Zenobia was a queen of the Palmyrene Empire (modern Syria).  She was called “The Pearl Necklace” in the history of the Syrian kingdom.

“Her face was dark and of a swarthy hue, her eyes were black and powerful beyond the usual…, her spirit divinely great, and her beauty incredible. So white were her teeth that many thought that she had pearls in place of teeth. Her voice was clear and like that of a man. Her sternness, when necessity demanded, was that of a tyrant, her clemency…that of a good emperor.” 

These were the words of a Roman historian around 270 A.D. describing Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, the city of Tadmor in today’s Syria, and also the name for the empire she ruled.

There have been many queens who went to war. In my reading about amazing women and a recent focus on warrior queens, I discovered Zenobia. She was tremendously brave and a fierce fighter, meeting and – for a time – beating Roman emperor Aurelius (Lucius Domitius Aurelianus).

To Set the Stage:

It was the 3rd century of the Common Era. Zenobia, sometimes called Septimia or Bat-Zabbel, was born around 240 CE in the Palmyrene Empire in Syria. She married Odeanathius, ruler of the city of Palmyra (sometimes called Tadmose), and when he was assassinated, she became the regent for her young son Wahballat. Some said she had him killed, but it’s difficult to know.

Zenobia claimed that she was a Ptolemy (the last ruling dynasty of Egypt) and a direct descendant of Cleopatra. She certainly was ambitious, and in 269 she decided to conquer Egypt. Within a year, her general Zabdas has secured most of Egypt and at the same time, Zenobia with other troops had taken most of Syria, as far as the Black Sea, under her control. At this point, she truly had an empire. But it wasn’t to last long.

Zenobia’s Battles Against Aurelian

The Romans didn’t like having territory taken away from them. The emperor Aurelian was a skilled military leader, and he immediately took back much of Zenobia’s empire, reconquering Egypt first.

Zenobia met him in battle, riding on her horse. The battle resulted in a horrible slaughter of Zenobia’s troops, and they fley to Palmyra. Aurelian besieged the city, cutting off trade and travel.

During the siege, Aurelian seems to have something of a grudging admiration for Zenobia. He sent her a message asking her to surrender, telling her he would save her city if she agreed. She responded with defiance.

Finally, in desperation, Zenobia tried to escape from the city to get help from the Persians. She got through a city gate and rode on a female camel (supposed to be faster than horses) to the Euphrates River, where she was captured as she tried to board a boat.

Zenobia was brought before Aurelius as a captive. When she was confronted with her “treasonous” (to the Romans, anyway) actions, she said she was just a “simple woman” who had been misled by her advisors. Against advice, Aurelian decided not to kill her, but he took her to Rome as his captive. I’m sure he saw the political capital to be gained from showing off his beautiful prize to the Romans.

In Rome, she was supposedly shackled with gold chains and paraded through the streets of Rome in Aurelian’s triumphal procession. Later, he went back to Palmyra, sacked the city, and ended the Palmyrate empire forever.

What Happened to Zenobia

After the parade, there are several versions of events, depending on which Roman historian you read. The most likely but, for me, the least palatable, outcome was that she Zenobia was allowed to live in an estate near Rome. She was said to have married a Roman senator and lived (relatively) happy ever after.

Zenobia’s Legacy

Zenobia has become something of a symbol for other women adventurers. Lady Hester Stanhope was determined to go to the ruins of Palmyra in 1911, where she styled herself as Zenobia reborn. She expected to be hailed as another Zenobia and “was not disappointed.”

Zenobia still shows up in popular culture. I’m not sure how I feel about these commercializations; for example, see this Zenobia T shirt, and this toy, in revealing garments.

 

Sources:

Most of my information comes from Zenobia of Palmyra, by Agnes Carr Vaughan (1967). Because there is little known about Zenobia, Vaughan says she used her “imagination liberally.” Much of her information comes from the Roman historian Pollio. So, I guess this is a 3rd hand source.

Emma Gatewood had lived a rough life. Born in 1887, she was married at 19. Her husband started beating her during their honeymoon and he beat her many times – sometimes almost to death – through 35 years of marriage and 11 children.

After her divorce in 1940, she was looking for something to keep fit. She saw an article about the Appalachian trail in a copy of National Geographic magazine (August 1949). So she decided to walk it.

Her story is an incredible one of determination and just plain toughness. Ben Montgomery tells Grandma Gatewood’s tale exceedingly well, so I’ll just give you the highlights.

How She Walked

Emma started her walk on May 3, 1955, at the top of a mountain in Jasper, South Carolina. She was 67 years old and a great-grandmother! No one knew she was there except the taxi driver who brought her to the top of the mountain and her cousin Myrtle in Atlanta. She told her children she was going for a walk.

She had attempted the trail the year before (1954), starting in Maine, but she lost her way, broke her glasses, and ran out of food; she was ordered by Park Rangers to leave. She told no one about this aborted trip. This time she was determined to go the whole way.

