liking for Druses and a first acquaintance with Arabic as a vernacular-an acquaintance which she would continue to improve to the end of her life. Five years later she slipped through the hands of the Turks into the Jebel again, and this time held on her way northwards through the ill-known Safa steppe to Damascus. Thereafter she crossed Antilebanon and quartered the Orontes valley down to Antioch and Seleucia. This journey she described with rare sympathy and literary power in a book 'The Desert and the Sown' (1907), which, breathing the influence of Charles Doughty, is not unworthy of a place by his masterpiece. Whether for its matter or for its veracity or for its style, it takes rank among the dozen best books of Eastern travel.

From Alexandretta Miss Bell led her camp through Asia Minor to Konia, turning aside to visit Bin Bir Kilisse (Barata), to whose remains of early church architecture she was attracted through her acquaintance with Josef Strzygowski. She copied there an inscription on which now depends the dating of the whole group of churches; and at Konia she found Prof. W. M. Ramsay to help in its interpretation. This meeting began a fruitful friendship, and two years later she joined him and his wife in an expedition to Barata and neighbourhood, where, besides making a methodical study of the churches, she discovered Hittite remains on the peak of Mehaletch. The results were published in 1910 as a joint book, 'The Thousand and One Churches,' of which Miss Bell wrote the greater part. She revisited the site in 1909 on her way back from the second of her longer journeys through Arab lands.

For this journey she made Aleppo the starting-point. She went off alone, as before, with a native staff, her body-servant being one Fattuh, a powerful Armenian Catholic, who could pose on occasion as a Moslem. He has testified to the dauntless courage and indomitable endurance of his mistress. Other travellers of fame he had known, but none who, like es-Sitt (the Lady), started in any weather and carried on through water and mud to the waist. She made for the Euphrates beyond Mambij, and to the dismay of the authorities crossed the stream into country where post-roads and guard-houses are not, and tribes observe no law but their own. For good part of the long east-bank track from Rakka to Anah she remains our only authority. What tempted her was the chain of obscure and sand-choked stations and camps which once watched across the river the outposts of Rome and Byzantium; but on the way she heard talk of a much greater castle in the desert west of Kerbela. Re-crossing therefore at Anah and detaching herself with two or three attendants from her caravan, she struck off into notoriously unsafe Deleim country, and on the fourth day had her reward. The great four-square mass of Sassanian Ukhaidir rose out of the waste-vastest of desert ruins, long rumoured but not scientifically surveyed till a month or so before by one of the German excavators of Babylon. Of his visit she then learned for the first time, but she still thought it worth while to send to Kerbela for her caravan, and settle down to make the study which, in 1914, she would publish as a monumental book, 'Palace and Mosque of Ukhaidir.'

This study completed, she proceeded by Kerbela and Babylon to Baghdadher first sight of the city which within ten years would be her home and within twenty her grave--and thence she went north up the Tigris valley, studying every kind of architecture from Assyrian to Mediæval, past Samarra and Kaleh Sherghat, where Andrae was exploring Asshur, to Mosul. By way of Zakho and Jezireh she next entered the Kurdish region of Tur Abdin, and there made a special study of ruined Armenian churches (published in Berchem's and Strzygowski's 'Amida, 1910) before setting her face homeward by Diarbekr,

Kharput, Malatiyeh, Kaisariyeh, and Konia. All which doings, are they not written in 'Amurath to Amurath,' which, with its maturer science but somewhat less careless rapture, repeated the success of her first travel book?

