There is evidently some special quality in the British national character which has produced so long a succession of indomitable women travellers; it is almost impossible to imagine a Lady Mary Wortley Montagu from France recounting her lively stories of adventure in the harems of Stamboul, or a Lady Hester Stanhope from Italy dominating the caravanserais of the Syrian desert. The Latin mind must find lives so adventurous as theirs alarmingly unfeminine; the Moorish invasion of Spain and those Saracenic raids on the littorals of Italy left behind them the indelible mark of female sequestration.

All the same, it seems to have been the achievement of our women travellers rarely to lose their feminity, to produce, in fact, an often delightful form of hermaphroditism: they will gossip as women but outmarch the strongest man; they will show feminine will by insisting on reaching a desert ruin before sunset, but show a masculine appetite for scholarship when the time comes to make the account of the journey. In this century we have had two great descendants in the line from Lady Mary and Lady Hester; Miss Freya Stark and Gertrude Bell, both women whose deepest passions were enflamed by the ancient and mysterious civilizations of the Arab world.

When Gertrude Bell died quietly in her sleep, at Baghdad, she was only fifty-seven, a woman celebrated as a traveller but perhaps more famous as a colonial administrator, one of the dominant forces behind the creation of Iraq. In 1927, the year after her death, two large volumes of her letters to her father and stepmother were published. The fact that no letters to any other correspondents were printed gives the book unity, but it is a pity that one is still unable to see her in all her aspects as a letter-writer. Even so, these letters do put her whole character and career into perfect perspective. And what a remarkable woman she was! Here is the pretty young girl with the Titian colouring, the finely chiselled nose and the determined mouth, who loved fine clothes, bubbling with zest and gaiety at Oxford, taking a brilliant First in Modern History in spite of telling her distinguished examiner during the viva that she had never been able to agree with his view of Charles I; here, later, is the frequenter of Europe's embassies, learning Latin in her spare hours to fill a lacuna in her education, making history by climbing the Finsteraarhorn, the flirter with the First Secretary at the British Legation in Teheran, the traveller across the Syrian desert to the mountain of Jebel Druze, the Arabic scholar, the archaeologist, the fine photographer, the accurate measurer of the desert ruins. … Her talents were prodigious and, blessed with curiosity, she spared herself nothing to satisfy her enthusiasms. Her work for the British Government in Iraq was the last of her great enthusiasms—she knew the Arab intimately and her advice was taken by the Government—but even during those last, hard-driving years she devoted hours to the Museum of Antiquities and portioned out the various findings at Ur.

Apart from all other interests, Gertrude Bell's letters to her parents are documents of family love and unity, though her own mother died when she was three. It seems clear that her almost extreme integration of personality and her various charms—not to mention her wilfulness—derived from her love of her family. At the age of fifty she wrote to her father, a Northumbrian ironmaster and colliery owner: 'Goodbye, darling father, I think and think of you. However long I'm away from you, your love and mother's is like the solid foundation on which all life rests.' Family love was all the love she seems to have needed, and she had little wish to marry, although the flirtation in Teheran took a deeper turn, and might have ended in marriage had the First Secretary, Henry Cadogan, not died. Her friend, Janet Courtney, mysteriously says that this brief romance was 'neither the first nor the last in her life', but of these affairs the letters say nothing.

Much of Gertrude Bell's independence of spirit came from her upbringing, which was by no means typically Victorian. Her father was a liberal-minded, free-thinking intellectual, and he believed in giving his daughter her freedom in every way; without his money and encouragement she would have been unable to make her desert journeys. The atmosphere in which she was brought up might have turned her into the perfect New Woman of the nineties, but bloomers, bicycles and votes for women did not claim her; indeed, during the suffragette disturbances she worked actively against the movement, believing that it would destroy all the gradually won achievements of the professional woman. It was one of her many charms that in spite of doing so well many things that had always been in man's province she never lost her feminity. The young girl who had burst into Janet Courtney's room with 'I've got a hat, Janet, but a hat!' never lost her love of clothes, and from a goat's-hair tent at Wadi el Asibiyeh might send home detailed instructions for a new evening dress to be made by Marthe, her Sloane Street dressmaker. And although she was proud of her work in Iraq during and after the 1914 war, she thought of herself as only the assistant to such men as Sir Percy Cox and Sir Henry Dobbs, the real architects of the protectorate.