She had no map, no sleeping bag, and no tent, and only a little money for food. She wore tennis shoes and carried a backpack with some essentials, including a shower curtain to use as a rain poncho. She had been preparing for her walk by walking, and she had gotten up to 10 miles a day by the time she started.

At the time she started, the official 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail was used mostly by day walkers or hikers; only a few men (and no women) had walked the entire trail. The trail was still in its infancy, still being developed, and only portions of it were marked. There were only a few shelters, and no one really knew much about it. So when Emma started walking, she was literally blazing a trail.

Her father had always told her, “Pick up your feet,” so that’s what she did. She just started walking. At the end of each day, she would start looking for a place to stay, asking politely. Sometimes she was refused, sometimes welcomed. When she was refused shelter, she slept on the trail. When she ran out of money, she would work for a few days. She would accept rides to nearby towns for food and a place to sleep, always requesting that she be returned to the trail where she left it. Most trail walkers today follow this requirement if they want to claim to have walked the entire trail.

The trail, from Mt. Oglethorpe in South Carolina to Mt. Katahdin in Main, held many dangers. There were mountains to climb, rivers with rapids to cross, and stretches of unmarked pasture land to get lost in. Many dangerous animals – mountain lions, black bears, and rattlesnakes to name a few – and people roamed around. (This was still the time of hillbillies and moonshiners.) Towns were few and far between.

When she began her trip in May, it was cold and snow was still on the mountains. Many days it rained and stormed. As she got further north, the hot summer sun beat down on her and the humidity brought out mosquitoes. And don’t forget the poison plants – dangerous to eat or to get close to. As Ben Montgomery said,

“There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die. 

But she was inspired by the beauty of the sights she had seen and her interactions with the kind people she met. She said,

“The forest is a quiet place and nature is beatiful. I don’t want to sit and rock. I want to do something.” 

The Public Begins to Notice

In early June, near Roanoke, Virginia, Emma was approached by two Appalachian trail club members who wanted to tell her story. She was reluctant to let them publish anything about her because she still hadn’t told her family about her journey. She finally agreed to a picture and a story.

Word spread “like wood smoke” and soon she found that local reporters were joining her on her walk just to talk with her and get her story for their newspaper. She was welcomed in some towns and treated like a visiting dignitary, which annoyed her; she just wanted to keep moving.

 

Emma Gets Addicted to Walking

Grandma Gatewood didn’t stop with one more trip through the Appalachian Trail. She made the trip two more times, the third time completing her first attempted trip. Then she walked across the country, from Ohio to Portland, Oregon. And she did more trips, climbing six mountains in the Adirondack Range,

At age 71, she walked the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri to Portland, Oregon. Everywhere she went, reporters and crowds followed and she was asked to appear on television, including the Groucho Marx show. She said she was starting to feel like a “sideshow freak.”

Back at home, Emma set out to encourage hiking but working to establish hiking trails in Ohio. She often walked around her home in Ohio, where she would set off on walks on a whim, covering 20 miles in a day.

Her lifetime of walking counted up to 14,000 miles. In the spring of 1973, she bought a bus ticket and visited 48 states and 3 Canadian provinces. shortly after her return, on June 4, she collapsed and died. (As I reviewed my notes before writing this article, I thought I’d made an error in the date, assuming that she couldn’t have made such a long trip so shortly before her death. But she did.)

Honors and awards followed, including her 2012 induction into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame. Emma (Grandma) Gatewood’s story was inspirational to me. She survived a brutal husband, had many children and grandchildren, and she was tough enough to start on her dream later in life. She never stopped walking and encouraging others to walk.

Pick up your feet, Jean!

Sources and more information

The quotes and most of the information in this article is from Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery. In 2018, the New York Times included Grandma Gatewood in their Overlooked series of people who should have had NYT obituaries.

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Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive (a little) money if you buy a book from one of these links.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s 1932. A woman with a bicycle is standing on a mountain looking at the eastern frontier of Russian Turkestan.

“…from the heights of the Celestial Mountains, I could [see], on a plain far away and further still to the east, the yellow dust of the Takla Makan desert. It was China, the fabulous country of which, since my childhood, I had dreamed.”

I almost cried to read these magical words – “China,” “Celestial Mountains.” Such a vision. but she couldn’t get to China. No visa could be had at that time and it was too dangerous. She explained,

“If I went on I should be arrested at the first Chinese village. Sadly I retraced my steps, turning my back on the limitless unknown that beckoned.”

But Ella Maillart was determined to get where she wanted to go. And there weren’t many places she didn’t go.

Ella Maillart’s Early Life

Ella was born in Geneva, Switzerland, in February 1903. She was the only child of a wealthy fur trader and his Danish wife. A sickly child, she spent her time reading adventure books and maps and she dreamed of travel. Her adventurous life began with learning how to sail, and she and her friend Hermine de Saussure won their first sailing race at age 13. From there, she went on to many more adventures.

