Page 284 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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GERTRUDE DELL
had helped to create. ‘I have never returned to the ’Iraq without
returning to Babylon,’ she writes in recollection of the great
German archaeologist Koldewey and his colleagues digging at the
mound of Nebuchadnezzar ... ‘all pomp and glory paraded be­
fore their eyes and fallen into dust... ’ She had written of Dr
Koldewey in a letter home in 1918: ‘It’s no good trying to think
of him as an alien enemy and my heart ached when I stood in the
empty dusty little room where Fattuh used to put up my camp
furniture and the Germans and I held eager conversations over
plans of Babylon or Ukhaidir. What a dreadful world of broken
friendships we have created between us.’ In her ‘Romance’, she
recalled him excavating to the heart of one of the great ziggurats,
to an inner core of sun-dried bricks, all that remained from the
depredations of robbers over thousands of years. ‘ “I call that
old,” said Dr Koldewey as he examined the bricks. “How old?”
I asked. “Ten thousand, twenty thousand years,” he answered.
“How can I tell? We can’t date the pre-historic period in
Babylon.” ’ There was a concluding story of her Arab friend who
was known as the Lord of the Merchants, who on a visit to Paris
sought a gift for his liege, Shaikh Khazal of Muhammerah. In the
end he purchased two life-size wax images of European women.
They had wooden hands which he replaced with wax ones at a
cost of 250 francs per lady. ‘ “Why,” asked his English com­
panion, “did he not put a gramophone within each of the images,
that the Shaikh might hear the voice of the women of Paris as
well as their form?” Deploring, all too late, his own lack of im­
agination, he answered: “Allahi! Kbnrshfikar\ that by God, that’s
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a sweet thought.
There in a brief pen-picture was her Iraq, in its antiquity and
novelty, its perversity and levity, the adopted family which she
protected with motherly devotion and affection and portrayed
with unsurpassed powers of description. It was, in a way, her
valedictory essay.
On July 7th, the day after the King’s departure for Europe, she
wrote to her father to say that her ‘faithful friend’ Sir Percy
Loraine had arrived from Tehran in the aftermath of Reza Khan s
accession to the ancient throne of Persia and the inception of the
Pahlavi dynasty. Sir Henry Dobbs gave a dinner party for the
ambassador and of course Gertrude was present. They ate in the
large cool ballroom of the High Commission and were entertained
by Russian dancers. On the night of July nth she went to be