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Why had she chosen to tell me all this? Was it to display her importance? To make it clear she had more than skirt lengths on her mind? I honestly didn’t know. Maybe I was all she had: no one else in the party had invited her company. People who are respected but not liked often seek out newcomers, hoping for admiration if not affection. Maybe she was lonely.
Or perhaps she was just summing up the outcome of the conference for her own purposes, trying to decide who had won and who had lost. Hussein, the elderly sherif of Mecca, would not rule a vast post-Ottoman caliphate, but in return for his goodwill toward the British government he would receive a yearly cash douceur. His chief rival to the south was a man named Ibn Saud, and to promote tranquillity in the rest of Arabia, that person was to be given a subsidy equal to Hussein’s, though Ibn Saud’s would be doled out monthly.
“That will keep him on a shorter leash,” Miss Bell remarked. Perhaps it was the mention of a leash that reminded her that I was listening. “You haven’t understood a thing I’ve said, have you.”
That’s why she’s telling me all this, I thought. Talking to me is like talking to a dog. To her, I might as well be Rosie. That’s what all of them think, I suppose.
And yes, I had probably gotten lost in some of the details, but I understood more than she thought, and something began to shift inside me. While I had been willing to promise Lawrence not to say anything to Karl, I had no such feeling of loyalty or friendship for Miss Bell. She clearly believed that whatever she said to me would go in one side of my empty head and swiftly out the other.
There is a difference between looking and being inconsequential, I thought then; I am not the cipher you think I am. “And what of Lawrence’s friend Feisal?” I asked. “Will he rule Iraq?”
Yes, Miss Bell informed me with satisfaction, she had beaten Colonel Wilson in that contest of wills. Feisal would be “elected” king, as soon as the British had removed his native rivals from the local scene.
Like Karl, Miss Bell admired Feisal, but she believed that he would be welcomed with rose petals in Baghdad. The new king would, of course, manifest his gratitude by acting in accord with advice tendered to him by Sir Percy Cox, for our cadaverous di
Across the sand, one of the officers with Lawrence suddenly stood. We could hear his voice, raised but indistinct. “The dear boy must have told him the bad news,” Miss Bell observed. “Winston is going to pull nearly all our ground troops out of Iraq. Trenchard will police the region from the air. Watch. The general will now cry carnage and ruin,” she predicted, and indeed both officers were visibly upset, though Lawrence remained calm and reasonable. “If Boom Trenchard says he can keep order with the R.A.F., he probably can, but …” Miss Bell shrugged. “Arnold Wilson thinks the plan is doomed. Without three hundred thousand British troops to keep order, he expects the Arabs to rise against any government with ties to us. Feisal will be tainted by association. Why bother with the dumb show? We should simply rule, as we do in India.”
“And what do you think?” I asked.
She motioned for more coffee. One of the waiters hurried over to pour, starting at the cup and raising the long-spouted brass pot high to elongate the stream dramatically before cutting it off—just so— without spilling a drop. “The arrangement is not ideal,” she admitted finally, “but things can’t go on as they have.” She lit another cigarette and shot smoke upward before adding bitterly, “It will cost less to fail from the air than to fail on the ground. And fewer soldiers will die for the mistakes of politicians. God!” she cried suddenly. “They are all so proud of the British art of muddling along—as though ignorance and bad pla
The man she didn’t marry, I thought. He must have been a soldier.
She stopped to pick a shred of tobacco from her lip. “There was a time when I had an infinite capacity for coffee, cigarettes, and cajolery,” she said, more with wonder than with wistfulness. “I knew every Arab chieftain. Whom they loved, whom they hated. Every name, every relation, every nuance of alliance. I could flatter and push, suggest and demand. No more! Diplomacy and marriage—I’m past them both. I simply haven’t the patience.”
She must have been a beauty once. Now her pink scalp peeked out amid thi
“It must have been hard on you,” I said. “All those years alone, so far from friends and family.”
She barked a dismissive laugh. “Happy and contented people don’t make history, Miss Shanklin. I’ve done that much, at least.”
And yet, there was no place for Gertrude Bell in the British plans. She had drawn the boundaries of Iraq and willed it into existence, but she would not be high commissioner. Percy Cox would rule.
She set her cup down, and stood, and looked north, her expression pulled taut as a pale, thin glove. “I can work with Feisal,” she said then, but not to me. “He’ll need a friend. Someone to guide him. Good God, the poor man’s never even been to Baghdad!”
She raised her voice and beckoned to the others. “All right, everyone,” she called out ringingly. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
We gathered and remounted, an excruciating process now that we’d had time to stiffen up, but as we drew closer to our destination, the scent of clover blew in from the riverbank, freshening the air and our dispositions. At the distance of two miles, the pyramids seemed to hover in a tremulous haze of sand, grand and imposing above the palms. An hour more, and then—
Well, it doesn’t matter how many photos and paintings you have seen. The pyramids will take your breath away. They are immense in a way that is incomprehensible unless you experience them up close and in all four of Professor Einstein’s dimensions: length, breadth, height, and time.
What will it mean to you if I say that the Great Pyramid is an almost solid mass of stone that covers thirteen acres? That each block at the base was a third the size of a railroad boxcar? Not much, I imagine.
All right. Try this: the Great Pyramid appears from a distance to terminate in a point, does it not? In fact, the apex is a flat square platform nearly thirty feet on a side, so large that an ordinary home in Cedar Glen would fit on it with room to spare. Such an imaginary penthouse would sit forty-eight stories above the desert—and at that, the Great Pyramid is only a suggestion of its original size. Three thousand years old when Jesus was a child, it has served Egyptians as a quarry for mille
Around that corrugated mountain of hewn rock, hundreds of tourists dominated the landscape while mobs of half-naked children cried “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!” and robed men in tarbooshes offered their services as guides. The Great Pyramid itself swarmed with climbing trios of steadily diminishing size. Nearly every foreigner was accompanied by two Egyptian stevedores who clambered up and over the shoulder of each huge block of stone, then reached down to grab the raised hands of their freight. Thus they hauled the tourist up by his arms, from one ledge to the next, chanting relentlessly in English singsong: “All right! Very good! Hard work! Pay soon!” Politely, they left off what seemed to me implied: Or prepare to be hurled to your death, should you fail to meet our remunerative expectations, O wealthy representative of colonial power!