Page 92 - Life of Gertrude Bell

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78 GERTRUDE BELL
Solomon, mounted on a donkey, who took her to sec the site of
Elijah’s sacrifice. She returned to England in May 1902.

Before she could accompany Hugo on a long-awaited sea trip she
had to return to the Engclhorn range to complete some of the
climbs that had been frustrated earlier by bad weather. She spent
the month of June at home in Redcar and London and in July she
was back in the Oberland.
At about this time she wrote an undated letter to ‘Ever my dear
Domnul’ to sympathise with him at the threatened takeover of
The Tims newspaper by a rival publishing group, and to com-
pliment him on his talents; and she added an interesting footnote
to the effect that Ibn Rashid, the Amir of the Central Arabian
province of Jabal Shammar, was ‘on the warpath’ and that she
could not be sure that this would be ‘a good year to visit him’.
This is the first reference in her letters to any ambition she may
have entertained to explore inner Arabia. Mountaineering was her
priority at the moment, however, and she left home with no more
demands on her family than a request to her sister Molly to obtain
for her two gold pins for her necktie and thick black garters.
She was met by Ulrich and Heinrich Fuhrer and was surprised
to find another woman climber there, Fraulein Kuntze, who was
somewhat put out to discover that Ulrich, with whom she had
been climbing, was contracted to act as guide to Gertrude. The
Englishwoman was uncommonly generous in her references to
the German girl; ‘very good indeed she is,’ she told Florence.
Gertrude had become a celebrated figure in the Bernese Oberland.
She was stopped by a guard on the train and asked if she was the
Miss Bell who had climbed the Engelhorn the year before. ‘This
is fame,’ she wrote with amusement and pride. The first few
days consisted of gentle climbing and reconnoitring ‘a charming
little rock or two’. Then on July 13th they attempted what they
called ‘the first of the impossibles’, the Wellhorn arete. They
literally ran up the first part of the mountain, the Vorder Wellhorn.
Then they roped and started to work around a smooth and nasty­
looking overhang which took them four hours of ‘very fine arete
climbing’. They arrived at a long knife-edge exposing a precipice
with a drop of some 2,000 feet beneath them. They reached the
summit after several hours of dangerous climbing in freezing
cold, and returned safely to base. ‘If the weather holds we shall
go on to Grimsel,’ she said, ‘for the second impossible is now in

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