Page 147 - Life of Gertrude Bell

HAIL i33

‘Would you like me to write you a love letter —to say in some
feeble whisper what the mind outside is shouting-to say, my
dear, how glad and gratified and humble I am when I think of
you ... *
But the last letter had not reached her yet. It was to follow her
across die desert, and in the meantime she started to keep a
secret journal, as well as her little pocket diary. On January nth,
as she waited and argued with the Turks who had followed
Fattuh to Ziza and had been ordered to take her to Amman, she
wrote:
I have cut the thread. I can hear no more from you, or from
anyone ... We turn towards Najd, inshallah, renounced by all
the powers that be, and the only thread which is not cut runs
through this little book, which is die diary of my way kept for
you.

She pulled every possible string to obtain permission to move on>
but the Turks were obdurate and even the new ambassador in
Constantinople, her friend Sir Louis Mallet, warned her that H.M.
Government would disclaim responsibility for her if she went on.
In the end she decided to slip away without her documents,
though three jemaders deserted her for fear of reprisal. She found
fresh camelmen and with Fattuh now attending to her welfare as
best he could, they set off south-eastwards to Tuba. Somewhere
along the line, perhaps about now, she wrote again to Chirol:

I have known loneliness in solitude now, for the first time,
and in the long days of camel riding and the long evenings of
winter camping, my thoughts have gone wandering far from
the camp fire into places which I wish were not so full of acute
sensation. Sometimes I have gone to bed with a heart so heavy
that I thought I could not carry it through the next day. Then
comes the dawn, soft and beneficent, stealing over the wide
plain and down the long slopes of the little hollows, and in the
end it steals into my dark heart also ... that’s the best I can
make of it, taught at least some wisdom by solitude, taught
submission, and how to bear pain without crying out.
Her journey from now on was over a well-worn route. The
Italian Carlo Guarmani, the Austrian Baron Nolde, Wilfrid and
Lady Anne Blunt, Doughty, Carruthers, Leachman, and many
others had traversed the path through Wadi Sirhan, east of the