A Woman in Arabia by Gertrude Bell Page A

poisonous. . . . We dislodged the vultures who were sitting in rows on the castle top—they left a horrid smell behind them.
    Karaman, May 7, 1905
    I daresay it does not often occur to you to think what a wonderful invention is the railway, but it is very forcibly borne in upon me at this moment for I am going to Konia in 3 hours instead of having a weary two days’ march across a plain of mud. Yesterday I rode in here some 35 miles.
    Binbirkilise, May 13, 1905
    We . . . set off across the plain to Binbirklisse. The name means
The Thousand and one Churches.
 . . . It lies at the foot of the Kara Dagh, a great isolated mountain arising abruptly out of the plain. . . . I fell in love with it at once, a mass of beautiful ruins gathered together in a little rocky cup high up in the hills—with Asia Minor at its feet. . . . It has made a delightful end to my travels. . . .
    May 16, 1905
    I . . . took the train and came back to Konia. The Consul and his wife met me at the station and dined with me at the hotel and I found there besides Professor Ramsay, who knows more about this country than any other man, and we fell into each other’s arms and made great friends.
    This was Gertrude’s first meeting with the archaeologist Sir William Mitchell Ramsay, and it led to their collaboration on a book about the ruins of Binbirkilise. On this occasion, she showed him an inscription she had copied on her brief visit there. Professor Ramsay wrote in the preface to their book, “Miss Gertrude Bell was impelled by [Strzygowski’s] book to visit Bin Bir Kilisse; and, when I met her at Konia on her return, she asked me to copy an inscription on one of the churches, in letters so worn that she could not decipher it, which she believed to contain a date for the building. Her belief proved well founded and the chronology of the Thousand and One Churches centres round this text.”
    They met again at Binbirkilise at the end of May 1907 for a month of excavations, worked together on the results at Rounton, and published the book,
The Thousand and One Churches,
in 1909.
    Lake of Egerdir, on the Journey to Binbirkilise, May 1, 1907
    There was a place which Ramsay had begged me to try and visit on the eastern shore of the lake . . . a holy site long before the Christian era, sacred to Artemis of the Lake who was herself a Psidian deity re-baptised by the Greeks. . . . The rocks drop here straight into the lake and at their foot there is a great natural arch some 15 feet wide through which glistens the blue water of the lake. In the rock above is a small rock-cut chamber into which I scrambled with some difficulty and found a slab like a loculus in it . . . probably the slab was sacrificial. . . . So we rode back. . . . Almost joined to the shore by beds of immensely tallreeds there is a little island which no one had yet succeeded in visiting. I, however, found . . . a very old and smelly boat, so I hired the three fishermen for an infinitesimal sum and rowed out to the island. . . . It was completely surrounded by ruined Byzantine walls dropping into the water in great blocks of masonry; here and there there was a bit of an older column built into them and they were densely populated by snakes. There was only one thing of real interest, a very curious stele with a female figure carved on it, bearing what looked like water skins, and two lines of inscription above . . . unfortunately the whole stone was covered by 18 inches or more of shimmering water. It had fallen into the lake and there it lay. I did all I knew to get the inscription. I waded into the water and tried to scrub the slime off the stone, but the water glittered and the slime floated back and finally I gave it up and came out very wet and more than a little annoyed.
    Maden Sheher (The Lower Town of Binbirkilise), May 21,