Page 122 - Life of Gertrude Bell

io8 GERTRUDE BELL
her undoubted gifts as an archaeological and historical scholar.
She crossed the Euphrates into the dangerous tribal territory of
the Dulcim and eventually reached the palace of Ukhaidir in late
March. She was greeted by a massive structure the dating of
which has always been in some doubt, though the later parts were
certainly built by one of the Abbasid princes, probably in the
second half of the eighth century a.d. Gertrude was able to stay
for only four days during which time she sketched as much as she
could, showing the central gateways, complex fortifications,
mosques, audience chambers and living quarters. She had to
enlist the services of her Arab companions and Turkish military
guides, or aghejls, in measuring the features of the palace, and she
ran into inevitable difficulties. ‘When my soldiers come measuring
... nothing will induce them to leave their rifles in their tents. They
arc quite intolerably inconvenient; the measuring tape is forever
catching round the barrel or getting caught in the stock, but I can’t
persuade them to lay die damnable things down for an instant.’
She returned to the palace in 1911, eventually producing a book
of painstaking scholarship which was published by the Clarendon
Press in 1914. In the meandme, she published an account of the
vauldng of the palace in die Journal of Hellenic Studies. When she
came back just over eighteen months later, the German archaeo­
logists of the Deutsche-Orient Gesellschaft had found their way
from Babylon to Ukhaidir. They generously allowed her to use
their architectural drawings and they freely compared notes, and
although their book on the subject came out two years before
hers there was no animosity between them; in fact, their respective
works complemented each other. She wrote in her preface:
With this I must take my leave of a field of study which
formed for four years my principal occupation, as well as my
chief delight. A subject so enchanting and so suggesdve as the
Palace of Ukhaidir is not likely to present itself more than once
in a lifetime, and as I bring this page to a close I call to mind
the amazement with which I first gazed upon its formidable
walls; the romance of my first sojourn within its precincts; the
pleasure, undiminished by familiarity, of my return; and the
regret with which I sent back across the sun drenched plain a
last greeting to its distant presence.
And so she went across the Euphrates in search of forts and
monasteries, drawing her incomparable word-pictures as she