Page 148 - Life of Gertrude Bell

*34 GERTRUDE BELL
region later called Transjordan, to the Great Nafud, the land of
orange-red sand dunes. In fact, Gertrude took a safer route than
most, for she avoided the wells to the cast and west of her path
where trouble was always likely to accompany the raiding parties
when they went in search of water; she relied instead on the
khabari, or ponds formed by rain in the desert. The lessons she
had taken in surveying techniques and map projection at die
Royal Geographical Society were to prove useful on the journey.
She was armed with a 3-inch theodolite, and she took accurate
sightings for latitude as she went. But too much has been made of
Gertrude’s journey to Hail as a notable feat of exploration. She
was not in any serious sense of the word an explorer. ‘That’s the
trouble with wandering,’ she once wrote, ‘it has no end.’ For her
there was a succinct truth in the remark, precisely because she
did not seek a conclusive goal. Her interests were those of the
scholar, the historian and archaeologist; her approach to travel
was philosophical, though it was accompanied by courage and
endurance of the highest order. She did not seek to discover new
places or to map unknown or unexplored areas, and the efforts
of some writers to portray her as ‘The Daughter of the Desert’,
as a kind of schoolgirl’s ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, do justice neither
to her nor to her real achievements. Even David Hogarth, who
was no traveller himself, tended to look with awe on her journeys
and to equate them with those of other voyagers who were bent
on discovery in the unmapped territories of central Arabia. The
geographical features of her route were clearly marked on the
maps of London, Constantinople and Simla. A woman was
largely protected by her sex in the desert. Unless she carried
valuable articles to tempt the natural cupidity of the badawin she
was unlikely to attract much more than an amused and uncom­
prehending interest. The desert Arab’s sense of self-importance
forbids a serious concern for the activities of a woman, whatever
her nationality or the novelty of her appearance. Indeed, many
remarkable tales of women’s exploits in the East have gone more
or less unnoticed. When Sir Leonard Woolley returned to
!■ England from his excavations at Ur of the Chaldees, for example,
he met a little old lady named Miss Tanner who exhibited a sur-
prising knowledge of the region in which he had been digging.
When he asked her how she had acquired her knowledge she
replied that she had wandered through Iraq and southern Iran
in the early 1880s accompanied only by a Christian dragoman and