Page 45 - Life of Gertrude Bell

PERSIAN PICTURES 33
furrowed with the deep courses of torrents. I never knew what
desert was till I came here ... ’ The hospitality of people to whom
she was a stranger, the enchanted prince whose home and garden
belonged to his guests, beggars who ‘wear their rags with better
grace than I my most becoming habit’ and the commonest
women whose veils ‘arc far better put on than mine’. The never-
ceasing compliments, the unstinted hospitality —‘Ah, we have
no hospitality in the west and no manners.’ And then — ‘Say, is it jj
not rather refreshing to the spirit to lie in a hammock strung
between the plane trees of a Persian garden and read the poems of
Hafiz...’
She arrived in Persia with a smattering of the language, learnt
in the course of six months’ tuition at home along with Latin,
which she found harder than Farsi, stumbling as best she could
over the ‘horrid catching briars of prepositions and conjunctive
moods’. She found an amiable old teacher in Tehran who knew
too much Persian for her and not enough French (and no English) • ■
and so they carried on long philosophic discussions, he expressing
the viewpoint of ‘an oriental Gibbon’ in Persian, she delivering
her sermons in French, and neither being greatly the wiser in the
:
end.
She had not been long in Persia before she met one of the
Legation secretaries, Henry Cadogan. She and Florence Lascelles,
it was said, imparted an unaccustomed gaiety to the diplomatic
missions, British and foreign, almost as soon as they arrived.
Within a very few days Gertrude was describing the real treasure
of her journey: ‘ ... it certainly is unexpected and undeserved to
have come all the way to Tehran and to find someone so delightful
at the end—he rides with us, he arranges plans for us — he shows
us lovely things from the bazaars — he is always there when we
want him and never when we don’t. He appears to have read
every tiling that ought to be read in French, German and English.’
Gertrude also made an impression on the German charge
d’affaires, Dr Friedrich Rosen, an able linguist who did much to
help her Persian studies so that before she left she could read and
write the language well and speak it tolerably. Cadogan, ten years
older than Gertrude, was an all-round sportsman, good it was
said at bezique and billiards as well as tennis, and agreeably
intelligent. Rosen often invited them to his home together and
they would ride into the surrounding country as a threesome or
with uncle Frank and Florence. ‘We would ride all over Shimran