About Gertrude Bell

So vast was her knowledge that the heads of the British Intelligence Department in Mesopotamia asked her to accept a staff appointment, and she played no small part in winning the friendship of some of the most bloodthirsty tribesmen residing in the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys.

Continuing Lawrence Launches Arab Desert Campaign,
our selection from With Lawrence in Arabia by Lowell Thomas published in 1924. The selection is presented in fifteen easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Lawrence Launches Arab Desert Campaign.

Time: 1917
Place: Along the Hejaz Railway

Blue eyes terrify the average Arab. Lawrence possesses two that are bluer than the waters of the Mediterranean, and so the Bedouins decided there was something superhuman about him. They themselves nearly all have eyes like black velvet.

Whenever Feisal was present, Lawrence would step aside and decline to decide disputes. He had no ambition to become the ruler of Arabia himself, and he knew that it would be far better for the future of the Arabs and for Emir Feisal if their differences were handled in the usual way by one of their own people. In fact, Lawrence never did anything himself that he could delegate to an Arab who was capable of handling it successfully.

Usually at 11:30 a. m. Feisal arose and walked back to his living-tent, where a little lunch would be served. Lawrence, in the meantime, would spend half an hour or so reading the inevitable Aristophanes or a favorite English poet. He carried three books all through the campaign: “The Oxford Book of English Verse,” Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur,” and Aristophanes, which shows his catholic taste.

Lunch usually consisted of dishes such as stewed thorn-buds, lentils, unleavened bread cooked in the sand, and rice or honey cakes. I ate with a spoon, although the Arabs used their fingers, as did Lawrence. After lunch there followed a short relay of general talk, rounding out the conversation of the luncheon hour, and, in the meantime, black bitter coffee and sweetened tea would be served. In drinking tea and coffee, the tribesmen would make as much noise as possible. It is the polite way of indicating that you are enjoying your drink. The emir would then dictate letters to an Arab scribe or enjoy a siesta, while Lawrence, absorbed in Wordsworth or Shelley, squatted on a prayer-rug in his own tent. If there were afternoon cases to be disposed of, Shereef Lawrence or Shereef Feisal would again hold court in the reception-tent. From 5 until 6 p. m. Feisal would usually grant private audiences, and at such times Lawrence sat with him, since the discussion nearly always would have to do with the night’s reconnaissance and future military operations.

Meanwhile, behind the servants’ tent a fire would be started with a pile of thorns. Another sheep’s throat would be cut, in the name of Allah the Merciful and Compassionate, and put on to roast. At 6 p. m. would come the evening meal, much like lunch but with large fragments of mutton crowning the rice-heap, after which would follow intermittent cups of tea until bedtime, which for Lawrence was never any fixed hour. At night Lawrence would have many of his most important consultations with the Arab leaders, but occasionally Feisal would entertain his intimate associates with stories of his adventures in Syria and Turkey, during the eighteen years when his family lived at the Sublime Porte under the wary eye of the Red Sultan.

The rest of us would often read well into the night. Before leaving Egypt I had picked up second-hand copies of the records of a few great Arabian travelers, such as Burkhardt, Burton, and Doughty. With the exception of Doughty’s monumental masterpieces I found none of the books in my haphazard collection more fascinating than Miss Bell’s “The Desert and the Sown.” My interest in it was stimulated by the stories which Colonel Lawrence related to me of the war-time adventures of the brilliant authoress. This extraordinary Englishwoman had been wandering about remote corners of the Near East for a number of years prior to the war. She was a scholar and a scientist, not an idle traveler in quest of notoriety. With a lone Arab companion or two she had trekked for hundreds of miles along the fringe of the Great Arabian Desert, visiting the wild tribes and studying their language and customs. So vast was her knowledge that the heads of the British Intelligence Department in Mesopotamia asked her to accept a staff appointment, and she played no small part in winning the friendship of some of the most bloodthirsty tribesmen residing in the Tigris and Euphrates Valleys. In her book, “The Desert and the Sown,” Miss Bell throws much interesting light on the life of the desert-dwellers:

The fortunes of the Arab are as varied as those of a gambler on the stock exchange. One day he is the richest man in the desert, and the next morning he may not have a single camel foal to his name. He lives in a state of war, and even if the surest pledges have been exchanged with the neighboring tribes there is no certainty that a band of raiders from hundreds of miles away will not descend on his camp in the night, as a tribe unknown to Syria, the Beni Awajeh, fell, two years ago, on the lands south-east of Aleppo, crossing three hundred miles of desert, Marduf (two on a camel) from their seat above Bagdad, carrying off all the cattle and killing scores of people. How many thousand years this state of things has lasted, those who shall read the earliest records of the inner desert will tell us, for it goes back to the first of them, but in all the centuries the Arab has bought no wisdom from experience. He is never safe, and yet he behaves as though security were his daily bread. He pitches his feeble little camps, ten or fifteen tents together, over a wide stretch of undefended and indefensible country. He is too far from his fellows to call in their aid, too far as a rule to gather the horsemen together and follow after the raiders whose retreat must be sufficiently slow, burdened with the captured flocks, to guarantee success to a swift pursuit. Having lost all his worldly goods, he goes about the desert and makes his plaint, and one man gives him a strip or two of goats’ hair cloth, and another a coffee-pot, a third presents him with a camel, and a fourth with a few sheep, till he has a roof to cover him and enough animals to keep his family from hunger.

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