They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [101]
One day I was taken to see Buffalo Town, which you can still see from the train as you come into Baghdad from the north. To the uninitiated eye it looks a place of horror—a slum, a vast enclosure full of buffaloes and their excreta. The stench is terrific, and the shacks made of petrol cans lead one to believe that it is an extreme example of poverty and degradation. Actually this is far from being the case. Owners of buffaloes are very well to do. Although they may live in squalor, a buffalo is worth £100 or more—probably far more nowadays. The owners of them consider themselves lucky people, and as the women squelch about in the mud, handsome bracelets of silver and turquoise can be seen decorating their ankles.
I learnt soon enough that nothing in the Near East is what it appears to be. One’s rules of life and conduct, observation and behavior, have all to be reversed and relearnt. When you see a man gesticulating at you violently to go away, you retreat rapidly—actually he is inviting you to approach .On the other hand, if he beckons you, he is telling you to go away. Two men at opposite ends of the field, yelling fiercely at each other, would appear to be threatening each other with sudden death. Not at all. They are two brothers passing the time of day, and raising their voices because they are too lazy to approach each other. My husband Max once told me that he had determined on his first visit, shocked at the way everybody shouted at Arabs, that he would never shout at them. However, before he had been working long with the workmen he discovered that any remark uttered in an ordinary tone of voice was unheard—not so much through deafness as a belief that anyone talking like that was talking to himself, and that any man who really wished to make a remark would take the trouble to make it in a loud enough voice for you to hear.
The people of Alwiyah offered me charming hospitality. I played tennis, I drove to races, I was shown sights, taken to shop—and I felt that I might just as well be in England. Geographically I might be in Baghdad, spiritually I was in England still; and my idea of travelling had been to get away from England and see other countries. I decided that something must be done.
I wanted to visit Ur. I made inquiries and was delighted to find that here I was encouraged, not rebuffed.
…I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and the wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colors of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute. I enjoyed the workmen, the foremen, the little basket-boys, the pickmen—the whole technique and life. The lure of the past came up to grab me. To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand was romantic. The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself. How unfortunate it was, I thought, that I had always led such a frivolous life. And it was then that I remembered with deep shame how in Cairo as a girl my mother had tried to persuade me to go to Luxor and Aswan to see the past glories of Egypt, and how I had wanted only to meet young men and dance till the small hours of the morning. Well, I suppose there is a time for everything.
Katharine Woolley and her husband7 urged me to stay one more day and see more of the excavations, and I was only too delighted to agree. My bearer, wished upon me by Mrs. C., was completely unnecessary. Katharine Woolley directed him to return to Baghdad and say that my day of return was still unsure. In that way I hoped to return unnoticed by my former kind hostess, and establish myself firmly in the Tigris Palace Hotel (if that was its name at the moment—it has