Page 78 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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Courage and Determination

Before she and Maurice left on their round-the-world voyage at
the end of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee year, the family had
spent a brief holiday in the Hautes Alpes. They stayed at La
Grave under the shadow of the Meije, a mountain which chal­
lenged the most experienced of Alpine climbers. Gertrude
wandered off one night and slept at the refuge, striding back the
next morning with her first serious mountaineering ambition
fixed firmly in her mind. She had to wait until the summer of
1899 before she could undertake the mission however.
Meanwhile she contented herself with a stay at Redcar with her
sisters and Hugo; a brief sojourn in London spent mainly with the
Russells of Audley Square; a visit to northern Italy on her own;
a few weeks in Bayreuth with Hugo, the Lascelles and Chirol;
and a journey to Greece with her father and her uncle Thomas
Marshall, a classical scholar who had published a translation of
Aristotle’s works. In Athens she met for the first time her friend
Janet’s archaeologist brother, Dr David Hogarth, who showed
them some recent finds - pots of 4,000 b.c. from Melos. ‘Doesn’t
it make one’s brain reel!’ They had travelled to Athens by way of
Corfu, a cheerful threesome despite the disparity of their ages.
She found her uncle Tom a ‘most amenable and agreeable’ com­
panion as they made their way along the coastline of Greece by
horse-drawn carriage and eventually by train on the last stage to
Athens. They stopped at several sites of ancient Greece on the
way, she and Marshall spending a ‘delicious’ time amid the ruins
of a Doric temple. But Gertrude wondered how her uncle managed
when he travelled alone. ‘He is absolutely ignorant and incap­
able about ways and means, added to which he has the
untravelled Englishman’s incapacity for making himself under-

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