Heteroglossic itineraries and silent spaces: the desert cartographies of Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence

Hopping hills and inventive maps: cartographic inaccuracy

The maps included with Bell and Lawrence’s textual narration are based on their respective gathering of information and observations. Their maps reiterate the geographic depictions of previous maps, while adding new information and making use of new technology. Advancements in printing techniques during the 19th century meant that maps were cheaper to print and could be printed in ever larger editions. The lower cost of their production meant that maps could be published with travel narratives – in the years before Bell reached Syria, for instance, she would have been able to consult the maps in Lady Anne Blunt’s Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1879) and A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1881), which contained a map and notes on the physical geography of Northern Arabia, including mountain heights ‘measured with an aneroid barometer’; ‘A Sketch Map Itinerarium of parts of North Western Arabia and Negd’ presented to the Royal Geographical Society in 1883 in Travels in Arabia Deserta and DG Hogarth’s The Penetration of Arabia, with its cartographic illustrations. Thus, the maps included with travel narratives provide an illustration not only to the authors’ journeys but also to the state of British knowledge of Arabian geography.

Despite this proliferation of maps of Arabia, because most were lacking in detail and the sum of Western knowledge of the region was incomplete, cartographic inaccuracy persisted and Bell’s descriptions of the conditions of her travel through Syria in The Desert and the Sown are often concerned with the relative accuracy of her maps. When describing her progress through unmapped or inaccurately mapped areas, she uses narrative as a forum in which to emphasise her pioneer status or to point out and correct the cartographical mistakes of predecessors. For instance, while travelling in the Jebel Druze, she writes,

The makers of the Palestine Exploration map have allowed their fancy to play freely over the eastern slopes of the Jebel Druze. Hills have hopped along for miles, and villages have crossed ravines and settled themselves on the opposite banks [. . .]. At the time it all seemed to fit in with the general malevolence of that day’s journey. ⁵

She sets up her own travels in opposition to the fanciful cartography of the Palestine Exploration Fund, which performs a reversion to the fabulous geography associated with regions unknown – and in the case of Arabia, apparently unknowable – to Western powers of conception. Here, the imaginations of the mapmakers modify the geography of the Jebel Druze in a disregard for accuracy that, while playful within the cartographic frame, becomes nightmarish when it affects Bell’s wayfinding. This activity, of course, depends upon the fulfilment of what might be called the cartographic promise – that the depicted terrain will correspond to that experienced in actuality.

The slippage between map and environment does not only affect Bell’s ability to navigate, though; the incommensurability of the map and the perceptually available environment are performed in radical transformations mediated through her description. ‘Hills have hopped along for miles’ and ‘villages have crossed ravines’ – both are imbued with motive power and agency in her projection of the upset natural order of the map. While her portrayal of the experience of the breach of the cartographic contract is lighthearted, she writes that ‘it all seemed to fit in with the general malevolence of that day’s journey’. The implications of this breach are felt by Bell and are played out in her perception and memory, which are coloured by the affective resonances of the inaccuracy of her map. For maps are not only navigational aids, their textual and graphic elements can dictate how to decipher an environment, and their affective interference alters processes of signification and spatial interpretation.

These effects originate in the interstice between a schematic representation and the lived experience of an environment. In his description of an act of the sort of fanciful cartographical authorship that wrought havoc over the Jebel Druze for Bell, Lawrence shows how such an interstice might be created. In a 1914 letter, written during his time as Map Officer at the Intelligence Department of the War Office in Cairo, he writes of an ‘awful scramble’ resulting from ‘some unit’ having

asked for a complete map of Sinai, showing all roads and wells, with capacity of latter, and a rough outline of hills. As Sinai is in manuscript in 68 sheets it meant a little trouble, for the sheets [. . .] were not numbered or labelled, and so nobody could put them together. I came up like St. George in shining armour and delivered them [. . .] and by night behold there was a map of Sinai eighteen feet each way in three colours. Some of it was accurate, and the rest I invented. ⁶

Lawrence emphasises the act of authorship over accuracy or indeed collaboration. Through his comparison of himself to St George, the chaos of the unnumbered, unlabelled manuscript maps is rendered monstrous – a cartographic dragon from which the War Office bureaucrats must be delivered. ⁷ Their difficulty lies in their lack of local knowledge – they are unable to put the unnumbered, unlabelled sheets together because they do not recognise the individual content or context. It is because Lawrence’s knowledge of the Sinai, gained through first-hand experience, that he is able to find his way among the 68 manuscript sheets and connect the lines of roads and ‘rough outline of hills’.

