For whom the Bell tolls

 Gertrude Bell to Lord Cromer

And yet there was a new note.  For the first time in all the turbulent centuries to which those desolate regions bear witness,  a potent word had gone forth and those who had caught it listened in amazement asking one another for its meaning.

Liberty  -  what is liberty?

I think the question which ran so perpetually through the black tents would have received no better a solution in the royal pavilions which had once spread their glories over the plain.

Idly though it fell from the lips of the Bedouin,  it foretold change.

That sense of change,  uneasy and bewildered,  hung over the whole of the Ottoman Empire;  it was rarely unalloyed with anxiety;  there was,  it must be admitted,  little to encourage an unqualified confidence in the immediate future.

But one thing was certain;  the moving finger had inscribed a fresh title on the page.