Page 74 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)

6o GERTRUDE BELL

sight-sheets and sheets of varied and exquisite colour —purple,
white, yellow and the brightest blue-and fields of scarlet
ranunculus.’ As they passed across the scented plain they were
joined by a cheerful party from Bethlehem, a fat man on a donkey
and a small thin man who walked beside him, the portly one
dressed in white with a yellow kajfiyah (‘the thing they wear round
their heads bound by ropes,’ she explained for the benefit of her
father) and a fair beard. He turned out to be another Christian
‘Praise be to God!’ and so they journeyed together across a
carpet of flowers, the men stopping every now and again to pick
Gertrude a bloom or to let off their breech-loader guns at pigeons
which invariably flew off untroubled. ‘May their house be
destroyed,’ exclaimed the Christian every time he missed. They
left the floral plain behind and went towards Tell Kufrein where
they saw the first black tents of the desert. All around barley was
in ear and one of the Adwan Badu — ‘Arabs par excellence*—played
a reed pipe. ‘It was much more Arcadian than Arcadia,’ she
wrote. They crossed Wadi Hisban ‘which is Hesbon of the fish-
pools in the Song of Songs’, and went on to Ayun Musa, ‘a
collection of beautiful springs with an Arab camp pitched above
them’, where the women were unveiled and wore long blue
cotton gowns. They bought laban, sour goat’s milk, from them
and went on to an encampment of the Bilka Arabs, where they
pitched their own tents. It was raining and a strong wind was
blowing when they left next morning, and Gertrude composed a
letter to her family:

At 7 it began to rain but I nevertheless started off for the top
of Siagheh, which is Pisgah, sending the others straight to
Madeba. I could see from it two of the places from which
Balaam is supposed to have attempted the cursing of Israel and
behind me lay the third, Ncbo-Naba in Arabic. The Moses
legend is a very touching one. I stood on the top of Pisgah and
looked out over the wonderful Jordan valley and the blue sea
and the barren hills, veiled and beautified by a cloud and
thought it was one of the most pathetic stories that have ever
been told.
She met an American photographer in a waterproof coat, took
coffee and a cigarette and waited at a Latin monastery for her next
official guide, who turned out to be a big, handsome and cheerful
Circassian. They took the Roman road, hewn out of the solid