Sample of writingPreface The most exalted seat in the world is the saddle of a swift horse & the best companion for all time is a book. El Mutanabbi, quoted by Gertrude Bell in Nazli''s Guestbook, undated but probably July 1907 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the artist, archaeologist and statesman Osman Hamdi Bey was a leading light in Constantinople society.The coming of the Turkish Republic cast a shadow over all things Ottoman, but in 2004 the sale of his painting The Tortoise Trainer, for what was then a record-breaking sum for a Turkish artwork, signalled a revived interest in him. So when an Istanbul museum showcased the contents of his daughter Nazli''s guestbook, I was eager to find out what famous names might be lurking between its covers. To my surprise, my eyes alighted on the autograph of Gertrude Bell, best known of a band of British ''desert queens'' famous for exploring the Levant in the years before the First World War. Born into a wealthy family of industrialists from the northeast of England in 1868, Gertrude travelled extensively in the territories that are now Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Saudi Arabia between 1905 and 1914. When war broke out, her pioneering adventures in little-known areas of the Middle East elevated her from amateur archaeologist and traveller to go-to expert, the only woman in a group of British former explorers with experience of the region''s complex tribal politics. After the war she settled in Baghdad where she came to be associated with the crude ''lines in the sand'' used to conjure nation-states from the territory of the defeated Ottoman Empire.

Later she would wet-nurse the inexperienced Saudi-born Prince Faisal as he made his stumbling first steps as ruler of the newly created Iraq. Gertrude''s, then, is a name more commonly associated with deserts than Aegean beaches, and, accordingly, for Nazli''s guestbook she selected a quotation from a revered Iraqi poet. But its presence there set me thinking. To have visited Osman Hamdi at home suggested a more than passing acquaintance with his family, which in turn implied a more than passing acquaintance with what was at that time still Constantinople. Curiosity piqued, I turned to her letters and diaries and quickly learned that between 1889 and 1914 she had visited what is now the Republic of Turkey on at least eleven occasions. Between 1889 and 1899 a sequence of short trips had taken her to Constantinople, Bursa and Smyrna, as well as to the famous archaeological sites of Troy and Ephesus. In 1902 she spent a month exploring Smyrna and its hinterland, the experience marking, in Turkish terms, the turning point between Gertrude the tourist and Gertrude the explorer. That transition was completed in 1905 when she arrived in Turkey not in the relative comfort of ship or train but astride a horse, riding into Antakya (Hatay) from Aleppo on her way back from Syria and Palestine.

Two years later Turkey itself formed the sole focus of a four-month overland expedition from Smyrna to Binbirkilise, a remote cluster of early Byzantine churches in the heart of Anatolia. Then in 1909 she rode into Cizre and across Turkey at the end of a long expedition through Syria and Iraq. Two years later and the border town of Nusaybin served as her entry point at the tail end of another months-long journey into Iraq and Syria. A premature farewell to Constantinople came in 1914 when she paused there briefly on her way home from a fraught expedition into what is now Saudi Arabia. Despite these many visits and the fact that she had met both her friend and colleague Lawrence of Arabia, and the great love of her life, Dick Doughty-Wylie, there, Gertrude''s time in Turkey has been largely overlooked. Yet the story was always hiding in plain sight. Her journeys had resulted in two books - The Thousand and One Churches and The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin - that were wholly about Turkey, and another three - Persian Pictures, The Desert and the Sown, and Amurath to Amurath - in which it played a walk-on role. Pieces of the story cropped up in volumes of her letters published by her stepmother, Florence Bell, and her sister, Elsa Richmond.

A sequence of articles on Cilicia and Lycaonia also appeared in the Revue Archéologique. The snag lay in the absence of one single book that pulled together all the threads. Plenty of foreign men had traversed the Turkey of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and published accounts of their adventures. Gertrude was perhaps the only Western woman to have done the same thing at the same time, yet it wasn''t until Newcastle University placed her archive online that the scattered pieces finally came together to reveal just how extensively she had travelled within the country, sometimes in the footsteps of renowned scholar-explorers such as Sir William Ramsay, sometimes - as in the Tur Abdin, where it can sometimes feel as if she has just walked out of the room - breaking new ground of her own. Her diaries revealed her climbing mountains (Cudi and Hasan) and rafting a river (the Tigris); they described her ventures in places as disparate as pre-Blue Cruise Bodrum and the Karaca Dagi, a region so remote that it is barely mapped even today; and they showed her at Binbirkilise, rolling up her sleeves as the first Western woman to dig for the past in the Anatolian countryside. Her letters oozed the gossip of late-Ottoman society. Her photographs immortalized all but inaccessible Byzantine ruins, some since lost to storm, quarrying or dynamite. They live on, rather touchingly, on the computer screens of local planning officers, cherished as the first known images of their domains.

