Page 65 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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She set out for the Middle East again in November 1899 at the
invitation of the Rosens who by now represented the Kaiser in
Jerusalem. She stopped on the way at Smyrna, the busiest trading
town of Asia Minor then, making the last part of the voyage
in a Russian vessel, the s.s. Rossia, which carried about four
hundred Christian pilgrims. She wrote to her stepmother: ‘The
pilgrims are camped out all over the deck. They bring their own
bedding and their own food and their passage from Odessa costs
them 12 roubles. They undergo incredible hardships: one woman
walked from Tobolsk, she started in March.’
She did not stay at the German consulate but at the Hotel
Jerusalem, presumably because the Rosens lacked the space to
accommodate her, but she had most of her meals with them.
Almost her first action on arrival was to hire a horse and an
Arabic teacher, Khalil Dughan. ‘My horse is much admired,’
she wrote to Florence. ‘My teacher, also, is a success.’ She was,
nevertheless, having a surprisingly difficult time with her Arabic —
surprising in view of her earlier protestations and the ease with
which she had learnt Persian. She told Elsa, ‘I must go to bed
quickly so as to be up early and prepare my lesson before my
Arab comes (I may say in passing that I don’t think I shall ever
take to Arabic, but I go on struggling with it in the hope of
mortifying Providence by my persistence! I now stammer a few
words to my housemaid—him of the fez—and he is much
delighted ... ’
She spent most of her time in Jerusalem touring with Dr
Rosen’s sister-in-law, Charlotte Roche, armed with a large
Kiepert map of Palestine, keeping her family informed of her
progress with a procession of vividly descriptive and sometimes