The problem of the Sinai map brings to light the contrast between two different geographic epistemes, termed by Tim Ingold as ‘inhabitant knowledge’ and ‘occupant knowledge’. ⁸ The latter relies on cartographic navigation and the schematising sciences of map-making while the former is expressed in wayfinding. This

more closely resembles storytelling than map-using. To use a map is to navigate by means of it: that is, to plot a course from one location to another in space. Wayfinding, by contrast, is a matter of moving from one place to another in a region. ⁹

Mapping, then, has the same relation to wayfinding as navigation does to map-using. The gestural designs of mappers function as ‘condensed histories’ rather than as spatial representations. ¹⁰ The respective narrative accounts of Bell and Lawrence mobilise elements of the particular spatial rhetoric of Bedouin tribes – that is, a locally situated idiom arising from the places and their histories that make up the region, and both authors depended on this knowledge to navigate. Mapping and wayfinding, then, are the manifestations of local spatial idiom that Bell and Lawrence encounter, record and mobilise in their journeys, map-making and itinerant narrations.

It is Lawrence’s wayfinding, enabled by his possession of inhabitant knowledge, relative to his colleagues, that allows him to assemble the complete map. Deliverance for the War Office bureaucrats seems to arrive in the form of order – the schematisation of a disordered conception of the region performed by the rational, conquering, Western male gaze – which is likely to be as inaccurate as the Palestinian Exploration Map encountered by Bell and as open to speculation as the legend Lawrence draws reference to. In the exigency of war work, the impression of cognitive mastery over a region overrides the facts of whether or not such mastery exists. The resulting map of Sinai functions as a form of propaganda, monumental in its presence – it is a ‘complete map’ that stretches ‘eighteen feet each way in three colours’ and thus gives the impression of being as detailed and exhaustive as the scale and three colours allow – attesting to the intellectual grasp of Sinai by map’s owner, the War Office.

Lawrence’s emphasis on his own role in the creation of the Sinai map is not uncharacteristic of British imperial-era explorer-cartographers. He portrays himself as a heroic, chivalric hero, but his choice of invention as a mode of authorship implies a performance of creative genius, rather than of recording or synthesising. Yet, maps are rarely the result of a single cartographer’s work. The data contained in a map are, necessarily, collected from numerous sources in a process that the geographer John Pickles, drawing on the work of Frank Lestringant, terms bricolage – lines and symbols reified by repeated re-inscription, sometimes over the course of several centuries, so that they eventually come to be recognised as a territory. ¹¹ This collection of symbols, the signifying units of a map, is selected and arranged according to the purpose of the cartographer to represent a certain interpretation or conception of a region. The map, then, an aesthetic object that actualises power structures through its participation in a cartographic rhetorical tradition, is open to close analysis – particularly useful in maps published alongside travel narratives.

JB Harley’s framework for identifying and analysing symbolism has been widely used over the past decade for this purpose. He points out that the choices involved in map authorship – the ‘selection, omission, simplification, classification, the creation of hierarchies, and “symbolization”’ – are inherently rhetorical and result in a text as open to deconstruction as any. ¹² Cartographic aesthetics are the result of a mode of representation that is inherently selective. It relies in addition on the deployment of representational devices categorised by Harley into six criteria for cartographic symbolism: size, colour, script, centrality, silence and ‘other cartographic properties’, all of which give varying degrees of importance to different aspects of the region represented. With this in mind, no critical analysis of travel narratives ought to neglect the maps included with them. However, this is often precisely the case, with cartography passed over lightly or ignored altogether. This article aims to show the value of close cartographical analysis through a reading of the maps produced by Lawrence and Bell, in relation to their textual narration and in terms of the landscapes they portray, the published metacartographical devices and how these might diverge from representational norms of map-making.