The kernel of an idea began to seed itself. Cautiously, I marked onto a map all the places that she had visited on her different journeys. Then I joined the dots and stood back to admire an itinerary that kicked off easily in the comfort of Istanbul, then tracked down to Izmir on the Aegean coast before sweeping east across the heart of the country to dusty, neglected Cizre on the Syrian border and doubling back west to Istanbul via the basalt-walled stronghold of old Diyarbakir. Gertrude had ticked off archaeological sites as well known as Sardis and Aphrodisias and as forgotten as Blaundos and Larissa; places as easily accessible as Konya and Eskisehir and as hard to reach as the Syriac monastery of Mor Augen. By amalgamating all her journeys and then retracing them, I hoped to find out how much had changed in Turkey and how much had stayed the same. Boarding a bus out of Izmir in April 2015, I could never have imagined the casual way that politics would upend my plans as a mid-June election triggered the collapse of a peace process between the government and the Kurds. Turkey went into a tailspin. As I journeyed steadily further from the safe, tourist-favoured west coast towards the embattled southeast, the country''s troubled past started to snap at the heels of its unhappy present.

Only by keeping a low profile (and perhaps being a woman) could I keep going. Most of my travel took place in 2015, but because of the fragile situation on the Syrian border I researched the Karkamis chapter first, in 2014, even though fighting in Kobani was underway. The ascent of Hasan Dagi had to await suitable weather conditions and was carried out belatedly in 2016. Pat Yale Istanbul, 2022 PART ONE Western Wanderings 1 The First East ''Hooooo.'' It''s a sound to make the hairs on your neck stand on end. An unearthly sound, inhuman, dredged, it seems, from deep within the soul. To attempt to render it in words is futile not least because its nearest English equivalent is the sound made by a child playing ghosts in a bedsheet, which would be to inject a wholly inappropriate suggestion of levity into something quintessentially solemn. Better, perhaps, to think of the haunting ''woo'' made by an owl crying out in the night.

Yet in Arabic there is no such transliteration problem. In Arabic the ''hoo'' sound is a word that can be rendered as ''hu''. This ''hu'' is the equivalent of the upper-case He of Christianity. But of course this He is not the Christian God but the Muslim Allah, and the elevation of the word into this spine-tingling sound speaks as profoundly of faith as that of a chorister''s voice echoing around the vaults of a Gothic cathedral. I''ve come to watch a troupe of whirling dervishes go through their paces in one of the waiting rooms at Istanbul''s Sirkeci Station. It''s a majestic, high-ceilinged space, the sort of space that was commonplace in the days before functionality and the need to remember heating bills eclipsed beauty in the design stakes. The lemony light filtering through the stained-glass windows above the quintet of elderly musicians only adds to the sense of this being a secular cathedral, a paean in stone to the glories of modern transportation. Beneath the windows the musicians warm up their audience before the dervishes begin to rotate, their snow-white skirts, lifted by gravity, undulating around them as they rehearse a routine in which every step is ritualized and meaningful, and only the blood red of the rug carefully spread on the floor at the start of the performance then ceremonially gathered up again at the end injects any semblance of colour.

Up swing the skirts, offering glimpses of white long johns, then back they drop again, twisting tightly around the dancers'' legs before coming to rest again when they pause for a break. Those swirling skirts stir a breeze in the hall. It flickers across my ankles as I sit waiting for the eerie howl that I know will conclude the proceedings. * On a spring day in 1889 a young woman stepped ashore from the steamer that had brought her down the Black Sea coast from Constanza in Romania to the harbour of Constantinople. As her foot touched the cobbles, she too.