Adventure classics – A joy to live those days between wars

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

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It was spring 1944 as Agatha Christie (in a rare use of the name of her second husband, Max Mallowan ) wrote the epilogue to Come, Tell Me How You Live, the memoir of her time as an archaeologist’s wife in the Middle East. She began it before World War II, laid it aside for years, and at last took it up again, writing, “. . . it seems to me that it is good to remember that there were such days and such places, and that at this very minute my little hill of marigolds is in bloom, and old men with white beards trudging behind their donkeys may not even know there is a war.”

So after years of war (with more than another year still to go), she took up the writing again. She could remember with both nostalgia and humor the travails of the years she and Max spent on excavations in Syria and Iraq.

There were the plagues of mice (dealt with by “a very professional cat”); the excavation’s top-heavy lorry (christened Queen Mary) and prone to getting mud-bound when seasonal rains wash out roads; the local forms of entertainment (“there is to be a hanging,” their foreman said, “a woman…who has poisoned three husbands! Surely (you) would not like to miss that!”).

Agatha fears her refusal to attend the hanging costs her a great deal in status, as does her insistence on not having the sheep that will constitute dinner slaughtered in plain sight of their house.

And although she considers herself handy at washing excavated artifacts and developing photographs, and dealing out first aid, her writings get no respect. And no wonder. Because after a workman proud of his rare literacy writes a note on an empty cigarette packet that another man has been drowned, the unlucky packet finds its way to the supposed dead man’s home village, prompting the arrival of “a great cavalcade of mourners”, the man whose rumors of death were so greatly exaggerated attacks the literate one. Max docks the supposed dead man a day’s pay for fighting, sentences the prankster to walk the 40 kilometers to the not yet dead man’s village to explain and apologize, and docks him two days’ pay.

“And the real moral is—Max points out afterwards to his own select circle—what very dangerous things reading and writing are!” she writes ruefully.

Perhaps most of all, she remembers an old man (one of those who seemed to arrive out of nowhere as if in a fairy tale) who arrives and after a long silence, “inquires courteously if we are French. German? English?. . . ‘Is it the English this country belongs to now? I cannot remember. I know it is no longer the Turks.’

“‘No,’ we say; ‘the Turks have not been here since the war.’

“‘Ah yes, about the time you mention, many (soldiers) went to and fro over the railway. That, then was the war? We did not realize it was a war. It did not touch us here.’”

“After four years spent in London in war-time, I know what a very good life that was, and it has been a joy and refreshment to me to live those days again…not an escape to something that was, but the bringing into the hard work and sorrow of today of something imperishable that one not only had but still has!…Inshallah, I shall go there again, and the things that I love shall not have perished from this earth…”

(The illustration for today’s post is reproduced from a photograph by World War I Australian Expeditionary Force member Eric Keast Burke and published in The National Geographic Magazine April 1922.)

(Next Friday Adventure classics begins a February of animal adventures with A Dog of Flanders, by Marie Louise de la Ramee, writing as “Ouida”.)

Adventure classics – How do you know where to dig?

Come, Tell Me How You Live, by Agatha Christie Mallowan

Throw Me a Bone, by Eleanor Lothrop

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There’s an element of melancholy even under the self-deprecating humor of memoirs by women who helped lost civilizations to light, Come, Tell Me How You Live, by Agatha Christie (using a rare instance of her second husband’s name, Mallowan), and Eleanor Lothrop’s Throw Me a Bone. From Christie Mallowan’s viewpoint in the Middle East, Lothrop’s in Central and South America, major civilizations have vanished almost without a trace beneath desert or jungle.

“People are always saying, ‘How did you happen to know just where to dig? Your husband must be psychic.’ As if it were magic that leads an archaeologist instinctively to the right spot,” Lothrop writes in her 1948 memoir of adventures with American archaeologist husband, Sam Lothrop.

“Unfortunately it’s not that easy; as a rule tedious and hard work is necessary…your best bet is to chase directly after the men who farm the land, for in ploughing or tilling they are apt to turn up remains of another era.” It’s still not an easy job, as Lothrop demonstrates with the following questionnaire sample:

Q. “Have you done any ploughing or digging around here?”

A. “Yes.”

Q. “By any chance have you come across any ancient skeletons or pottery or ornaments?”

A. “No.”

Q. “Do you know anyone who has?”

A. “No.”

Except that, after a similarly disappointing session at one farmstead, Sam notices a pig eating from a delicately painted prehistoric bowl. “‘What’s that?’ he asks, trying to control his excitement.” The answer, delivered with a pitying look: a pig. “‘I mean what is he eating out of?’” The answer, no doubt given even more pityingly: a pot. Soon, however, the farmer discloses that the pot came from a nearby field, and the Lothrops are on their way.

