Improbable Women: Five Who Explored the Middle East

21. Assassins and Incense

222 21 Assassins and Incense On November 18, 1927, Freya boarded the SS Abbazia in Venice and sailed for Beirut. For Freya, having read and dreamed and prepared for this moment, the small vessel with five other passengers and a cargo of cement, sugar, oil, matches, figs, almonds, and soap was the dirt, steel, and sweat equivalent of a lateen-rigged Arab dhow. An aura of adventure and mystery lay like a fine mist over the ship, with the fresh smell of open sea, the rushing sound of the bow wave, and the pilot’s boat disappearing into the black obscurity of night at sea. New land appeared with each new day and even the names were magical: Corfu, Ionian Sea, Ithaca, Corinth, Salamis, Cyclades, Sporades, and finally Rhodes. Almost 116 years after Lady Hester Stanhope was shipwrecked on the coast of Rhodes, Freya explored the island, had tea with the governor’s lady, and boarded a new ship, the SS Diana, bound for Beirut. The parade of romantic names continued , with the Diana calling at Larnaca and Alexandretta. On a side trip to Antioch, she was finally able to use her Arabic, which she found to be “adequate.”1 Then Tripoli, where the men unloading the ship wore baggy trousers and red-tasseled tarbushes, and looked “just like Sinbad the Sailor as I met him in the picture-book on my ninth birthday. Herbert gave him to me, and is probably responsible for my being here” (22). After three weeks they reached Beirut, and Freya made her way up the winding roads to Brumana, a mountain village thirteen miles northeast of Beirut. She moved in with Mademoiselle Rose Audi, who lived alone with a maid in “a little square stone house with white-washed rooms, very clean and full of plants in pots” (23). Assassins and Incense • 223 Freya was something of a mystery to the other British in Brumana . They did not understand why she would want to study Arabic , and when she was asked, she told them it was for pleasure. While this was true, it sounded so implausible to the other expatriates that they decided she was trying to deceive them. She must be a spy or a novelist. The Syrians, however, were delighted to find someone who was simply interested in them with no desire to convert or educate. Eventually she concluded that she did not like missions and missionaries because they shared so little of the local life—they created and lived in little Englands outside of England. Because Freya preferred the Syrians, she was considered eccentric at best. Th er e ar e t wo fo r ms of Ar abic : classical and colloquial. Classical Arabic is the same across the Arab world and is what is found in most written forms of the language, in newspapers and the Quran for example. While virtually all Arabs would understand spoken classical, they would speak the colloquial unique to their area, and these versions can be significantly different. Someone speaking Moroccan Arabic would not easily be understood by a person familiar only with Gulf Arabic. Freya had studied classical, and the colloquial language of Syria was a major challenge. In her first month, she estimated that she understood about one word in a hundred in a conversation: “I have reached the interesting stage when I can ask my way and not possibly understand the answer” (31). Nevertheless, Salehmy, her teacher, was impressed and spread word of her brilliant Arabic and unprecedented intelligence. Freya discounted this as owing to a low feminine standard. Her days were filled with Arabic grammar, visits to neighbors with Mademoiselle Audi, and long walks through the countryside. Her clothes were apparently a hit with the Syrian community. “I have never been anywhere where it is more fun to have clothes: everyone is so interested in them, and if I put on a fresh hat on Sunday mornings, it is with the agreeable certainty that it is going to give pleasure to the whole congregation” (53). The long walks alone were a different story. They were considered peculiar by the British community and 224 • Freya Madeline Stark dangerous by the Syrians. Freya, of course, did not see the danger, and her only real problem turned out to be choosing among the fifteen different ways to say good-bye and thank you. She could not help feeling conspicuous when in what...