Page 44 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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Persian Pictures

Arc we the same people I wonder when all our surroundings,
associations, acquaintances are changed? Here that which is
me, which womanlike is an empty jar that the passer by fills at
pleasure, is filled with such wine as in England I had never
heard of...

She went to Persia in the spring of 1892, travelling with her
cousin Florence Lascelles (whose father was by then ambassador
in Tehran). They went by the long rail route through Germany
and Austria to Constantinople and on to Tiflis, Baku and the
Caspian Sea, Gertrude reading Strabo Svho mentions nearly all
the little towns which exist today’. She wrote some of the most
descriptive letters of this holiday to Horace Marshall. After the
above lines which captured her first questioning feelings she
wrote: ‘How big the world is, how big and how wonderful. It
comes to me as ridiculously presumptuous that I should dare to
carry my little personality half across it and boldly attempt to
measure with it things for which it has no table of measurements
that can possibly apply. So under protest I write to you of Persia:
I am not me, that is my only excuse. I am merely pouring out for
you some of what I have received during the last two months.’
And so she pours out her impressions, vivid pictures which
seem, even at a distance of almost a century, still to shimmer in
the cool streams of Tehran, Kashan and Isfahan. Men with
flowing robes of green, white and brown, women who lifted
their veils as she went past to reveal lustrous eyes, luxurious
vegetation and the nothingness of stony desert —‘Oh the desert
around Tehran! miles and miles of it with nothing, nothing
growing; ringed in with bleak bare mountains snow crowned and