Some of Lawrence’s earliest maps appear in his undergraduate thesis, based on the fieldwork at crusader castles in France and Syria, which traces the development of the defensive architecture of the Crusaders. These maps form part of the analytical apparatus of the thesis, showing the fortresses’ strategic communication network and how their placement enabled their visual and strategic dominance over their surroundings. This network, and Lawrence’s mapping of it, is framed as bringing order to a landscape characterised in the Western European mind as simultaneously chaotic and inscrutable. In his apologia, he defines the castles by their setting in this unruly landscape, as ‘they are mainly a series of exceptions to some undiscoverable rule’. Consequently, the study of these must ‘of necessity be minute and technical: and any such inquiry must obviously be based on first hand study of the actual remains’. His self-presentation here is not just as a scholar but as an explorer of the apparently unknowable Syrian landscape, where ‘the sites of some [castles], which figure in history, remain unidentified in the riot of hills filling up Syria between Antioch and Nazareth’. ¹³ Here, Syria is a conceptual space whose features – its ‘riot of hills’ – appear to militate against the possibility of intellectual apprehension of places portrayed ‘in history’. By describing the sites of the castles as ones that ‘remain unidentified’, Lawrence foregrounds his thesis as a work of reclamation of Crusader property, whose maps will reassert ocular dominance and order. The combination of spatial analysis, photographs, plans and maps in the thesis performs the work of visualism outlined by Johannes Fabian, constructing an ordered space for Western thought to reinhabit, in this case, a synchronic object of visual and aesthetic perception from apparent topographic disorder. ¹⁴

The maps are based on those produced by Harry Pirie-Gordon, who took part in the British survey and coincided with Lawrence in Syria. They show the ‘intervisibility of the castles of the Northern system’ using solid, straight red lines, and the main roads connecting them by dotted red ones. The key also distinguishes fortified castles, fortified towns, and unfortified towns and villages. Geographical features are limited to rivers, coastlines and lakes, all symbolised with utilitarian restraint by solidly inked, equally weighted and therefore indistinguishable black lines; no indications of terrain, topography or modern road networks are included. Indeed, it is only possible to distinguish sea from land because of the towns shown; in this respect, Lawrence relies on the viewer’s familiarity with the region – the Eastern border of Syria is shown by a river that is not immediately differentiable from the coastline and the landscape past this line is almost completely blank. This is also a landscape whose symbolisation privileges the network of power and communication of the Crusaders to the exclusion of almost every other feature.

The castles’ placement enacts a second scopic regime – that of the commanding view. Pickles writes of this gaze as a ‘transcendental positioning [that] is both the view from above, an elevated two-point perspective bird’s-eye-view, and an all seeing eye that views everywhere at the same time’. ¹⁵ In this way, the Crusader Castles maps capture the Syrian landscape in a panopticon of two simultaneous perspectives – the bird’s-eye-view of the cartographic gaze and the situated visual dominance of the commanding view. Their placement allows oversight of the surrounding terrain, enabling the identification of approaching pilgrims, traders or sources of threat. David Spurr writes of the ideological implications of the commanding view, which offers aesthetic pleasure, information and authority, conveying ‘a sense of mastery over the unknown’. Furthermore, it is ‘an originating gesture of colonization itself, making possible the exploration and mapping of territory which serves as the preliminary to a colonial order’. ¹⁶ Lawrence writes of the experience of this situated gaze in a letter to his mother, describing his visit to Beaufort, or Qal’at al-Shakif, which is

well situated above the Litani about 1600 [feet] above sea level. The view was very good up and down the said sea coast, and along the Litani gorge for 20 miles. A stone I threw from the chapel windows fell spattering after two rebounds into the river 1600 feet below. ¹⁷

The fortress’ location, overlooking the course of the Litani River to the North ‘for 20 miles’ and to the coast to the West, is one of strategic advantage and natural defences. Rather than the properties of its internal spaces, Lawrence represents the possibilities of visual and physical communication from within the fortress to its environment. Qal’at al-Shakif has visual communication with the fortified towns of Little Maron and Subeibe, as well as the crusader castle of Toron (Tibnin), which is marked as an unfortified town on the map, and from thence to Hunin, Maron, Safed and so on via the network of intervisibility. ¹⁸ The visual command of the immediate surroundings of the fortress and its connection to other points of power with which the map is concerned also show its contemporary strategic possibilities. Clearly, the Syrian landscape was not primarily a source of aesthetic pleasure for Lawrence (though it held that attraction also) but as a former theatre of war whose strategic elements were yet readable as such.

The flat representation of the interlinear spaces on the map implies not just its availability to the castles’ panoptic reach but also to physical travel – as if it might be moved across, rather than through. Ingold argues that the ‘specialised, “bird’s-eye view” of the cartographer or navigator’ necessarily implies a region or environment imagined as a surface – ‘Indeed the world can only be perceived to have an exterior surface by a mind that is situated above and beyond it. One makes one’s way though it, not over or across it’. For the inhabitants of a region, ‘the world itself has no surface’. ¹⁹ Read in isolation, it is this multi-dimensional world that the maps’ choices of omission and privileging of intervisibility deny.

