Adventure classics – No love for fleas among the ruins

Throw Me a Bone, by Eleanor Lothrop

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

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In near synchronicity with the publication of Agatha Christie Mallowan’s memoir of her archaeological adventures with husband Max Mallowan, Come, Tell Me How You Live, another archaeological wife on the other side of the world told her story. Eleanor Lothrop demonstrated a sense of humor to rival Agatha’s in her 1948 memoir, Throw Me a Bone, about her adventures of the 1920’s through 1930’s with American archaeologist husband, Samuel Lothrop.

The early 20^th century was still a time when women often could only enter archaeology in partnership with their husbands, but both Christie (in a rare use of her married name Mallowan) and Lothrop don’t waste time or ink complaining. Instead, both books brim with zest for all things archaeological. All things, that is, except fleas. Admittedly, cockroaches, mice and snakes were not among their favorite companions while camping at desert sites in the Middle East or (in Lothrop’s case) South American jungles. But the worst of these were fleas.

“At the time I met my then future husband,” Lothrop writes, “I led right off with the Acropolis, the Forum and King Tut and was started when my companion, rudely interrupting, said, ‘I am an American archaeologist.’

She answers, “‘I know the Lothrops come from Boston. So what?’ But it seems I had missed the point. An American archaeologist, it was explained, in an archaeologist who specializes in the archaeology of the Americas—North, Central and South.”

Despite this inauspicious start, Sam soon proposes marriage and they are off on what she thinks is a honeymoon in Chile. It turns out to be the start of an expedition to a tiny port town which can only be reached by boat, in this case, a cattle boat which Eleanor realizes too late is infested with fleas. (And whose illustration, without fleas, illustrates today’s post.)

“‘What do you expect on a cattle boat?’” Sam asks, with maddening realism.

It’s a pity Eleanor and Agatha hadn’t been able to compare notes.

“We are to suffer a good deal from fleas,” Agatha writes in Come, Tell Me How You Live. “It is not…so much the bites of fleas. It is their tireless energy, their never-ending hopping races round and round one’s middle that wears one out. Impossible to drop off to sleep when fleas are holding nightly sports round and round the waist.”

Even stoic Max (who once informed her that she wouldn’t notice mice running over her face if she was asleep) suffers from fleas.

“One day I find and kill one hundred and seven in the band of his pyjamas!…It would appear that I only get the overflow of fleas—the ones, that is, which have not been able to take up their abode on Max. Mine are second-class, inferior fleas, ineligible for the high jumps!”

And yet, they keep coming back for more. “Each time we wind up an archaeological trip,” Lothrop writes, “I look forward to the same things. No scratching. Lying in bed late, soaking in a hot bath. Plumbing. Ice water and fresh milk. Raw celery and lettuce. Plumbing. Movies and theatres. Plumbing!

“And what happens? About a month of these delights and I get restless. It never fails. Sam comes home from work, sinks into a comfortable chair in his comfortable bugless apartment and tries to appear ecstatically happy.…I usually say it first. ‘This is the life! It’s wonderful; no doubt about it. But when oh when are we going where?’”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with the Mallowans and Lothrops. For more about early women in archaeology, I liked Amanda Adams’ Ladies of the Field, which I also reviewed at Goodreads and Amazon.)

Adventure classics – From ghosts to ancient tombs

“The Phantom Coach”

by Amelia Edwards

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Ghosts were for writers in the Victorian era what vampires are in the 21^st century – a source of bread and butter. The often cheesy Christmas annuals published late in the year were the Victorian equivalent of chia pets – holiday gifts for the totally clueless giver. Except instead of chia seeds, the annuals demanded stories, lots and lots of stories, to fill them. Strange though it may seem, those stories often included ghosts, the unhallowed dead earning their keep by providing holiday cheer.

Male writers were willing to supply the Christmas annual market, but it was also, aside from birthing babies, one of few creative outlets available to the increasingly educated, middle-class women writers of the era. And one of the best of those now almost forgotten women was Amelia Edwards.

Many of her counterparts of both sexes wrote not only as a creative outlet but out of desperate need to support their families. Edwards, however, was unmarried, childless and, after the death of her parents, without family ties. With only herself to provide for, her recognized talent (Dickens invited her to contribute to his Christmas annual) and energy enabled her to accumulate enough wealth to indulge a love for exotic travel. To that end, on November 29, 1873, at age 32, she and traveling companion Lucy Renshaw arrived in Cairo, “literally and most prosaically,” she wrote, “in search of fine weather.”

Fine weather, however, had been in short supply for the narrator of one of her most famous stories, 1864’s “The Phantom Coach.”

“Within a day or two of the end of the grouse season,” "Coach's" young barrister-at-law James Murray relates, “I had been out all day with my gun and had had no sport to speak of. The month (was) December, the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way.”

A snowstorm begins and night falls. Murray begins to fear he will walk aimlessly until he drops from exhaustion to freeze to death when the figure of an old man with a lantern appears out of the storm. Although the old man gruffly informs him that he will not be welcome, Murray insists on following him to his house. After a supper seasoned with tales of ghosts, the misanthropic host directs Murray to the nearest road where he can catch a mail coach to the nearest town.

Only, he is warned, he should watch for a signpost where one night nine years earlier, the coach tumbled off the road and into a ravine, killing all six men aboard.

As the night grows colder, a vehicle approaches. Murray steps inside, to an atmosphere, which was “colder than that of the outside air, and was pervaded by a singularly damp and disagreeable smell. . . ” .His ride with the death coach's doomed passengers has begun.

Widely anthologized, “The Phantom Coach” is also available at http://gutenberg.net/au/ebooks06/0605591.txt and on YouTube.

Edwards, meanwhile, found Egypt an equally fascinating source of creativity, as Amanda Adams details in her Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists and Their Search for Adventure. Edwards’ infatuation with Egypt would lead to the writing of her greatest writing, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, work as a co-founder of the Egypt Exploration Society and mentorship of rising young Egyptologist Flinders Petrie.

Fans of the Egyptian mystery tales of the late archaeologist Barbara Mertz (writing as Elizabeth Peters) will enjoy the many similarities between Mertz’s heroine Amelia Peabody and Edwards, from their first names to the name of their Egyptian houseboats, to their age on arriving in Egypt. But while Amelia Peabody found true love with a (fictional) archeologist, Amelia Edwards’ great love remained Egypt itself, her mission: bringing its ghosts back to life.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an October of horror with “The Open Window,” by H.H. Munro, writing as “Saki.”)