Page 129 - Life of Gertrude Bell

MESOPOTAMIA ID
her story, Aw nr a lb lo Amurath, was a sensitive account of that
awareness.
J. G. Lorimer, her host in Baghdad, was a steward of the
Residency in the mould of Rich, Rawlinson and Taylor. He was
engaged in the compilation of a Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf which
became the most reliable and authentic guide ever put together
of Britain’s long involvement in the area, of the histories of the
Arab princes and shaikhs from the coast to central Arabia who
had ruled under Turkish suzerainty for more than four centuries.
What Gertrude did not know at that time was that Lorimer was
engaged in a long-drawn-out dispute with his own government
arising out of the rivalry between the Foreign Office, which since
Palmerston’s time had dedicated its support to the crumbling
Ottoman Empire, and powerful factions within the Indian
administration that supported the aspirations of Arab rulers. It
was a battle in which, in years to come, Gertrude was to find
herself playing an important part.
For the moment she was content to enjoy the hospitality of the
Resident, and to take a ride up-river on the official launch with
Sir William Willcocks, ‘a twentieth-century Don Quixote,
erratic, illusive, maddening and entirely lovable’, with whom she
discussed the possible irrigation of the desert regions and the
proposed extension of the German railway from Baghdad to
Basra. They moved on towards the Persian frontier along the
Diala river and then westward again along the Himrin range,
stopping at the fortress of Kasr Shirin, ‘one of the most beautiful
places I have ever seen’, crossing and re-crossing the Zab river,
on the way to Mosul. On the road at Kalat Shergat she met the
German archaeologists who now, since the funds once provided
for British archaeologists by the British Museum and the Daily
Telegraph had dried up, had become the dominant force in
Assyriology. She was warmly welcomed by them and she spent
three days in the company of their leader, the distinguished Dr
Walther Andrae. ‘His knowledge of Mesopotamian problems is
so great and his views so brilliant and comprehensive.’ Fattuh
became ill again on their journey north through the tribal dira
of the Shammar, but a native doctor was called who bled him
copiously and, it seems, to good effect. They were now on the
well-trodden desert road from Mosul to Mardin, Urfa and
Carchemish, where she hoped to meet Hogarth. In early March,
as Gertrude’s caravan was on its way to Baghdad, Hogarth’s