Page 37 - Life of Gertrude Bell

EUROPE AND LONDON *5
priests when they swung incense exchanged humorous
remarks with the congregation.

By the first week of May they were at the gateway to the East,
surrounded by the Byzantine and Islamic splendours of
Constantinople. Gertrude’s first impression was muted. ‘The
people are so fearfully sophisticated, they address you in very bad
English, and in order to gain your confidence assure you that
they recognise you perfectly and remember having seen you
often in Glasgow or Liverpool or some other place you have
never been to.’ The view soon brightened. She and Billy took a
caique and rowed up the Golden Horn nearly to the Sweet
Waters. ‘It was perfectly delicious with a low sun glittering on
the water, bringing back the colour to the faded Turkish flags of
the men of war ... ’
They dined with the Embassy secretaries. ‘I sat between Mr
Lowther, who is not nice but is rather funny, and Mr Findlay
who is good but dull.’ The paradox was not lost on Gertrude.
Her relationships with men were ill-fated from the beginning and
there can be no dissent from the words of an earlier biographer
who had the advantage of womanly insight: ‘Men interested
Gertrude more than women, and on the whole I think she got on
with them better; but she had too strong a streak of masculinity
in her own make-up, and she was too prone to intellectual argu­
ment, so that in spite of her essential womanliness, her in many
ways delightful femininity, her very warm heart and her craving
for affection and desire to be liked, she was not perhaps the sort
of woman men want to marry. In fact I rather fancy she frightened
off even those she cared for most.’
In June 1889 she was back in London. Many years later her
sister Elsa re-read her youthful letters and wrote: ‘I feel... that
they close the last chapter of absolute happiness in Gertrude’s
life.’

She had passed through the Bosporus and had seen from a
distance the ornate splendours of the palace and seraglio whence
the Sultan Caliphs had ruled for some five centuries, secretively
^ and often fearfully, over the Arabian peninsula, Syria, Meso­
potamia and much of eastern Europe and north Africa, and held
spiritual sway over the faithful of Islam. She had approached
the high ingate to the Sultan’s palace, the bob al aly, which the