Page 77 - Life of Gertrude Bell

JERUSALEM <>5

the paramount shaikh of the Druses by the attentive Hammad,
their little fingers entwined as he led her to the great man of his
people. ‘I would defy anyone not to treat Yahya Beg with respect/
she observed. He was a big man of fine stature and manner, who
summoned the Englishwoman to sit with the others squatting
on his carpet and eating from a central platter, and soon he was
asking her about her travels, and her family. As she told her tale
he would say, Daghty, daghty, ‘it is true, true’. By the time she was
ready to leave after five days at the heart of Jabal Druse, the
people called her Okhty, ‘sister’. She drank tea with them and gave
them passages from the Bible to toy with — they were especially
pleased with ‘Love Thy Neighbour’—and finally set off for
Damascus on Wednesday May 9th. She rejoined Charlotte
Roche there two days later. She had asked her parents’ permission
to go on to Palmyra for a fortnight accompanied by three Turkish
agheyls and on her return to join Charlotte again for a final journey
over the Baalbek Hills to Beirut, and thence by boat to Haifa and
on to Jerusalem.

As we drew near Palmyra, the hills were covered with the
strangest buildings, great stone towers ... some more ruined
and some less ... They are the famous Palmyrene tower
tombs ... I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular
landscape.
Except Petra, Palmyra is the loveliest thing that I have seen
in this country, but Petra is hard to beat.
She returned home in June. Before she left she wrote to her
father: ‘But you know ... I shall be back here before long! One
doesn’t keep away from the East when one has got into it this
far.’