In 1911 she was in Syria again, taking occasion to visit at Carchemish, which she had passed two years before, the British excavations begun that spring. She proved an object of deep interest to the Jerablus Arabs, who, regarding her as some new Queen Balkis, concluded that she came to wed the only member of the expedition party known to be heart-free, namely, T. E. Lawrence; and they were difficult to appease when she went her way, having done no more than add a friend, of strange future fame, to the company of her allies. She had long nursed a desire to penetrate Arabia proper and see Nejd, where, of European women, only Lady Anne Blunt had been. By December 1913 she was ready, with a caravan encamped near Dumeir, on the northeastern edge of the Damascus oasis; and in the middle of the month she vanished into the desert without Fattuh, who was in hospital. Her plan was to go far south, taking at first a route beyond Ottoman reach, to the east of Jebel Druz. Despite bitter weather, in which the thermometer fell nightly far below freezing-point, and despite also some trouble with a small Arab tribe of the Jebel, she accomplished the first stage in twenty-one days, her principal stations being Jebel Sais, an extinct volcano; the fort of Burqa (Bura); and the castles of Qasr el-Azraq, Qasr el-Amra and Kharaneh. From the last point she turned west to the Mecca railway, only to be caught at Ziza and detained in Amman by the Ottoman Government. After some ten days in the Belqa she was permitted to return at her own risk to the desert; and, once released and rejoined by Fattuh, she showed a clean pair of heels to the Turks. Through the diras of the Sukhur and Howeitat Arabs she pushed by Tuba and Bair down to Tor el-Tubaiq, keeping on a line which varied little from that followed by Mr. D. Carruthers in 1909; and after much cogitation she decided to avoid both Jof and Teima, and make straight across the south-western angle of the Nefud, by the Hazaim well, to the northern capital of Nejd. Thanks to the abundant pasture and many rainpools of that winter, she was able to keep within the Nefud and after a forty-days' journey from Ziza to appear before Hayyil. The young Emir was absent; but she was courteously received into the town by his uncle, Ibrahim, and lodged in the Summer Palace of Mohammed, greatest of Rashid Emirs of the past There, however, she found herself short of money and virtually a prisoner, the Rashids, in the absence of their Emir, shrinking from the responsibility involved either in allowing her to go about among a Wahabite population or in cashing a draft for £200, which she had presented from the Emir's waki! at Damascus. She had planned to pass on into the dominions of Ibn Saud and see his southern provinces, then unvisited, but this plan did not suit her hosts, and only when assured that she would relinquish it and go north towards Mesopotamia did the Emir's grandmother, Fatima, open the Treasury and cash the Damascus draft. Miss Bell insisted also on liberty to see the castle and town, and this was granted. She left on March 8 by the western Nejef road, which has rarely been travelled; and except for some dangerous moments with Shiah tribes at pasture near the Mesopotamian border, she reached Kerbela without adventure in fifteen days' hard riding. After a short stay in

Iraq she returned to Damascus by a desert route which gave her occasion to visit the great Amarat chief, Fahad ibn Hadhdhal, and to see and plan several unknown ruins. She was never satisfied with mere travel or adventure unless she felt that she had advanced archæological science.

It is hoped that before long a fuller account of this bold journey may be given to the Society with the help of her diaries. But it will not be possible to recover in full her impressions of desert life of the purest kind or of the unique Arab society of Hayyil and its bloodstained chivalry. The more's the pity; for, thanks largely to the talk of a Circassian girl, Turkiyyeh, with whom she made great friends in Hayyil, she learned enough of its sinister annals to startle General Staffs during the War with curious and lurid details of Rashid politics, intrigues, and murders.

