Page 283 - Life of Gertrude Bell

faisal’s kingdom 257
On July 6th Faisal left for Europe, to take the waters of Vichy
and then to proceed to London, stating that he would like to stay
at Buckingham Palace. Faisal’s tailor and perfumier, when they
got wind of the visit, promptly asked the Colonial Office if it
could underwrite the Arab King’s credit as he had not paid his
bills for previous calls on them. The C.O. replied that it could not.
King George’s secretary told the Colonial Office: ‘HM desires me
to say that the only day on which he can receive King Faisal is
Tuesday ioth August. FIM only returns from Cowes on 9th ... ’
By then Sir Gilbert Clayton had signed a treaty with Ibn Saud
recognising him as the legitimate King of all central Arabia in­
cluding the Hijaz. Husain, unwelcome even in the lands of his
sons, had gone into exile in Cyprus. Ali, his eldest son, had
reigned briefly for a year in Jidda as the Sharif of the Holy Cities.
Now in July 1926 he was Faisal’s Regent in Iraq. Gertrude had
told her parents a few weeks earlier that she had found a new
‘place’ for her museum. ‘It is an excellent building which will give
me ample space ... and an office for myself.
At some time in her Iraq years Gertrude wrote an undated
essay which she called ‘Romance’. It was meant for the Arab
Bulletin but was never used. In it she captured the essence of her
adopted land and some of that joy which ran through the letters
and literature of her youth.
I have written of politics and of commerce, of steamships and
locomotive engines, but I have not pronounced the word which
is the keynote of the ’Iraq. It is romance. Wherever you may
look for it you shall find it. The great twin rivers, gloriously
named; the huge Babylonian plains, now desert, which were
once a garden of the world, their story stretching back into the
dark recesses of time — they shout romance. No less insistent on
the imagination, and no less brilliantly coloured, are the later
chapters in the history of the ’Iraq. The echoing name of
Alexander haunts them, the jewelled splendour of the Sassanian
King of Kings, the changing face of the Muhammadan
Khalifates, and last (to English ears not least), the enterprise,
the rigours, the courage of our seamen and merchants who
forced their path through the gates of the ’Iraq and brought
the Pax Britannica into the torrid seas of the Persian Gulf...

And then she took a nostalgic journey through the country she
had known under its Turkish rulers and under the monarchy she

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