The murmur and whisper of the desert

When Gertrude Bell set off on one of her trips to the Middle East in January 1905, she wanted to study Byzantine and Roman ruins. As it would later turn out, she was making preparations for her later mission as an advisor to the British government, which involved the redivision of the Middle East. With her caravan and a few local servants, she penetrated the deserts and mountains of Syria, Palestine and Lebanon into areas that hardly any Europeans, let alone women, had ever set foot in before. Self-confident, she sought contact with sheikhs and tribal leaders, under whose protection she managed to travel back and forth between rival tribes. She listened to the stories of shepherds, sat around campfires with soldiers, in the black tents of the Bedouins and the visiting rooms of the Druze. She crossed geographic and social boundaries, defying conventions, because "English women are strange. On the one hand, they are probably the greatest slaves to conventionality. But once they break with it, they do it properly, as if to take revenge." - So said a 1907 review of this book in the New York Times.