The sketched maps and descriptions within the text of Crusader Castles indicate how different from this the actual terrain is. Lawrence’s depictions of Saône/Sahyun (also known as Qal’at Salah al-Din, the Citadel of Saladin), for example, show this. He describes it as

built on a narrow ridge [and] isolated from its neighbours on each side by being placed in the sharp angle of two streams just about to meet. The valleys on this side and on that are extremely narrow, and some four hundred feet deep.

For Lawrence, its ‘colossal size’ and challenging setting mean that ‘a complete examination of it is a matter of some exertion and discomfort’. In his thesis, this is accompanied by a marginal note of ‘I had malaria rather heavy those days’. ²⁰ Here, he displays subjective responses to an environment that disrupt the performance of objective and detached analysis. This is remarkable from an author concerned with representing his presence in the landscape, which becomes a subjectively constituted one of overcoming illness and physical ‘exertion and discomfort’, rather than of intellectual control.

This impression of subjectivity is strengthened by the sketches he includes, some of which are almost exactly reproduced in photographs. The relative impression of these sketches and sketch maps implies an immediacy of response allied to his portrayal of the castles as places demanding exertion yet also the prolonged contemplation involved in producing drawings by hand. These can be related to the conception of map authorship evident in his letter about the Sinai map. Both are consistent in their repudiation of cartographical facticity, presenting a fluid enough conception of map-making to allow its interrogation.

Itineraries: lines of narration

Where Lawrence’s Crusader Castles maps seek to codify the visual and strategic dominance of the Crusaders, a map recording Gertrude Bell’s journey between December 1913 and May 1914 is a hybrid of map and itinerary. It is inked in by Douglas Carruthers, who compiled maps at the Arab Bureau during the First World War, and uses Bell’s observations of altitude, distance, topography and place names as well as her corrections of Carruthers’ work. It records a circuit through Mesopotamia with little information about places exterior to this circuit – indeed, the map consists mainly of negative space. The location and date of each of her camps are recorded, so that the route, traced by a thick black line, can be understood as both a spatial and temporal progression. As such, it denies the panopticism of the cartographic gaze by its exclusion of any feature of the region not visible from the route.

This remarkable document lies at the intersection between the temporal progression of itineraric narration and the synoptic, temporally arrested perspective of cartographic gaze, characterised by a twofold erasure of development: in terms of what it represents its object and its presentation of its mediation. These qualities are part of the discursive power of maps – as Ingold argues, ‘the process of its production is eliminated from the final form of the product, [and] the world it describes is not a world in the making, but one ready-made for [occupation]’. Maps are typically static presentations of regions that elide political, environmental or demographic changes – particularly pertinent in a region characterised by the shifting camp locations and territorial boundaries of the nomadic Bedouin. Contrary to Lawrence’s crusader castles maps, the choices of exclusion in Bell’s limit the visual mediation of the landscape, making claims only about the places she had directly observed and available through the spatial operations of wayfinding – Ingold’s term for the method of navigation dependent upon the following of narration, or memory, of past experience of places. ²¹ The dependence of wayfinding upon narration of already-perceived landmarks limits its description to a given path or vector rather than an entire region as represented in conventional cartography. Narratives or itineraries of wayfinding would thus only ever make it possible to retrace the specific path described, rather than lay open a whole territory to conceptual mastery.

So, while it would be possible to retrace Bell’s route using this map, it would be impossible to plan any other trajectories through the region. It displays the position, orientation and goal of paths and roads crossed, but their existence beyond her immediate experience of them is not described in any way. Similarly, the location and quality of the wells passed by Bell are plotted along her route, while other wells remain invisible and unknown to the reader of the map. De Certeau argues that it is the ‘“citation” of the places that result from [. . .] or authorize’ travel narratives that structure them, through a ‘chain of spatializing operations’ that produce spaces through their representation and imply a local order by the representation of the limits placed on the journey. ²² This document mediates Bell’s journey with a singularly exclusive focus, resulting in a schematised, visually expressed itinerant narration. It can be read as a chain of linked spatial operations and observations that produces spaces for consumption by its readers. In this way, it can be seen as a modern descendant of the Ancient Roman itinerarium. In contrast to that document, however, its purview is determined by the factors that limited Bell’s travel – difficult or unknown terrain, the locations of wells and the relative stability created by tribal interrelationships – so that its form is determined by the region it seeks to represent, rather than calling a territory into being by a comprehensive production of spaces.

