Page 85 - Life of Gertrude Bell

COURAGE AND DETERMINATION 73
higher—always with Ulrich on me, mind!-and he began to
raise himself by his hands.’ As Ulrich’s foot left her shoulder
Gertrude put out her hand and straightened her arm to make a
ledge for him. He called out, ‘I don’t feel at all safe-if you move
we arc killed.’ Grtrudee assured him that she could stand there
for a week. The guide got himself up into ‘a fine safe place’; then
it was Gertrude’s turn. The three of them were roped together
and she was able to make the ledge on which Ulrich was perched
with the help of the other two, but Heinrich, left to last with no
shoulders to stand on, could not get up ‘with fifty ropes’. Then,
in her account of this dangerous ascent, Gertrude delivers a
characteristic aside: ‘The fact was, I think, that he lost his nerve.’
She was speaking of one of the most distinguished and courageous
of Swiss guides, who like his cousin of the same name was a
legend in the Alps. Ulrich and Gertrude went on to the summit
of the Klein Engelhorn, rescuing Heinrich on the way down.
When she retold the story to her stepmother, Gertrude remarked
that Ulrich had admitted to her that if, when he had asked her if
she felt safe she had replied that she did not, he would have fallen
and they would all have gone over the edge. Gertrude told him
after the event, ‘I thought I was falling when I spoke.’
‘What do you think?’ she asked her father at the end of her
report, ‘Seven new peaks — one of them first-class and four very
good. One new saddle also new and first-class. That’s not bad
going is it?’
By mid-September she was back in England, none the worse
for a wet and hazardous expedition. She called on the Stanleys,
Chirol, Lisa Robins, the Pollocks, Humphry Wards and other
friends, and spent Christmas 1901 at Red Barns.

The year 1902 began and ended with sea journeys which, had she
not made such descriptive use of them, would seem nothing
more than ostentatious extensions of a life marked by unques­
tioned privilege and unlimited parental indulgence. In January
she, her father and Hugo left Liverpool on a voyage to North
Africa, Sicily, Malta and Italy, and on the first day out, the 14th,
she wrote to her stepmother: ‘We sat next the Captain at lunch.
Mr Moss next Hugo and a Mr and Mrs W. and their daughter
and two B’s (father and daughter) opposite. Mr W. has a Lanca­
shire accent you could cut with a knife, is a vulgar beast, but
interesting and not unpleasant. Mr B. is sanctimonious, and I