Desert Queen by Janet Wallach Page A

atheist, she stood apart from the multifarious crowds and watched in amazement as factions fought over inches of holy turf. Turkish soldiers were stationed to keep the Christians from attacking one another. “It is comfort,” she said, “to be in a cheerful irreligious family again!”
    Despite her scorn, it thrilled her to be there, elated by the sights and the people and even the moon. “Such a moon!” she extolled. “I have not seen the moon shine since I was in Persia.”
    Perhaps for the first time since being romanced by Henry Cadogan, seven years before, she was content. She concentrated on her studies, losing herself in her work. “I am extremely flourishing, and so wildly interested in Arabic that I think of nothing else,” she wrote home. “It’s like a good dream to be in a place where one can at last learn Arabic. I only fear I may wake up some morning and find it isn’t true.” She could now read the story of Aladdin without a dictionary and found it tremendously gratifying to be able to read Dr. Rosen’s volume of the Arabian Nights “just for fun.”
    At night, snuggled in her room, a cigarette and a cup of thick Turkish coffee at her side, she munched pistachio nuts and studied. After several weeks, the language that had thwarted her seemed conquerable. The warm days flew by, and she certainly did not miss the bleak English winter. In the middle of January she wrote home delightedly, “These two days have been as hot as an English June and far brighter.” The Middle East weather invigorated her, so unlike the endlessly gray skies and the damp, enervating air at home.
    The news from home was hardly cheerful: Maurice had volunteered to fight in the Boer War, the violent struggle between the Afrikaners and the British over diamonds and gold mines. She worried about his going to South Africa to join an army that was untrained and undersupplied. “I have borne the departure of everyone else’s brother with perfect equanimity,” she noted, “but when it comes to my own, I am full of terrors.”
    Only briefly, she considered going home, but realized it would do no good to return to England, and knowing, as always, that the more she engaged in her work, the better she felt. “Arabic is a great rock in time of trouble! If it were not for that, I think I should have packed up and come home, but that would have been rather a silly proceeding,” she informed her parents. “An absorbing occupation is the best resource.” So, with subscriptions arriving from The Times and the Daily Mail , a Bible and two dozen rolls of film received from England, and a gray felt hat trimmed with black velvet bows on its way, she stayed in Jerusalem.
    The rites and rituals of the pilgrims fascinated her, and on a January day she rode down to the Jordan River to find an enormous crowd of people waiting to be baptized. Desert Arabs, Arab peasants, workers and servants, Turkish soldiers, Greek priests, Russian priests and Russian peasants wearing fur coats and high boots, all standing in the hot sun, wearing chains of beads and crucifixes around their necks. Amazed by their fervor and their ability to ignore the thick garments even in the broiling heat, Gertrude walked among them, photographing as she went. Then, after half an hour, a procession of priests holding lighted candles filed to the water’s edge. The crowd of people clambered down the muddy river banks and stood in water up to their waists. When the priest laid the cross three times on the water, guns went off, and everyone baptized himself by dipping and rolling over in the water. “It was the strangest sight,” she observed.

    W ith Friedrich Rosen, who was born and raised in Jerusalem, she planned a series of solitary trips. His tales of adventure whetted her appetite: only the year before, he had crossed the desert and sipped coffee in the tent of the distinguished Anazeh chief and friend of the Turks, Fahad Bey; he had visited Babylon and met the