One of the most remarkable aspects of this itinerarium is that its conditions of production are made clear, contrary to Ingold’s description of maps. Furthermore, those provided indicate that it is to be read as a tentative, rather than an authoritative, representation. It is a large map, composed of five sheets of varying sizes, most of which contain the note stating that

Corrections in Red are

Miss G. Bell’s original corrections

inked in by D. Carruthers

     July 1917

In Black. DC.

This directs the reading of the map as a collaborative work whose marks are part of a process tending to a correct representation of the observable terrain from a particular route. Bell’s corrections are yet visible in many places, written in pencil, and mainly correcting spelling errors, the placement of geographical features or referring to previous travellers. For instance, Bell’s note that the towns of Hit and Ramadi have been ‘placed in relation to Nejef according to Wilcox’ makes clear that her route intersects with Wilcox’s earlier travels and that Bell and Carruthers’ placement of these towns in relation to one another depends partially on Wilcox’s judgement. Another of Bell’s notes, not inked in and therefore unverified, or deemed less relevant by Carruthers, labels a pair of hills, Jebel Marabib and Ims el Ma with a quote from Lady Anne Blunt’s A Pilgrimage to Nejd. If this is investigated, it reveals Blunt’s reference to a previous traveller, Dr Colvill. Blunt writes of a view of the surrounding landscape from ‘a sand-hill at least a hundred feet high’, which she and her companions climb

to take the bearings of the country, for there is a splendid view now of Jebel Shammar, no isolated peak, as Dr. Colvill would have it last year, but a long range of fantastic mountains [. . .]. There are also several outlying peaks distinct from the main chain. Behind us, to the north-west, the Jobba group, with continuations to the west and south-west. Eastwards, there is a single point, Jebel Atwa. ²³

Three layers of recorded observations are visible here; each successive traveller engages with the work of their predecessors in a collective effort to capture the region in as detailed and accurate a fashion as possible and each re-presentation contains echoes of previous iterations. The visibility of the multiple sources of information used to compile this itinerarium allows it to be read as a heteroglossic travel narrative.

This is in contrast to the conventional map, which, while it is in fact a visual archive of data collected from numerous individuals and groups, is presented to its reader as a monoglossic, static (rather than reified) mediation (rather than representation) of a territory, usually by a government body with all of the authoritative connotations that such a publisher might connote. As de Certeau argues, the conventional map ‘pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the or the necessary condition’, including the ‘diverse origin’ of the data which constitute it, which are received from the tradition of geography and produced by the observations of navigators, but the map is, most importantly, characterised by the erasure of the itineraries that are ‘the condition of its possibility’. This document, perhaps because it is a record of cartographic work in progress, documents a possible future contribution to a conventional map in terms of the itinerary and also includes the diverse origins of the data it relies upon.

One source of information, however, is excluded: the knowledge and observations of the local guides Bell relied on to navigate and negotiate her way through Mesopotamia are excluded. Her diary entries provide evidence of how important this information was, and allow the development of her store of information about the region to be traced. For instance, before the tour starts, she writes that ‘Abd’el Aziz and ‘Abdallah al Ma’shirek (members of the expedition) warn that ‘the tribes S[outh] of [Qasr al-] Azraq [are] much disturbed always’. She makes frequent note of the locations of possible routes learned from her hosts at the campfire as she progresses through the region, noting that ‘They say there is an old road from [Qasr el-] Burqu to [Qasr al-] Azraq’. Later, this information is reinforced over the coffee fire of the Masa’id when she hears of the same ‘old road’ running in the opposite direction, ‘from Azraq to Nemara and Burqu’ and this road is depicted in the itinerarium. Her return to this part of the journey, recorded twice in her diary, indicates that it was a cause of some worry while her use of local sources of knowledge indicates a paucity of Western knowledge to answer those concerns. Her description of ‘Old Muhammad al Ma’rawi’ shows his particular importance as a guide, as he ‘knows all the Arabs of every part’ and ‘the fathers and grandfathers of all the sheikhs have been among his friends or enemies’. ²⁴ Bell’s itinerarium, then, performs an act of bricolage of boundaries and obstacles, narratives and past observations that together, though unevenly represented, determine the course of its line.