According to Brian Fagan*, by the age of 30, she had:

• Taught French in a Welsh school
• Competed in a sailing competition in the 1924 Olympics (the only woman in the race)
• Acted on the stage in Paris
• Captained the Swiss women’s field hockey team
• Assisted at an archeological excavation in Crete
• Studied film production in Moscow
• Published a book about her walk through the Caucasus
• Ridden a camel across the desert in what is today Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

Sailing turned to skiing and she competed for the Swiss in four world championships from 1930 to 1934. At the end of the trip above, when she was turned back at the Chinese border, she continued to travel alone back to Europe, through the southern Soviet republics, without permits and avoiding checkpoints where she could have been jailed – or worse.

The trip to Russia and her walks through the Caucasus whetted her appetite for the Far East. Her first books, Among Russian Youth (1932) and Turkestan Solo (1932).

Forbidden Journey

By 1935 Ella was back in Asia, ready to tackle China again. She and English journalist Peter Fleming (brother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming) went from Beijing to Kashgar and India, back to the place where she had stopped three years earlier.

In Forbidden Journey, she tells the story of this journey. It’s just about the best travel writing I have read in a long time.

Ella wanted to get “as far as possible from the world of luxury hotels and stream-lined expresses,” and by this time she was an experienced traveler. When she and Peter first talked of traveling, he told her she could come with him.

She stopped him and replied, “I beg your pardon. It’s my route and it’s I who will take you, if I can think of some way in which you can be useful to me.” She knew the dangers of travel and took precautions against them. She was appalled at Peter’s lack of planning and his refusal to get the vaccine against the typhus that was rampant in China at that time. Ella said her two biggest worries while traveling were toothache and appendicitis; she had had a tooth filled by Austrian sisters before her latest trip.

They walked most of the time, lived in traditional Chinese hogans, and ate local food, including “to-fu” and with food “served in little heaps in which nothing is whole and entire.” The visited Kumbum monastery in eastern Tibet, as had Alexandra David-Neel a few years before. Ella was charmed by the colors of the place and the holy men who looked like “perambulating tulips.” They ate Tsamba, a Tibetan food made from toasted barley meal and buttered tea (I know it sounds gross, but it seems to be the only drink in Tibet.)

In central Asia, they traveled in caravan – 250 camels, 30 horses, and 80 humans. Every night Peter would say, “Sixty li’s (measure of distance) nearer to London.” Ella felt the opposite. She said,

“I was so completely absorbed in the life of the trail, …the life of the beasts, of the elements, it was as though I had always been living it.”

In the mountains, Peter’s eyes suffered from the extreme light. He had neglected to bring along goggles even though she had told him to. Their interactions became curter and their bantering not as nice. Peter thought she was too serious, and she didn’t understand his British humor. She wanted to understand the “thousands of diverse lives that make up humanity,” and he just wanted to get back to England.

on June 4, 109 days after leafing Peking, they came to Sinkiang (now Xinjiang province) in northwest China, home to many ethnic groups, including the Uyghur people (Muslims that are currently being persecuted by the Chinese). Their travel became even more monotonous, and Ella recited poetry over and over to herself to keep on going. The most exasperating thing about the journey was fleas. She had to “engage in mortal combat” with them almost every night.

During their trek through this part of China, they were stopped often by soldiers who asked for their papers.

There’s much more in Ella’s story, but I’ll stop here in the hope that you will be interested in reading it. On September 12, at 17,000 feet, they ended their trip in Kashmir, in India.

Ella was sad to say goodbye to the “careless life of the trail” and head back to Europe, where “shadows of war” were hovering.

She said,

‘Suddenly I understood something. I felt now, with all the strength of my senses and intelligence, that Paris, France, Europe, the White Race, were nothing….The something that counted in and against all particularisms was the magnificent scene of things that we call the world.”

Ella’s Later Life

Peter Fleming went back to England, married actress Celia Johnson later in 1935. He continued to explore and write about his adventures, including Brazilian Adventures (still in print). He died in 1971 at age 64.

Ella Maillart continued to travel, including trips to Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iran. In 1939 she traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan, but this trip was cut short by the start of World War II. During the war she was in India studying Hundu philosophy. She returned to Tibet in 1986, then retired to her home in Chandolin, Switzerland, a virtual recluse after so many years of adventuring. She died at age 94 in March, 1997.

Journalist Simon Schreyer calls her

“an ardent traveller, a bride of the wind and a storyteller, like the world had not seen before.” 

I agree. She lived life on her own terms, confident, at her own terms, and out loud.

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Sources:

Much information and all quotes are from Forbidden Journey

*Brian Fagan, From Stonehenge to Samarkand.

A complete biography is available on her website: http://www.ellamaillart.ch/bio_en.php

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Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive (a little) money if you buy a book from one of these links.