Page 289 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

EPILOGUE z63

GERTRUDE BELL
Whose memory the Arabs will ever hold in reverence and affection
Created this Museum in 1923
Being the Honorary Director of Antiquities for the Iraq
With wonderful knowledge and devotion
She assembled the most precious objects in it
And through the heat of the Summer
Worked on them until the day of her death
On 12th July, 1926
ICing Faisal and the Government of Iraq
In gratitude for her great deeds in this country
Have ordered that the Principal Wing shall bear her name
And with their permission
Her friends have erected this Tablet.

Looking back from the turmoil of Faisal’s Iraq, from a world torn
asunder by war and the efforts of the peace-makers, there is danger
of losing sight of the achievements of so few years past; of the
mountaineer who won the admiration of the finest climbers of her
age, of the translator of Hafiz and the chronicler of the early
churches of Asia Minor, of that solid body of writing at the
pinnacle of which stands The Desert and the Sown, of the dutiful and
loving daughter and sister. Her fame has faded with the years, but
it will not die. Her real work will remain an inspiration to genera­
tions of archaeologists and other scholars, and her example will
be quoted by those who seek adventure in deserts and on moun­
tains, long after that disastrous experiment in Arab king-making
has been forgotten. When, a year after her death, David Hogarth
gave a presidential lecture on the 1913 journey to Hail at the Royal
Geographical Society, he said:
She had all the charm of a woman combined with very many of
the qualities that we associate with men. She was known in the
East for those manly qualities. Fattuh, her servant... was also
my servant for one journey ... I remember an awful week in the
north of Syria when it rained day after day, and day after day
I told him we could not start because the weather had not lifted.
Once he did not ask, but merely said, T suppose we don’t start
today?’ I said ‘No.’ He said, ‘No, we shan’t start, but the sitf —
with an expressive gesture — ‘she went through mud and water
to her waist.’