If Bell’s itinerarium occupies a middle ground between map and narrative, how might such a document be theorised? De Certeau’s writing about the relationship of stories to maps holds a possible way forward. He argues that maps are ‘proper places in which to exhibit the products of knowledge, [. . .] tables of legible results’ – that is, documentations of land made visible to and recorded according to the organising principles of the gaze of the state. Stories about space, on the other hand, exhibit the operations that actuate or allow space within environments that enforce an imposed order. ²⁵ This document exhibits products of knowledge, but these are gained through spatial operations along a path defined by the imposed topographical and sociopolitical constraints of the region and are therefore limited to the same extent as Bell’s movements are.

According to de Certeau, the primary role of stories is to open ‘a legitimate theatre for practical actions’ (de Certeau’s emphasis). This founding, or foundation, allows the taking place of social actions and is ‘fragmented (not unique and whole), miniaturised (not on a national scale), and polyvalent (not specialized)’. The fragmentary nature of this foundation is due to the heterogeneous references, or citations, that authorise it – de Certeau evokes a compositional process of bricolage, in which fragments of previous narratives are recycled, similar to that posited by Lestringant in reference to the building of the cartographic tradition. Furthermore, de Certeau considers that ‘socioeconomic technocratization’ prevents the operation of the founding story beyond the realm of the individual of family unit within society. De Certeau’s first two conditions allow Bell’s map to be read as part of a process of conceptual imperial founding, however limited the theatre of practical actions thereby opened may be. A final quality of foundational narration is its polyvalence. De Certeau argues that it is a consequence of its fragmentary composition, which is expressed through the buried ‘“fragments” of narration planted around the obscure thresholds of our existence’ and implies that the founding narration continues to develop in conjunction with the development of national space. ²⁶

This analysis presupposes a spatially defined political state – both as a source of pressure keeping the story at the level of the individual and as a theoretical space produced by it. While de Certeau’s analysis is most helpful in conceptualising the itinerarium as a narrative, the issue of the state highlights a shortcoming. He contends that the story is ‘miniaturized’ – never able to transcend the experience of the individual or family unit – but does this miniaturisation occur without the influence of the ‘socioeconomic technocratization’, which implies a developed national economy and attendant technologies of social administration? Clearly, these structures are absent from the region portrayed in Bell’s itinerarium. Miniaturisation is thus not a necessary component of the spatial story, in the absence of these pressures.

In addition, further implications become clear because this is a visually expressed travel story. It may well be miniaturised, but this is in the sense of its spatial delimitation rather than its limitation to the level of the individual or family. Clearly, the same path can be retraced even today and the itinerarium records the progress not just of Bell but of the other members of her expedition and by their changing guides, the changing of which adds a further layer of bricolage to the itinerarium and the information it displays. Similar arguments might be applied to the condition of polyvalence – here, the numerous sources of narrative do not result in infinite variability in the course of the route, but in its limitation, nor do they result in a proliferation of spatial interpretations or applications of the line and its narrative.

Narration is also integral to Ingold’s conception of wayfinding, as distinct from navigation, as a method of negotiating one’s way through an environment. In navigation, ‘the relation between one’s position on the ground and one’s location in space, as defined by particular map coordinates, is strictly synchronic, and divorced from any narrative context’. By contrast, in wayfinding, position is defined in relationship to the past and future content of the narrative of a given path. This chain of significances can also be visually defined, as in the memory of a series of vistas or landmarks. ²⁷ It is its divorce from cartographic context, the lack of longitudinal or latitudinal observations, that makes the itinerarium readable as a foundational travel story that builds on a bricolage of information and disseminates a heteroglossic narrative of the region.

When Bell’s diary and photographs of the journey are considered as a corollary and a set of source narratives of this story points along the path are defined by their narrative context rather than synchronically. Thus, for instance, Bell’s camp of 15 March 1914 is distinguishable by its date marker, by the altitude observation attached to it and by its narrative context. In this instance, on the day leading up to that making of camp, Bell’s expedition passed through a group of low hill leading to the Loquah Wells, which reach a depth of 20 fathoms and along the Wadi al Khadd, which, according to Bell’s now faint pencilled note, contains rich spring pasturage and water pools – highly important pieces of information for desert travel.

