Learning to love the stunning austerity of the desert and the exotic culture of its peoples, she made further journeys into forbidding stretches of Mesopotamia and Arabia, where her deepening knowledge of tribal politics became crucial to British hopes for dominance in those oil-rich lands. But her dream persisted of penetrating the Arab world of the fading Ottoman Empire, and by 1905 she was among the Bedouin and Druse in Syria, gathering material for a book. In the next few years, insatiably curious and restless, Bell read and wrote voluminously studied languages, art and architecture climbed in the Swiss Alps and went around the world with her brother. Its beauty and the lives of its peoples would become her abiding passion. Several years of world wandering followed, including her first experience of mountain climbing, and by November 1899, she was in Jerusalem to pursue the study of Arabic and make her first sallies into the desert. Her father refused his consent to their proposed marriage, the young man died accidentally, and Bell was devastated. After a period back in London, she traveled to Persia, began to master the language and fell in love with a young British diplomat.
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