After reading Elizabeth Peters’ archaeological adventure, I decided to read a book on an actual archaeological expedition. So I picked up Agatha Christie’s ‘Come, Tell Me How You Live‘.
Agatha Christie’s husband was an archaeologist and so Agatha Christie frequently accompanied him on his expeditions helping him out, and sometimes using the expedition as a backdrop for one of her novels. Some of her friends asked her once what her day-to-day life was when she was on an expedition and to answer their question, Agatha Christie wrote this book. The expedition that Agatha Christie describes in the book happened in the 1930s in Syria. She describes how they surveyed different places, how they decided on the place where they can dig, how they hired people to work there, how everyday life was, how they managed food and water and what happened when someone was sick. She also describes the life of the local people and their culture and customs. I found her description on how Arab people and Kurdish people are different, very fascinating. I also found her description of the Yezidi people very fascinating. Agatha Christie says that the Yezidi people are devil worshippers and I found that very fascinating. She also describes a Yezidi temple that she visited. I didn’t know about the Yezidi people before. I want to read more on them.
Agatha Christie describes a Syria and a Middle East which was very different compared to how it is today. It was a different time, a charming, innocent time, which will never come again. There is one particular passage that I found very interesting. It went like this.
“An old man comes and sits down beside us. There is the usual long silence after greetings have been given.
Then he enquires courteously if we are French. German? English?
English!
He nods his head. “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.”
“A war?” says the old man, puzzled.
“A war that was fought twenty years ago.”
He reflects. “I do not remember a war…. Ah yes, about the time you mention, many ‘asker 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.”
Presently, after another long silence, he rises, bids us farewell politely, and is gone.”
This particular part was also very beautiful.
“There is a village there, and with Hamoudi as ambassador we try and obtain workmen. The men are doubtful and suspicious.
“We do not need money,” they say. “It has been a good harvest.”
For this is a simple and, I think, consequently a happy part of the world. Food is the only consideration. If the harvest is good, you are rich. For the rest of the year there is leisure and plenty, until the time comes to plough and sow once more.
“A little extra money,” says Hamoudi, like the serpent of Eden, “is always welcome.”
They answer simply : “But what can we buy with it? We have enough food until the harvest comes again.””
I found this passage also very beautiful.
“Accustomed as we are to our Western ideas of the importance of life, it is difficult to adjust our thoughts to a different scale of values. And yet to the Oriental mind it is simple enough. Death is bound to come – it is as inevitable as birth, whether it comes early or late is entirely at the will of Allah. And that belief, that acquiescence, does away with what has become the curse of our present-day world – anxiety. There may not be freedom from want, but there is certainly freedom from fear. And idleness is a blessed and natural state – work is the unnatural necessity.”
I loved ‘Come, Tell Me How You Live’. It was very different from what I expected. It brought back a bygone time and it was very beautiful. There might be an occasional sentence or passage here and there which might offend our 21st century sensibilities, but the book was beautiful and charming and it had a fascinating cast of characters who were all likeable. I loved Agatha Christie’s humour too.
Towards the end of the book, Agatha Christie says this –
“For 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…. Writing this simple record has been not a task, but a labour of love. 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!
For I love that gentle fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life, who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners, and a great sense of humour, and to whom death is not terrible.
Inshallah, I shall go there again, and the things that I love shall not have perished from this earth….”
When we leave the book, we can’t help but echo the exact same sentiments…
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite pages from the book. It is long, and so I apologize in advance. Do make yourself a cup of coffee or hot tea and hope you enjoy reading it.
“I am struck as often before by the fundamental difference of race. Nothing could differ more widely than the attitude of our two chauffeurs to money. Abdullah lets hardly a day pass without clamouring for an advance of salary. If he had had his way he would have had the entire amount in advance, and it would, I rather imagine, have been dissipated before a week was out. With Arab prodigality Abdullah would have splashed it about in the coffee-house. He would have cut a figure! He would have ‘made a reputation for himself’.
Aristide, the Armenian, has displayed the greatest reluctance to have a penny of his salary paid him. “You will keep it for me, Khwaja, until the journey is finished. If I want money for some little expense I will come to you.” So far he has demanded only four pence of his salary – to purchase a pair of socks!
His chin is snow adorned by a sprouting beard, which makes him look quite a Biblical figure. It is cheaper, he explains, not to shave. One saves the money one might have to spend on a razor blade. And it does not matter here in the desert.
At the end of the trip Abdullah will be penniless once more, and will doubtless be again adorning the water-front of Beyrout, waiting with Arab fatalism for the goodness of God to provide him with another job. Aristide will have the money he has earned untouched. “And what will you do with it?” Max asks him.
“It will go towards buying a better taxi,” replies Aristide.
“And when you have a better taxi?”
“Then I shall earn more and have two taxis.”
I can quite easily foresee returning to Syria in twenty years’ time, and finding Aristide the immensely rich owner of a large garage, and probably living in a big house in Beyrout. And even then, I dare say, he will avoid shaving in the desert because it saves the price of a razor blade.
And yet, Aristide has not been brought up by his own people. One day, as we pass some Beduin, he is hailed by them, and cries back to them, waving and shouting affec- tionately.
“That,” he explains, “is the Anaizah tribe, of whom I am one.”
“How is that?” Max asks.
And then Aristide, in his gentle, happy voice, with his quiet, cheerful smile, tells the story. The story of a little boy of seven, who with his family and other Armenian families was thrown by the Turks alive into a deep pit. Tar was poured on them and set alight. His father and mother and two brothers and sisters were all burnt alive. But he, was below them all, was still alive when the Turks left, and he was found later by some of the Anaizah Arabs. They took the little boy with them and adopted him into the Anaizah tribe. He was brought up as an Arab, wandering with them over their pastures. But when he was eighteen he went into Mosul, and there demanded that papers be given him to show his nationality. He was an Armenian, not an Arab! Yet the blood brotherhood still holds, and to members of the Anaizah he still is one of them.”
Have you read ‘Come, Tell Me How You Live’? What do you think about it?
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