Christie Mallowan has a similar take of the sites chosen by her second husband, Max Mallowan, for his excavations in Syria and Iraq.

“Here, where nowadays only the tribesmen move with their brown tents…were the beginnings of civilization, and here, picked up by me, this broken fragment of a clay pot, hand-made, with a design of dots and cross-hatching in black paint, is the forerunner of the Woolworth cup out of which this very morning I have drunk my tea…I sort through the collection of sherds which are bulging the pockets of my coat (I have already had to mend the lining twice), throwing away duplicate types, and see what I can offer…”

Of course, the sherds must meet Max’s time table before a spot can even be considered for excavation. He disdains any artifacts from, oh, say, the last two thousand years, “intrusive Roman” stuff in his eyes. But he, like Sam Lothrop, his colleague of a hemisphere away, finds himself credited sometimes with psychic powers.

When a well dug at the Mallowans turns out to have been the exact site of a more ancient one, villagers in need of water flock to Max. “The secrets of antiquity are to you an open book,” they say. “Therefore, indicate to us the right places to dig…”

None of Max’s protestations of a chance finding are believed. Of course the original well would have to have been what he called “a beastly Roman well.” One more strike in his eyes against those all too modern imperialists.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes a January of true adventures with the Mallowans and Lothrops.)

Adventure classics – Adventures of 'le camping' in the desert

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

***

Last Friday’s post left Agatha Christie and her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan leaving Palmyra. But those lovely Roman-era ruins are far too modern for Max, whose mind, as Christie notes in her introductory poem, was attuned “to far B.C.” But before the Mallowans depart the first century CE for circa 3,000 BCE, they encounter some of those hangers-on of archaeology, tourists. Specifically, French tourists who need a ride back to their hotel after the breakdown of their taxi, and whose high-heeled ladies are unable to make the trip on foot.

While gallant Max returns to the hotel to fetch the Mallowans’ rented car, Agatha makes small talk.

“The French ladies profess a charming interest in our journeyings,” she writes in her 1946 memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live. “‘Ah, Madame, vois faites le camping?’ I am fascinated by the phrase. Le camping! It classes our adventure definitely as a sport.”

It is a phrase she comes both to love and to rue, as the adventures come to include scourges of mice, fleas and cockroaches; the company of their Armenian driver Aristide who was rescued and adopted by an Arab tribe while escaping the World War I era genocide of his people; and encounters strange, comic or tragic.

The Mallowans’ first visits to Iraq and Syria are made in autumn to scout potential excavation sites for the following spring. Mallowan has three requirements for a dig: it needs proximity to villages where he can hire labor and to water (not to be taken for granted in a desert). And most important, it has to be of the right era. Of the hundreds of “tells” – artificial mounds indicating the places of ruined and buried cities dotting the Syrian and Iraqi deserts – he passes over any he considers too recent, i.e., within the past two millennium or so. Even sites with more ancient strata don't make the cut if their oldest layers are too deeply buried under more modern debris – the cost of excavating will simply be too high.

They are indeed camping, setting up their tents nightly, including a never-to-be forgotten night of rain and wind. "the wind rises to a gale, the rain is lashing down," Christie writes. "Aristide runs in to say he thinks the tents are coming down. We all rush out in the rain. It dawns on me that I am now going to see the seamy side of le camping.”

And then there are the people, who often appear seemingly out of nowhere like figures from a fairy tale, such as the very old man with “a long white beard and ineffable dignity…He sits down beside us. There is a long silence—that courteous silence of good manners that is so restful after Western haste.” After asking Max’s name: “‘Milwan…How light! How bright! How beautiful,’” he leaves. The Mallowans never see him again.

More tragic is the mother who comes to their camp begging for medicine to cure her son who “has not his proper senses.” The child’s mental disability is all too obvious, and Max tells her gently that there is no medicine that can help the boy. “The woman sighs—I think a tear runs down her cheek.” Then she asks Max for poison “‘for it is better that he should not live.’” This request too must be refused as gently as possible.

I suspect the fate of this mother and child especially weighed on Agatha. Much later, she would use the trope of a mentally disabled child and a mother’s revenge by poison in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (published in the US under the shortened title, The Mirror Crack’d).

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie Mallowan’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.)