Page 125 - Life of Gertrude Bell

MESOPOTAMIA hi
Levant after escaping from the clutches of Sir William Ramsay,
and who succeeded Sir Arthur Evans as Keeper of the Ashmolean
at Oxford. He was six years Gertrude’s senior and wrote learned
books about Arabia, its inhabitants and its explorers without ever
going beyond its fringes, for he was no explorer. He was a
prodigious scholar, a walking encyclopaedia in matters Greek,
Arabic and archaeological, though he did not speak Arabic and
was more attracted by writing than by digging in his devotion to
the latter pursuit. He looked forward to spending ‘quite a
respectable portion of eternity in talking to Herodotus’.
Then there was Mark Sykes, the banc of Gertrude’s eastern
paradise, a peripatetic gatherer of alarmingly biased information.
He admired the Turks and approved their method of rule, divide
et impera, and he spoke of the Arabs of his own day with a con­
tempt that has seldom been equalled. He had travelled among
these people from boyhood with his father, and he wrote of his
visit to a tent of the Wuld Ali tribesmen: ‘Now at the moment I
stepped into a tent... I was immediately impressed by the fact
that tiiere never could be, and never would be, any fellow-feeling
between them and me.’ Of the Shammar badawin he wrote: ‘A
rapacious, greedy, ill-mannered set of brutes ... These animals
are, unluckily, pure badawin, and have not been tinctured with
either Turkish or Kurdish blood, which always has a softening
and civilising effect on these desert tramps.’ He was hardly more
complimentary about the town Arabs. Sir Mark Sykes was to
become the principal adviser to the British government on its
war-time relations with the Arabs in just a few years. Meanwhile
he wandered among these tribal people, writing passionately of
the achievements of the Caliphates, ever praising the Turks and
denigrating his hosts.
There was Captain Hubert Young, bristling with military zeal
and anxious to meet everyone who mattered, British, German and
Arab; George Lloyd, cool and precise; Auberon (Aubrey)
Herbert, bohemian and myopic, who made the journey across
Sinai in 1907, a feat at that time considered remarkable; and at
Carchemish in the north-east corner of Syria, T. E. Lawrence,
‘Ned’ or ‘the little fellow’ as they called him, a bright classical
scholar and aspiring Arabist, working for Hogarth alongside
Leonard Woolley amid the ruins, and keeping his eye on the
Germans who were also digging there, on behalf of Military
Intelligence.