Page 111 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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ASIA MINOR 97

abrasive encounter was capable of causing a good deal of uproar,
both among their eastern hosts and their fellow countrymen. For
the moment they avoided each other, he returning to
Constantinople as the impetuous honorary attache at the British
embassy, she continuing her travels. For the next two months she
wandered happily on horseback among the Syrian Arabs and the
Druses, through Palestine and the Levant, from Haifa to Rameleh
and Tneib, meeting up with the Bani Sakhr tribesmen by whom
she was greeted with the remark which followed her for the rest
of her life, and long after her death: Mcishallab! Bint Aarah, ‘As
God has willed, a daughter of the Arabs’, though she rendered it
rather freely as ‘daughter of the desert’. She crossed the Jordan
and the Mecca railway, joining a raiding party, or ghev^u,
and parleying with the Druses whom she told, to their apparent
sadness, that Lord Salisbury was dead, and to whom she explained
the complexities of fiscal policy in the world so that they became
convinced Free Traders. And on to Damascus, where she arrived
at four in the afternoon to find men of all kinds gathered in
prayer, ‘from the learned Doctor of Damascus down to the
raggedest camel driver’, and she was constrained to say ‘Islam is
the greatest republic in the world, there is neither class nor race
inside the creed’. She took off her shoes and followed them as
they responded to the chanting of the imam.
‘Allah!’ he cried, and the Faithful fell with a single movement
upon their faces and remained for a full minute in silent
adoration, till the high chant of the imam began again: ‘The
i Creator of this World and the next, of the Heavens and the
Earth, He who leads the righteous in the true path, and the
evil to destruction. Allah!’ And as the name of God echoed
through the great colonnades, where it had sounded for nearly
2,000 years in different tongues, the listeners prostrated them­
selves again, and for a moment all the church was silence ...

So from the Great Mosque on to the coffee houses and to the
Governor’s residence. ‘This has been a visit to Damascus that I
shall not easily forget. I begin to see dimly what the civilization
of a great Eastern city means.’ She went on to Baalbek, Homs,
across the foothills to the plain of Hama and Apamea, over­
looking the Orontes Valley, a square mile of temples built by
Seleucus Nicator, now in ruins. ‘Now think how Greece and the
East were fused by Alexander’s conquests. A Greek king, with