Page 143 - Life of Gertrude Bell

HAIL 129
mind: ‘It’s late and I’m all alone, and thinking of those things, of
philosophy and love and life-and an evening at Rounton-and
what it all meant. I told you then I was a man of the earth,
earthy ... You are in the desert, I am in the mountains, and in
these places much could be said under the clouds. Does it mean
that the fence was folly, and that we might have been man and
woman as God made us and been happy ... But I myself answer
to myself that it is a lie. If I had been your man to you, in the
bodies we live in, would it change us, surely not. We could not be
together long, and there’s the afterwards sometimes to be afraid
of... Do you ever think like this? ... And still it is a great and
splendid thing, the birthright of everyone, for woman as for man,
only so many of them don’t understand the simplicity of it. And
I have always maintained that this curious, powerful sex attraction
is a thing right and natural and to be gratified, and if it is not
gratified, what then; are we any worse? I don’t know
It does not need any great perception to read between those
lines, or to imagine the kind of letters that Gertrude was address­
ing to Albania; the kind of questions she was asking. Yet she went
about the mundane tasks of organising her journey from Damascus
with every appearance of single-minded concentration. On
November 28th she wired her father for £400: ‘This is not a gift
for which I am asking. I wish to borrow the money from the
National Bank.’ Bessam had found her a guide and two personal
servants one of whom, Muhammad Murawi, had travelled four
years earlier with Douglas Carruthers, the man who was to draw
up her maps when she returned to London. The wealthy and
powerful Bessam had told her that she would need plenty of
money with which to buy gifts for the princes of Hail. She pur­
chased twenty camels, hired cameleers and a rafiq or guide,
Hamad of the Ghiyadh tribe, and set off on December 16th. It
seems that she was in touch with T. E. Lawrence, still digging
and spying on the Germans at Carchemish, for he wrote to his
brother on December 10th ‘Miss Bell passed straight through
from Beirut to Damascus ... and will not visit us till Spring.’
Before leaving England she had written to Chirol: ‘I want to cut
all links with the world ... The road and the dawn, the sun, the
wind and the rain, the camp fire under the stars, and sleep, and
the road again ... ’
Her first camp was at Adhra on the edge of the Damascus
oasis near Dumeir. She was on the road she would normally have