The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

and the Sown , published in 1907 but still a standard guide for anyone visiting Syria and especially its desert ruins and the so-called “dead cities” in the northwestern part of the country. In that account, Bell records hiring the muleteers and a cook, purchasing provisions at vari- ous stops along the way, and setting up and breaking camp. She pho- tographed and wrote down her impressions of local people, and surveyed, measured and pho- tographed ancient ruins, later mak- ing some of them subjects for schol- arly papers. She describes the climb on a cold wet evening up the steep pass to Crac des Chevalier, the spectacular Crusader castle in western Syria with its view all the way to the Mediterranean, and then climbing still farther within the castle itself up the long, winding passage on horseback. The Turkish resident and his wives took her in, fed her and provided a room for the night — a large, stone-vaulted room that later became a very good tourist restaurant. Between forays into the Middle East, she climbed the Alps and was described by a professional Swiss mountaineer as a woman without fear, who didn’t lose her nerve even under the most perilous conditions. Despite her independence and fearlessness, her letters home to her adored and adoring father Hugh and stepmother Florence Bell show a strong and childlike need for their approval all her life. A Small World Perhaps most paradoxical — and ironic — of all, she, a woman, was a key political player in a male-domi- nated world, a lone female moving among powerful men and develop- ing her own power. Even more remarkable, she achieved this stature in the Middle East. J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 45 Top: Gertrude Bell on horseback in Lebanon, 1900. Center: Bell flanked by Winston Churchill (left) and T.E. Lawrence (right) at the Pyramids during the Cairo Conference in 1921. Bottom: Bell at a picnic with Faisal (right fore- ground) in 1921, near Ctesiphon, Iraq. Photographs courtesy University of Newcastle.