Page 123 - Life of Gertrude Bell

MESOPOTAMIA 109

went, and then north-cast to Kurdish territory. Of the nun at
Khark she wrote: ‘ ... young and personable, and she found the
religious life very much to her taste. Her sacred calling gave her
the right to come and go as she pleased, to mix in male society,
and even to put forth her opinion in male councils. Moreover it
provided her with an excuse for claiming audience of me on the
evening of my arrival. “I have come to see my sister,” I heard her
announce. “Does she speak Arabic?” And before Fattuh could
answer, she had presented herself at the tent door. The object of
her visit was to ask me for a revolver.’ At the same place Gertrude’s
saddlebags containing her precious notebooks, photographs and
cameras were stolen, and she sent the local Kurdish chief off into
the desert to look for them. When he could not find them she
summoned the Turkish kaitnakam, the governor of nearby
Midyat, to complain to him. The saddlebags were found with all
their contents except her money, which was later refunded by the
Ottoman authority. To her dismay, her adventures in the wild
country of the Kurds reached the British Press. ‘One might think
that in the Tur Abdin one was safe from horrible newspaper
notoriety.’
There was also a study of Ali Beg the chief of the Yezdis, the
so-called ‘devil-worshippers’, who still plied their ancient caravan
route through Asia Minor: ‘He is a man of middle age with a
commanding figure and a long beard, light brown in colour, that
curls almost to the waist. He was dressed from head to foot in
white, and as we sat together in the divan, I thought that I had
seldom drunk coffee in more remarkable company. I told him
that I knew his people in the Jabal Simun and that they had
spoken to me of him as the ruler of all. “The ruler of us all,” he
replied gravely, “is God”.’
At Samarra on the Tigris she met the distinguished German
archaeologists Buddensieg and Wetzel. ‘The pleasure at being
out of the heat and dust of a camp ... and into a cool clean house,
is scarcely less great than that of having intelligent, learned people
to talk to,’ she wrote. She made notes of the finds there and copied
many inscriptions in her notebook, which the Germans signed to
signify their approval of her work.
In August 1909 she was at home in Yorkshire drawing the
castle of Ukhaidir, ‘it is coming out beautifully. I can scarcely
bear to leave it for a moment,’ and contributing a chapter on the
Armenian monasteries she had studied on her way to Diyarbakir