The figure of Gertrude Bell is so attractive from such countless aspects that the predatory cynic in us may begin to look for the catch in her character, the price she paid for her happiness. The catch cannot be defined, only felt vaguely—and perhaps unjustifiably. After reading all her work, one is forced to say that in spite of her extraordinary array of talents hers was fundamentally a conventional mind, and that although she had brilliant talent she had neither great intellect nor the sensibility of the artist. One reads the letters with delight and is thrilled by her superb description of the two days on the Finsteraarhorn, but how rarely one wants to mark a passage that is memorable for that piercing intuition, that unique vision of a special mind. In her lifetime she was sometimes called 'the Diana of the Desert', but after reading her letters one might prefer to call her 'The Emma of the Desert', for she has so many of Miss Woodhouse's characteristics.

Whenever there was a question of fear she seems, paradoxically, to lose her feminity. One expects her, one wants her, to shrink behind her guard of soldiers during her frequent dangerous encounters in the desert, but instead she is always well to the fore. Her only comment when asked what she had felt like during the two terrible nights on the Finsterrerhorn was: 'Oh, it was rather chilly.' In all her writings—letters and books—there is not a line to show that she had ever known the meaning of fear. It is an element which one misses, its presence would have given a special humanity to her work. There are other indications of a kind of insensibility. Her agnosticism, which bordered on atheism, prevented her from writing with any religious sympathy for the Arab's all-enveloping reverence for the godhead. She learned to speak the languages of the people she loved with a feeling for all their nuances and subtleties, and her Arabs loved her. She understood entirely their way of thinking, but her own feet were so firmly planted in the desert sand that the Arab way of believing completely defied her understanding. Many Arabian travellers have been compelled by some mystique of the desert and its monuments of the past, but a mystique in any form was contrary to Gertrude Bell's nature, although that is not to say that she was not compelled by an irresistible joy in the life of the desert; in The Desert and the Sown (1907) she writes: 'To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. The mists lifting their heads out of the hollows, the dews floating in ghostly wreaths from the black tents, were shot through first with the faint glories of the eastern sky and then with the strong yellow rays of the risen sun. We climbed the Jebel el Alya and crossed the wide summit of the range, the landscape was akin to that of our own English border country … the glorious cold air intoxicated every sense and set the blood throbbing. See the desert on a fine morning and die—if you can.'

That passage is typical, in its sense of joy, of The Desert and the Sown which, with Amurath to Amurath (1911), are the only general books she wrote, with the exception of Persian Pictures, an immature little book which she wrote when she was twenty-four. It is perhaps right that her letters have proved her literary memorial, but her two books deserve to be better known, for they are classics of their kind. Incidents which are treated cursorily in the letters appear with all their possibilities exploited and, far more than in the letters, one is given a sense of the adventure of this attractive girl setting off with her muleteers and her guide into the unexplored wastes, and feeling, with the poet Mutanabbï, that 'the most exalted seat in the world is the saddle of a swift horse'. Not a morning or an afternoon passes without an encounter: Russian pilgrims with long beards and crinkly kneeboots on their way to Jerusalem; a Christian encampment out of the Acts of the Apostles; a band of nomadic bedouin bearing down on her camp furiously firing their rifles (in welcome, as it turned out); the nights sitting by the sage-bush fire in the tent of a desert sheikh, drinking the bitter coffee she so loved and discussing the ways of the desert and the beauties of Arabic poetry. Or, during the long hours of the journey, there were the enchanting conversations with Namrud the guide, from whom she coaxed such stories and observations of wisdom; it was Namrud who told her that the Arabs believed there was a strong racial connection between themselves and the Japanese.

An interesting feature of both The Desert and the Sown and Amurath to Amurath is the large number of photographs taken by Gertrude Bell herself, many of which are masterpieces of travel photography, and make one realize how enormously the value of a travel book is enhanced by really adequate illustration.

