Monday, April 26, 2021

Dressed stylishly if a shade overimaginatively

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 221. 

Another regular guest, both at Ain Anoub and in Beirut, was Freya Stark. Whenever she came we would give a little dinner party for her. People would arrive in a state of wild excitement at the thought of meeting this most intrepid of travelers, winner of the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society while still in her twenties, who had crossed vast tracts of unknown territory in the Middle East and Central Asia, mapping much of it for the first time. They would expect a tall, spare, weather-beaten woman, her hands heavily calloused after years of pitching tents and tightening the girths of camels, and would be gratifyingly astonished to see this short, dumpy figure with an extraordinary coiffure like a whirlpool, dressed stylishly if a shade overimaginatively and dripping with jewelry, her little stubby fingers heavy with huge rings. Knowing her as I did, I doubt whether she had ever pitched a tent or harnessed a camel in her life. As her books make clear, she always traveled en princesse, attended by a small regiment of guides and dragomen. When they arrived at a suitable camping site she would immediately retire to a comfortable spot nearby and start writing her diary or one of her exquisite letters, returning only when her tent was ready, her dinner awaiting her, her bed prepared.

 

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