Silent (and silenced) spaces

Consequent to the quarantining of signifiers along the line of travel, much of Bell’s itinerarium is composed of negative space. JB Harley terms this cartographic silence, an expression of the limitations of a Foucauldian episteme or an expression of state power through suppression of knowledge or intentional misinformation. Both of these are conditions of the negative space against which Bell’s traverse is expressed. While contributions of other Europeans to knowledge about the region are included in the map, those of her native contacts are suppressed. Cartographic silence, as Harley points out, is as important to reading maps as the utterances of lines, script and symbolisation. ²⁸ In this case, the black spaces provide the conditions of existence for the itinerarium both as a series of textually expressed utterances and as an arrangement of compositional elements. The map’s silence privileges the narrative of Bell’s itinerary at the expense of any other – while these are referenced, their fragments of narrative are included only according to the terms dictated by Bell’s (and to a certain extent Carruthers’).

Clearly, all maps need a certain amount of negative space to allow the comprehension of other aspects of map language. In this case, the map language mediates a particular interpretation of the landscape it portrays. Only one path in the region’s matrix is actuated while the others are bypassed, symbolised by double dotted lines as at Mshatta and Tell Kharaneh. Topographic features, muted by the spare symbolisation, are readable in the route’s zig-zag, explained by the labels ‘rising ground’ and ‘top of hill’ more readily than contour lines. Wadis are in some places symbolised by the same double dotted lines as have elsewhere been used to indicate roads, as at Wadi Umkad and Wadi Khuburri and although the course of the path follows that of the Wadi, this is only visible in the faint, red corrective lines. Similarly, while castles and forts account for changes of direction in the line of Bell’s route as she travels to visit them, their names are unaccompanied by any symbol that would indicate their meaning to any map reader unfamiliar with the Arabic terms ‘Qal’at’ or ‘Qasr’.

The only aspect of the map that is consistently represented is Bell’s route, whose bold, black line spreads over the otherwise blank paper. A parallel may be drawn to the bold, red lines of intervisibility that imposes the strategic network of the Crusaders over the Syrian landscape portrayed in the maps of Crusader Castles – both assert the presence of ephemeral or purely visual trajectories, giving these far more importance than, while refusing to make any representational claims about, the environment. In addition, both documents conceptualise their portrayal of the regions purely through a Western (Imperialist) experience of it, reinforcing the conception of it as an essentially unknowable landscape that remains blank, even on maps.

In contrast to this, Lawrence’s Compass Traverse of May 1917 presents its reader with a different mediation of his journey. Again, it is a provisional map, part of a process of information-gathering, destined for the late-Victorian imperial archive. ²⁹ It lacks a frame and key, and its scale gives the barest information needed to contextualise and understand the map. Lawrence does not include any references to previous Western travellers in his short traverse. He does, however, give credit to Auda Abu Tayi for the names, marking the traverse as an intellectual product dependent upon the situated, local, partisan knowledge of an inhabitant. ³⁰ He also includes far more detailed indications of the Wadis and undulations of terrain through which his route travels, marking these in blue and red watercolour, calling upon conventions of cartographic symbolisation to render the traverse readable in terms familiar to its readers. The depiction of these features is far more extensive than that given in Bell’s traverse and place names are marked in lettering bold in comparison to the dotted line of Lawrence’s route. In contrast to Bell’s itinerarium, though, local testimony is given more compositional and thereby conceptual weight, indicating a more tentative approach to the environment than Bell’s, which displays an anxiety to highlight her journey as proof of her presence in the landscape, of her traverse as a performative record of her actions. The traverse then might stand as a model for a circumscribed cartographic gaze that records an immersive route through a region expressed in recitation of place names and observations. In a pencilled note to readers, Lawrence writes that ‘This is the only drawn copy so please do not lose it prematurely’, before stating the traverse’s relationship to existing Royal Geographical Society cartographical knowledge, implying both its ephemeral status as well as his opinion of the imperial bureaucratic machinery. The negative spaces of Bell’s and Lawrence’s traverses transmute the environment of the explorer-authors’ journeys into a geographical margin into which notes and errata can be transcribed. This negative space, then, is a silencing rather than merely a silence and through this act of silencing, an empty rhetorical space is created onto which the notes of the mapmaker may be written.

