They came to Baghdad - Agatha Christie [102]
This plan did not come off, because Mrs. C.’s wretched husband had been sent to meet the train from Ur every day. However, I disposed of him quite easily. I thanked him enormously, said how kind his wife had been, but that I really felt it was better for me to go to the hotel, and that I had already made arrangements there. So he drove me there. I settled myself in, thanked Mr. C. once more, and accepted an invitation to tennis in three or four days’ time. In this way I escaped from the thralldom of social life in the English manner. I was no longer a Mem-Sahib. I had become a tourist.
The hotel was not at all bad. You passed first into deep gloom: a big lounge and dining-room, with curtains permanently drawn. On the first floor there was a kind of veranda all round the bedrooms, from where, as far as I could see, anyone going by could look in and pass the time of day with you as you lay in bed. One side of the hotel gave on to the river Tigris, which was a dream of delight, with the ghufas and various boats on the river. At meal-times you went down into the sirdab of complete darkness with very weak electric lights. Here you had several meals in one; course after course, all bearing a strange resemblance to each other—large lumps of fried meat and rice; hard, little potatoes; tomato omelettes, rather leathery; immense pale cauliflowers; and so on, ad lib.
The Howes, that pleasant couple who had set me off on my voyage, had given me one or two introductions. These I valued as not being social ones: they were to people whom they themselves had found it well worth while to meet, and who had shown them some of the more interesting parts of the city. Baghdad, in spite of the English life of Alwiyah, was the first really oriental city I had ever seen—and it was oriental. You could turn off Rashid Street and wander down the narrow little alleyways, and so into different suqs: the copper suq, with the copper-smiths beating and hammering; or the piled up spices of all kinds in the spice suq.
One of the Howes’ friends, an Anglo-Indian, Maurice Vickers, who led, I think, a rather solitary life, proved a good friend to me also. He took me to see the golden domes of Kadhimain from an upper room; he led me to different parts of the suq—not those you usually see—and he drove me to the potters’ quarters and many other places. We went for walks down to the river through palm-groves and date gardens. Perhaps I appreciated more what he talked about than what he showed me. It was from him that I first learnt to think of time—something I had never thought of before; never impersonally, that is. But for him time, and the relationships of time, were of particular significance.
‘Once you think of time and infinity, personal things will cease to affect you in the same way. Sorrow, suffering, all the finite things of life, show in an entirely different perspective.’
He asked me if I had ever read Dunne’s Experiment with Time .I had not. He lent it to me, and from that moment I realise that something happened to me—not a change of heart, not quite a change of outlook, but somehow I saw things more in proportion; myself less large; as only one facet of a whole, in a vast world with hundreds of inter-connections. Every now and then one could be aware of oneself existing. It was all crude and amateurish to begin with, but I did feel from that moment onwards a great sensation of comfort and a truer knowledge of serenity than I had ever obtained before. It is to Maurice Vickers that I am grateful for that introduction to a wider view of life. He had a large library of books, philosophy and otherwise, and was, I think, a remarkable young man. Sometimes I wondered whether we should ever meet again. But I think on the whole I was satisfied that we should not. We had been ships that pass in the night. He had handed me a gift that I had accepted; the kind of gift that I had never had before, since it was a gift from the intellect—from the mind, not just from the heart.
I did not have much