Page 71 - Life of Gertrude Bell

JERUSALEM 59

attacked by dogs, the German Consul just saving himself from
being thrown over a precipice by jumping from his horse with
celerity. She learnt to read Genesis in Hebrew with Dr Rosen’s
help: ‘It’s extraordinarily near Arabic, much nearer than any two
European languages I can think of.’ And ever the worried
enquiry about Maurice, the keen interest in the activities of her
sisters as they traversed France, Italy and Switzerland and the
salons of London in her recently implanted footsteps, and of
brother Hugo now at Oxford.
On March 2nd she wrote to her father: ‘The R’s and I have been
planning expeditions. We mean to go for ten days into Moab
about the 18th. It will be lovely. We shall take tents, Dr R, Nina
and I. Our great travel is not till the end of April, but I shall go to
Hebron sometime early in April. Goodbye!’
She set out on her first desert journey on Monday March 19th,
1900, at the age of thirty-two. The road was thick with tourists,
all accompanied by their donkey caravans, servants and badawin
guides. There were no extraordinary dangers in these Syrian
vilayets of the Ottoman empire, though it was common enough
for American and European tourists to go home with hair-raising
tales of narrow escapes from wild tribesmen in these stony and
often flower-carpeted fringe deserts; and of course the badawin
guides exaggerated the dangers out of sheer venality. Despite
romantic stories which surrounded the journeys of Lady Hester
Stanhope and Gertrude herself, to say nothing of later visitors
whose powers of literary invention were to touch the hearts and
minds of generations of Englishmen, the so-called Bible lands
were not the stuff of great voyages of exploration.
Gertrude took things very much in her stride. In fact, she went
without the Rosens on this first excursion, arranging to join them
for a second journey in early April. She was accompanied by a
cook named Hanna, ‘that H is such as you have never heard,’ she
told her father, and a Christian guide named Tarif. In four hours
she reached Jericho, famished, and went straight to the Jordan
hotel for a meal. She had hoped to camp in the Jordanian desert
that night but the tents were so far behind on the baggage mules
that she was compelled to return to the hotel to sleep. They left
early next morning with an extra agheyl—TL Turkish guide —to see
them along the Jordan valley to Madeba. Tamarisks blossomed
in ‘full white flower’ and the willows were in ‘the newest of leaf’.
Of the Jordan plain she wrote: ‘It was the most unforgettable