Page 126 - Life of Gertrude Bell

112 GERTRUDE BELL ■
Gertrude returned to Mesopotamia in January 1911 after
spending a few months at home completing her current literary
tasks and making a brief journey through Italy and Germany. By
now she had completed another book, a record of her 1909 trip
which she called Amnratb to Amnratb and which the publisher
hoped would rival the success achieved by The Desert and /be Sown
in the three years since its publication. She travelled by way of
Beirut and Damascus (where she was delayed by snow) and
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through the Syrian desert to the Euphrates, ‘ ... too heavenly to
be back in all this again, Roman forts and Arab tents and the wide
desert’, marching sometimes thirteen or more hours a day, and
often getting nowhere. However, she found a short-cut to
Ukhaidir which took a day or two off her expected travelling
time.
On March 4th she wrote: ‘We left Ukhaidir this morning. I
wonder if I shall ever see it again and whether I shall ever again )
come upon any building as interesting or work at anything with
a keener pleasure.’ From there her caravan set off for Najaf, sister
city of Karbala on the Euphrates, the two sacred centres of the
Shia sect of Islam which stems from Ali the cousin of the Prophet
and the husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. As they
marched through threatening weather they found the corpses of
sheep and donkeys that had been trapped by the snowfall of
January, which had covered not only Damascus but much of the
Syrian desert. When the desert-dwellers first saw it, she was told,
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they thought it was flour. The region through which they now
travelled was occupied by the Bani Hassan tribe and the plain was
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aglow with their camp fires. Gertrude’s party stopped briefly at
the ruin of Khan Atshan, ‘a splendid ruin of I should think the
9th century, about the time of Samarra’, which provided her with
useful information in her attempt to date the palace at Ukhaidir.
They reached Najaf on Tuesday March 7th, ‘a walled town
standing on the edge of a cliff of the dry sea and surrounded on
the other side by a flat plain. Above the walls rises the golden
dome of Ali’s tomb which is the place of pilgrimage of all the )
Shia world’. She was taken sightseeing by the chief of police, but
there was little to interest her since she was not allowed into the
mosque nor even to pass close to it, and so she went on to
Babylon.

I rode off with a guide, and lunched on top of the Tower of