Page 88 - Gertrude Bell (H.V.F.Winstone)_Neat

74 GERTRUDE BELL
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like him not. Miss M. pleasant and inoffensive.’ She seldom
erred on the side of charity in describing her companions. Hugo
and Gertrude played bridge, read Sicilian history and argued
amicably through cold blustery winds, and their father wrote an
article about Trades Unions which he read to them from time
to time. Gertrude thought it was ‘excellent’. She caught a cold on
the early part of the journey and was sick going through the Bay
of Biscay; but neither malady confined her. She arranged to have
the upper deck marked out for golf practice and went on with her
Italian as the ship proceeded towards the Mediterranean. She
continued to work at her Arabic, and less systematically at Latin,
the syntax of which, along with Arabic pronunciation, presented
the only serious obstacles to her formidable powers of learning.
They went ashore at Algiers and Gertrude was ‘much entertained
at talking Arabic’. She found the ‘better classes’ quite easy to
understand. She felt the pull of the East again: ‘I find it catching :
at my heart again as nothing else can, or ever will I believe, thing
or person.’ On January 23rd they entered Malta harbour, and so
began a week of photographing and drawing ruins of that
ancient island, interrogating and describing its people, and hectic
socialising. Dinner with the captains of H.M. ships in the harbour:
‘I sat between Captains Leveson and Farquhar, and was very
much amused.’ Lunch with the C.-in-G, Admiral Sir John Fisher
on the flagship Renown, ‘rather an outsider, but an amusing
person. His mother was a Cingalese, and he and his daughter have
a most distinct touch of the Oriental’. To the opera for Cavalleria,
‘of which we could only endure half’, and the Council Chamber i
‘hung with Gobelins given by Louis XIV’. By the end of the
month they had journeyed to Sicily. ‘After lunch we drove out
... to the Latomia dei Cappuccini, that tragic place which is
now a fruit garden, full of oranges, lemons, flowering almonds, i
pomegranates, and olives ... Here the Athenians sighed their i
lives away, out of sight and earshot of the blue waters they had
ruled and lost. So on to San Giovanni where we saw boring
catacombs, and the place where St Paul is supposed to have 1
preached.’
Almost every page of her letters of this period was filled with i
the freshness and enchantment of discovery in a Latin land
dotted with the remains of ancient Greece. At Taormina: ‘Hugo
and I got up at six and went to the theatre to see the sun rise.
Unfortunately it was sirocco, and a very stormy sunrise, with