsay
returned to the site some of the structures had collapsed beyond
recognition — settlements, forts, monasteries and churches finally
succumbing to the erosion of time and the insistence of subsiding
land.
Gertrude had already written an account of her preliminary
researches in a letter to Revue Archeologiquc of January 1905, where
she went into the geometry of the cruciform structure. ‘The
structural scheme of the cross-in-square must have been early
understood. Millet has pointed out that in the great vaulted
buildings of Rome, such as the baths of Caracalla and the basilica
at Maxentius, it is only necessary to substitute the dome on
pendentives for the intersecting barrel vault in order to arrive at
the cross-in-square
jn the opening chapter of A Thousand and One Churches Ramsay
wrote: ‘A defenceless city like this must have fallen easy prey to
the Arab invaders, who began to overrun Asia Minor soon after