Freya Stark Read Online Free Page B

written to tell her that Canadian Grand Trunk Railways shares were set to rise. She asked the manager of Barclay’s Bank in Monte Carlo, who handled her money, to invest her entire capital in them. He protested, but was, as many were to be after him, courteously but firmly overruled. The shares dropped. When, a few days later, they rose spectacularly, Freya sold.
    In June, Freya wrote to her father in Canada that she had met a Syrian Quaker who was going to find her a ‘cheap lodging in an Arab village where I shall meet no Europeans’. Briefly tempted by the School of Oriental Studies in London and the classes of Sir Thomas Arnold and Sir Denison Ross (who used to hold the hands of pretty girls, ‘but only did this once to me, for I was not at all pretty enough to be noticed’), she had decided instead to ‘make for the real thing in Syria’. What was more, she was still unmarried, suitors having hovered and vanished, to the distress of her mother who felt that spinsterhood was a bad condition and who filled Freya with a convictionthat ‘it must be due to some invincible inferiority in myself’. What she needed now was to escape a ‘miserable sense of being a failure’. Her health was still not good, but she had decided that she would rather die than endure the life of an invalid.
    On 18 November 1927, feeling somewhat small and forlorn as she gazed up from the gondola bearing her and her luggage at the SS
Abbazia
spitting smoke and steam from its funnel in the port of Venice, having been baptised a Presbyterian, so as not to die ‘outside the Christian brotherhood’, she embarked ‘for Beirut – and my travels in the East began’.

CHAPTER THREE
    By the middle of December, Freya was settled in a room in the village of Brummana in the Lebanon which, ‘sung by Flecker, lay like a brown lizard on its ridge’. From the first days of departure, her spirits had risen, and they kept rising; it was all better, much better than she had hoped. Purposeful, self-contained, a woman alone spending little, she must have seemed strange to local people who were used to greater pomp and assertiveness among the few Europeans who had come this way. The bolder children crowded around her whenever she walked down the street while the men stared and the women followed her movements from behind shuttered windows. Everywhere, at alltimes, she was on show. Her response was simple. She acted calmly, with precision, and always pleasantly; she stopped to talk and ask questions, a parasol held over her head, in sensible suit and hat, or sat for hours sketching or just looking.
    Freya was soon hard at work on her Arabic and setting a routine for daily life in the Middle East that was to remain a pattern for all her travels. She walked a good deal, making expeditions with a guide, having prepared herself well beforehand. She spent much time paying calls, sitting listening and practising Arabic; and she wrote letters, instructing her main correspondents to keep them, so that they would act as diary.
    She had, as she herself recognised, one useful accomplishment: a true appreciation of leisure and the importance of not hurrying, but leaving time to listen and be accepted. It came, she felt, from early illnesses, and from the Victorian rules of her childhood, when dressing for dinner was customary and with it the ‘casting away as it were of the day’s business’ so that she now felt herself most like the Arab nomad, ‘who receives his world as it comes from Allah, and is not concerned to alter it more than he need’. She was soon completely charmed, the landscape and the people perfectly suited to her intense curiosity and strong sense of the romantic. ‘I have been trying’, she wrote,‘to think why it is all so fascinating, and have come to the conclusion that it is the feeling of a life not merely primitive – we have that in Italy – but genuinely wild … a feeling of the genuine original roughness of life.’ To an English