Lawrence gives a written account of the traverse in his letter to General Clayton, narrating his actions with his Arab comrades between leaving Wejh (al Wajh, Saudi Arabia) on 9 May 1917 and the taking of Akaba on 6 July of that year. The letter is concerned with conveying strategically significant details to his Commanding Officer, so Lawrence’s narration is spare and appropriately matter-of-fact. He writes, after detailing the senior officers of the expedition and Feisul’s instructions to them, that ‘We marched to Abu Raga where we increased our force to 36 men, and thence to the Railway at km. 810.5 which we dynamited on May 19th. Our route then lay by Fejr to Maigua in Wadi Soilan’. ³¹ In contrast, his description of the same route in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is comparatively verbose and makes it clear that the accuracy of the map-making depends entirely on Auda abu Tayi. Lawrence describes how ‘Auda ranged up beside my camel, and pointing with his riding-stick told me to write down on my map the names and nature of the land’, followed by a textual laying out of the land that functions as a virtual map, so that Auda’s instructions are fulfilled in the map and the later text of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. ³²

In re-representing Auda’s descriptions, Lawrence projects his part in the Imperial map-making machinery,

swearing I was no writer-down of unspoiled countries or pandar to geographical curiosity; and the old man, much pleased, began to tell me personal notes and news of the chiefs with us, and in front upon our line of march.

His dissimulation of his motives for map-making here indicates his views on the geographical data collection with which he was engaged. His own part in this process is, he swears, not as a ‘pandar’ – a go-between or person who provides the means of sexual gratification, a pimp – ‘to geographical curiosity’, which is here analogous to the environmental prostitution of unspoiled countries to gratify the sordid curiosity of the imperial archivists. As he makes his deception clear in the opening pages of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, readers are made complicit in his dissimulation and can recognise the lies as Lawrence performs them.

The unforgiving, purgatorial, plain marked ‘El Houl’ on the traverse appears almost as a punishment to this. Their ‘urgent progress across its immensity [is] a stillness or immobility of futile effort’, and is interrupted when the men are overtaken by a khamseen – a sandstorm. They continue under these conditions, which place real and mental distance between the earlier collecting of geographical data by an intervening description of time passing, ‘Auda huskily spat extra names at me’, which might be read as a result of passing through the khamseen or through the filter of the narrator’s guilty conscience as righteous anger (1922: 130–1) ³² . The environment here apparently asserts itself in retribution for the personal and institutional dishonesty used to gather information.

Bell also experienced doubts while undertaking her traverse, recording these in her epistolary diaries intended for to her lover, Charles Montagu Doughty-Wylie. The entry of 16 February 1914 reveals Bell’s certainty and confidence as a façade – she doubts the importance of her own role in the British imperial project in Arabia and what profit she herself may get from:

A compass traverse over country which was more or less known, a few names added to the map [. . .] and probably that is all. [. . .] And the road to Baghdad has been travelled many times before. It is nothing, the journey to Nejd, so far as any real advantage goes, or any real addition to knowledge, but I am beginning to see pretty clearly that it is all that I can do. There are two ways of profitable travel in Arabia. One is the Arabia Deserta way, to live with the people and to live like them for months and years. [. . .] It’s clear I can’t take that way; the fact of being a woman bars me from it. And the other is Leachman’s way – to ride swiftly through the country with your compass in your hand, for the map’s sake and for nothing else. And there is some profit in that too I might be able to do that over a limited space of time, but I am not sure. ³³

Part of this complex of doubts is due to Bell’s awareness of her position in relation to the line of other travellers in the Arabian Desert, whose work means that it is country ‘more or less known’. Ali Behdad argues that this anxiety typifies the belated travellers in Arabia from the second half of the 19th century and that it results in ‘an obsessive urge to discover an “authentic” Other’ and in a particularly convoluted, discursively heterogeneous, exoticist project. ³⁴ Arguably, then, Bell’s exploratory journeys through the desert, read as a quest for an authentically alien landscape, result here instead in her alienation from it and its cultural construction in the imperial archive. Her modes of travel, perception and mediation are undermined in comparison to those of Doughty and Leachman. Her own status as a female travel writer interested in representing her own, subjective experience of the Desert precludes her writing from either category and while she considered accurate maps of the desert to be important, map-making was never the primary aim of her travels as it arguably was for the geographer-explorers Carruthers and Leachman. For Bell, then, it is not just the region but her own gendered identity that resists categorisation within the prescribed forms of ‘profitable travel’. Part of her concern is that she is retreading already well-travelled ground – the landscape she depicts is more or less known and the road to Baghdad is established. More importantly, it is the difficult journey to Nejd, a vast desert well, that becomes ‘nothing so far as any real advantage goes, or any real addition to knowledge’. Particularly, it is her lack of having made a contribution to knowledge and to national advantage within the context of other travellers and the political aims of the British in Arabia that her anxieties hinge upon.