Page 74 - Life of Gertrude Bell

6z GERTRUDE BELL
tent, content that they had been near the Prophet and had seen
the holy city. One of her muleteers was a Druse. ‘If all his sect arc
like him, they must be a charming race. He is a great big hand­
some creature, gentle, quiet and extremely abstemious.’ She
decided that she would like to go to the Hauran desert and to take
Muhammad the Druse with her. She arrived back with the
Rosens on Saturday April 8th, sunburnt, ‘a rich red brown, not
at all becoming’, and began immediately to arrange for the next
journey, to the Hauran, with her hosts and her muleteers. She
wrote to Elsa, discussing her sister’s views on Italy and sending
an illustrated article on Petra, written en route, for the Monthly
Cousin. Gertrude was now an accomplished photographer and
she began to send home some of the thousands of pictures of the
East which were to supplement the written accounts of her
travels. And a word for her other sister whom she persistently
regarded as the most frivolous member of her family: ‘Tell the
ditty Moll... that I’ve got a present for her. It’s a complete
Bethlehem costume, with the high hat and veil and everything.
She can wear it to the next fancy dress ball if she likes.’

Before setting off for Jabal Druse, the mountainous home of that
sect which stands somewhere between Islam and Christianity and
which neither cares for greatly, she went to the Russian consulate
and watched from its balcony the ceremony of the Orthodox at
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She was intoxicated. ‘I never
felt so excited in my life,’ she wrote. ‘Suddenly the sound of the
crowd rose in a deafening roar and I saw a man running from the
sepulchre with a blazing torch held high over his head. The crowd
parted before him ... Then followed a most extraordinary scene.
On either side of the sepulchre people fought like wild beasts to
get to the fires, for there were two issuing from the two windows
of the sepulchre, one for the Greeks and one for the Armenians.
In an instant the fire leapt to the very roof; it was as though one
flame had breathed over the whole mass of men and women ...
there was nothing but a blaze of light from floor to dome, and
the people were washing their faces in the fire. How they are not
burnt to death is a real miracle ... Well, I can scarcely tell you
about it sensibly, for as I write about it, I am overcome by the
horrible thrill of it.’
By the last week of April she was ready to leave for her^first
journey into genuinely difficult and hazardous territory. ‘Oh,