Page 75 - Life of Gertrude Bell

JERUSALEM ^3
Father dearest, don’t I have a fine time! I’m only overcome by the
sense of how much better it is than I deserve!’ She and the
Rosens kept together for the first week as they made their way
north-east from Jerusalem, crossing the Jordan near Salt and
making their way across country towards Damascus. By the end
of April they had made leisurely progress to Deraa and when the
following morning Gertrude looked through the flap of her tent
she could see Mount Hermon, snow-capped and gleaming, in
front of her. On the eastern horizon she could just make out the
Druse mountains. They breakfasted in front of the Rosen tent as
usual, and then parted for the time being, she going east with her
caravan and they striking out westward to Lebanon. She rode for
three hours with Muhammad and Yakoub her muleteers and
Hanna the cook, though she usually went on ahead while they
coped with the baggage animals; and she began to familiarise
herself with the tribal dims, or pasture lands of the country, a
knowledge that she was to put to vital use in years ahead. ‘The
maps mark this as Anizah country,’ she would note, ‘but they
appear to have withdrawn their black tents further eastward,
probably because of the encroaching Turkish government.’
Before they left Jerusalem, Dr Rosen had insisted diat if
Gertrude was going into the desert on horseback she must learn
to use a ‘gentleman’s saddle’. It meant a break with one of the
fixed customs of life but she was eventually persuaded and
already she felt the benefit after years of side-saddle riding. The
chief comfort of her journey, she said, was her masculine saddle.
‘Never, never again will I travel on anything else; I haven’t
known real ease in riding till now.’ She was disconcerted, how­
ever, to find that wayfarers now thought she was a man approach­
ing and addressed her as ‘Effendi’ until they saw her skirt. ‘You
mustn’t think that I haven’t got a most elegant and decent
divided skirt,’ she assured her father. In this volcanic region most
of the houses were built of black basalt rock — ‘When the Romans
built a great colony here in the first century, about, they built
entirely with stone’ — for there were no trees for wooden building.
She made her way to Jizeh and then on to Bosrah, black and
imposing, ‘a mass of triumphal arches with the castle dominating
the whole’. She was surrounded by past magnificence and present
squalor, as she put it. Here came the inevitable moment of
bargaining with the Turks. The Mamur, the Sultan’s land agent
in the province, was a Beiruti who spoke Arabic but his colleague