Perhaps, of all the desert moments, those that gave Gertrude Bell her purest excitement were those when suddenly, above the rim of the desert, would appear the ruined towers of Ukheidir, or the remains of the fabulous palace of Ctesiphon, with its astonishing vaulted roof, unchanged from the time when it protected Chosroes and his court. She was no 'virtuoso' who came merely to see and enjoy; she would camp for days at the ruins, measuring them and making accurate plans, taking rubbings and pressings of inscriptions. She was an amateur archaeologist but she did nothing without professional zeal, and there is no doubt that she added much to the knowledge of Arabic cultures. In 1905, during a visit to the ruins of Bin Bir Kilisse, she recorded an inscription which later produced an entirely new line of inquiry. Two years later she and Sir William Ramsay measured and mapped the ruins, and together they published a formidable volume called The Thousand and One Churches, whose Arabian Nights echo is misleading. 'It will be a very dull book, you understand,' she wrote to her stepmother, but she was always ready to accept the fact that dullness could be worth-while.

In The Desert and the Sown she mixes the archaeological with the human in perfect proportion; one of the problems of writing a travel book is to know exactly when to stop in the description and discussion of mere stones—an author's personal enthusiasms need to be kept under control. In this book Gertrude Bell never offers more than her readers can take, but in Amurath to Amurath she is less inclined to assist the uninitiated reader, printing plans and giving lists of the exact measurements of the fluted niches at Ukheidir. Nevertheless it is a book which in the main lives up to the high intentions of its preface: 'In that spacious hour when the silence of the embracing wilderness was enhanced rather than broken by the murmur of the river, and by the sounds, scarcely less primeval, that wandered round the camp-fire of my nomad hosts, the task broadened into a shape which was in keeping with the surroundings. I would attempt to record the daily life and the speech of those who had inherited the empty ground whereon empires had risen and expired.'

Amurath to Amurath, alas, was Gertrude Bell's last book, except for a little guide to Mesopotamia which she produced for the British Government during the 1914-18 War. Her desert journeys were now over; she had learnt the lesson of the Arabs, and now she could devote her knowledge to their welfare. In 1919 she, with Prince Feisal and T. E. Lawrence, was at the Paris Conference to plead the cause of the Arabs. Her friends, who had not seen her for four years, remarked that she looked as if she had turned into finely tempered steel, and her strength was tried during the next years of intense work.

When her task was nearly done, it was suggested to her that she should return to England and stand for Parliament. The anti-suffragette, the un-masculine feminist wrote in a letter: 'I haven't the quickness of thought and speech which could fit the clash of Parliament. I can do my own job in a way, and explain why I think that the right way of doing it, but I don't cover a wide enough field, and my natural desire is to slip back into the comfortable arena of archaeology and history.' Was she planning, for that retirement of which death cheated her, a last desert journey? Did she want to wake once more in the heart of an opal and taste the bitter coffee? Did she want to know, again, days like that morning when she had come across some poor Arabs in the desert who had been robbed by members of the Deleim tribe: 'Their tale filled me with futile anger so that I desired nothing so much as to catch and punish the thieves, and without waiting to consider whether this lay within our power I galloped on in the direction indicated by the peasants … we searched the sandhills without success, but when we came down to the Euphrates, there were five armed men strolling unconcernedly along the bank. … Now you do not wander with a rifle in your hand in unfrequented parts of the Euphrates bank for any good purpose, and we were persuaded that these black-browed Arabs were the five we sought. … Unfortunately we had no proof against them … and though we spent some minutes in heaping curses upon them, we could take no steps of a more practical kind. My soldier was in an agony of nervous anxiety lest we should relieve them of their rifles. He looked forward to a journey alone to Baghdad, and it is not good for a solitary man to have an outstanding quarrel with the Deleim. Finally I realized that we were wasting breath in useless bluster. … If we were to concern ourselves with the catching of thieves we might as well abandon all other pursuits in Turkey.'

No passage in her works could express better the heart of this remarkable woman.