She had not recovered from the fatigue, physical and mental, of that journey when the War broke out. Eager, none the less, to serve, she was sent at first to Boulogne to control its organization for tracing the missing on the Front, and her uncompromising efficiency was quickly felt by such as thought to "do their bit" easily at a base. In 1915 she came to headquarters at Norfolk House. Her proper sphere was plainly the Eastern theatre; but, overworked and hard hit by the death of a friend at the Dardanelles, she resisted transference. In November however she appeared at the Intelligence Office at Cairo, and was set to collect and order information about Arabia, where a movement against the Turks was brewing. In the following January she was called to India by the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, who first employed her on the compilation of the Gazetteer, and then sent her on to Basra to help the Political Service of Expeditionary Force D and maintain liaison with the Arab Bureau of Cairo. She quickly won the confidence of Sir Percy Cox, who made her an A.P.O. After our occupation of Baghdad she remained there in charge of desert affairs-a charge for which wide knowledge of tribal personalities and relationships peculiarly qualified her. True to her mission at Cairo she consistently supported our Sherifian policy, careless that, at the time, it was not generally approved in Mesopotamia or India; and ultimately, as was to be expected, she welcomed and warmly furthered the plan of preferring a Sherifian prince to the throne of Iraq. Meanwhile, summoned to the Paris Conference to advise on Arab affairs, she became, in the spring of 1919, one of the conspicuous personalities of that polyglot gathering, and added an experience of the European situation to a previous knowledge of Western and Turkish affairs shared by few in Iraq, and to the light which she gained by a tour in Syria under Feisal's short-lived régime-all of which made her, on her return in the autumn to Baghdad, a very valuable and effective counsellor. After the troublous episode of the Mesopotamian Revolt, no one did more to bring about and consolidate a settlement of the Iraq question on lines more promising than those contemplated at the conquest. As Arab Secretary to the High Commissioner she acted as liaison between him and the new King, each party being able to confide in her without committing himself to the other-a delicate confidential rôle which was not always understood or properly appreciated by those who lacked her knowledge and experience of a wider world. In the little house on the outskirts of Baghdad, which now became her home, she received all and sundry, and in particular the desert men, whose social status and connections she knew better than any other European. That she knew also the particular societies and problems of Mesopotamia is sufficiently demonstrated by the White Paper on British Administration in Iraq which she compiled in 1921. It is matter for profound regret that she did not live to repeat that masterly review or to deal at large with all the events-quorum pars magna fuit of Iraq history since her first sight of the country in 1911.

Finding no sufficient service for administering archæological affairs in Iraq, Miss Bell assumed control of the application of the Draft Law of Antiquities, and of the organization of a museum at Baghdad; and it fell to her to further and watch the recent campaigns of excavation at Ur and Kish. This she did with great knowledge and tact, holding the balance between local claims and those of world science. It is due largely to her that archæology has so quickly been able to resume investigations into the rich antiquities of Babylonia. Her services to geography were recognized in 1918 by the award of our Founder's Medal, an honour only twice previously conferred on a woman. Her political services earned in the previous year the decoration C.B.E. Further official recognition of her lifelong devotion to the interests of the Empire and of science was overdue at her death, which came suddenly in sleep as and where, perhaps, she would have chosen. She had worn herself to a shadow by long sojourn, summer and winter, in the trying climate of Baghdad, from which she rarely escaped except on brief trips to England, and on one to Persia while her former chief, Sir Percy Cox, was at the Embassy in Teheran. When she was home in 1923 she looked sadly wasted, but the sparkle, the quick interest, and the facile utterance, which made her one of the best of letter writers, as well as talkers, were still there, and her mind, at least, seemed ever young. There can have been few women equally endowed with both serious interests and social instinct, and fewer who have made so much of both. If any one ever did, Gertrude Bell warmed herself through and through at the fires of life ! D. G. H.

CORRESPONDENCE

"Dutch Geography in an English Text-book"

THE gravamen of your article on the above subject lay in two serious mistakes, both based on misprints in the first proofs of the first edition of the book (1913). No one called my attention to these till nearly a year ago; but within twentyfour hours of hearing of them, I had arranged for a cancel of the pages in question. In the current edition, as I told you, we went further, and modified some of the " opinions" to which Dr. Beekman objected, and in which I had not what I considered higher Dutch authority.

As I have been widely accused of "deliberate malice" in this connection -which implies that I made the mistakes intentionally in order to say something nasty about the Dutch-I wish to clear up the matter of the "one-tenth " mistake.

You simply say: "Somehow the I got multiplied by 10." I much prefer the exact statement which I made to you. I wrote 1%, but the compositor mis-read it as 10 p.c., and I failed to notice the mistake. Worse still, as I did not like the figures beginning, as they did, a new line and a new paragraph, I changed them into words as "one-tenth." The mistake, therefore, was in the chapter from the first, the proof bearing R. & R. Clark's date-stamp of March 28, 1913-so that the "malicious" mistake was in the book at the time when the Dutch Government was acknowledging-through the R.G.S. Secretary (Sir John Scott Keltie) -my regard for their interests as shown in the last paragraph of the chapter, which they had obviously read. L. W. LYDE.

University College, London, 21 September 1926.