Adventure on the Nile, by Cathy Pickens

A week ago, I returned home from an interesting journey, one that didn’t, on the surface, have anything to do with mystery writing. I traveled to Cairo and Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, with a group of graduate business students.

Naturally, part of my trip preparation included re-reading Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile.

I had looked forward to exploring countries and cultures very different from my beloved Carolinas , and I certainly found the exotic – pyramids and camels and a tiny nation-city in overdrive to capture the title of World’s Largest/Tallest/Biggest/Best everything, from tallest building to biggest dinosaur park to highest population of people who aren’t from there.

Photo: Burj Dubai, world's tallest building.

What I wasn’t completely prepared for were the similarities.

I knew that in progressive Egypt, women were once again resuming the veil they’d thrown off decades ago. I also knew that in Dubai, a more conservative country making concessions to draw foreign visitors and investment, I’d see women in full gallabiyya.

What I didn’t expect to see were five black-clad young women in the Dubai airport, slight and graceful, like a flock of blackbirds swaying around the counter at … McDonald’s, yep, the Golden Arches. Ordering McArabia meals, with fries and Cokes. I'm not kidding.

I expected to visit the Mall of the Emirates, an elegant shopping mall that could sit in Atlanta or Richmond or Charlotte – except it dwarfs anything in those cities and boasts its own indoor ski slope.

I didn’t expect to see copies of my books in the Borders store (wow!) or to stand in line at Baskin-Robbins with a woman in a full black gallabiyya edged in rhinestones … and wearing Gucci sunglasses and Jimmy Choo stilettos.

We share other things besides fries, Co’Cola, ice cream, and an affinity for shiny rhinestones. In business settings, a Middle Eastern man waits until a woman proffers her hand before offering a handshake. Didn’t your mama teach you that, too?

Women hold high government offices in both countries, including the ministries of finance. But we also share an odd schizophrenia about women in leadership. Women are to be gentle and ladylike, but they can also be in charge. No easier to figure out the rules in their country than in ours.

In Egypt, as in the South, they value hospitality and friendliness. They welcome those who are interested in their culture, and they are warm hosts. In Dubai, 85% of the people who live there come from somewhere else. Interesting to consider what that must be like for their culture. Unlike the South, though, they have strict visa requirements. Many of those workers can stay no longer than two years and must wait five years before they can return.

Cairo driving reminded me of a lickety-split, souped-up tear down a Southern Appalachian mountain road – except their roads are flat and very crowded. Regrefully, I only got to enjoy it vicariously, in a bus or black-and-white cab. The white lines denoting lanes are only suggestions. On a road marked with two lanes, as many as four or five cars would be running abreast.

Horns are constant. Not the rude, your-mama, I’m-gonna-cut-you-off horn honks common in some (Northern) cities here. No, these were polite little I’m here toots. Get over, please. I don’t mind bumping you if I have to. Stock-car racing legend Richard Petty (who once nudged a lady’s bumper on I-85 because she was cruising in the passing lane) would love it.

The best part, though, was trying to imagine Cairo as Agatha saw it early in the last century. Our hotel didn’t sit directly on the Nile, but it did open on a courtyard much like the one she describes. Families and foreign tourists and white-robed sheiks gathered in the cool evening breeze to the smell of fresh-baked pita and hubbly-bubbly pipes of flavored tobacco and to enjoy an evening that stretched late.

Those of you from the South need no explanation of the small can held by the fellow on the right. The photo is from the website of a couple of Alaskans who travel the world with their can of SPAM. Charlotte, apparently, has lost its seat as #1 city in per capita consumption. Ah, the never-ending struggle for supremacy …

I was entranced by the differences and surprised by the similarities – and not disappointed at all in the mysteries. Pull out your copy of Death on the Nile. Agatha captured its essence.

Agatha Christie Familiar -- Cathy Pickens

I took a break from cleaning closets – yes, I admit it, the lengths I’ll go to procrastinate when I should be writing really do know no bounds. I decided to treat myself to lunch at a new pizzeria so I could begin reading a new book I’d just gotten. Oh, what a jolly break to the end-of-the-year holidays, to read and not rush. Then I had to disturb all the others who’d come for lunch, causing some to wish they’d chosen another table at which to perch. One nearby couple decided to move to another seat.

I couldn’t help it, though. I started laughing. Out loud. At first, it was just a snicker, but after I read only a few more lines, it turned into an outright snort. Who knew Agatha Christie was so outrageously funny?

Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan (1946, reprinted 1974) is her memoir of digging with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan in the Syrian Desert. With the Middle East so much in the news, her tales of that time leap to life with names from the evening news. Her Epilogue was especially poignant; she talks about the war (World War II) keeping them home and how wartime London made her long for the primitive but beautiful digs in remote reaches.

But the start of the book was what prompted my giggles. Was it the jolt of recognition? Her author photos always show her comfortably padded in her English tweeds, solid and accomplished and … grand. How could the grand Dame herself have had the same experiences I’ve had while rummaging through closets?

From Chapter 1:

Shopping for a hot climate in autumn or winter presents certain difficulties. One’s last year’s summer clothes, which one has optimistically hoped will “do,” do not “do” now the time has come. For one thing they appear to be (like the depressing annotations in furniture removers’ lists) “Bruised, Scratched and Marked.” (And also Shrunk, Faded and Peculiar!) For another—alas, alas that one has to say it!—they are too tight everywhere.

So—to the shops and the stores, and:

“Of course, Modom, we are not being asked for that kind of thing just now! We have some very charming little suits here—O.S. [out-size] in the darker colours.”

Oh, loathsome O.S.! How humiliating to be O.S.! How even more humiliating to be recognized at once as O.S.!

(Although there are better days when, wrapped in a lean long black coat with a large fur collar, a saleswoman says cheeringly: “But surely Modom is only a Full Woman?”)

Alas, indeed, to have clothes that one reserved for just such a future excursion come out of the closet looking … Peculiar. And how loathsome to be a size(s) larger than you rightfully should be, despite all the exercise during the holidays and all the resolutions dutifully kept from last year.

Then there was Agatha’s tale of her new Zip traveling bag, which had all the inherent defections she’d feared in zippers, and how long it took to decide what books to carry on the trip, and her husband hanging about wanting to put some of his books into her suitcase because he had to remove them from his in order to fit in the barest number of shirts and underpants and socks.

(Okay, I confess. I’m the one who sneaks books into my husband’s suitcase when he’s not looking. He always has plenty of room. But I know I’m not the only one who spends more time deciding what books to take than what to wear.)

Then Agatha encountered a Turkish border guard who cross-examined her at length about the number of shoes she’d brought on board the Orient Express. Who knew Agatha had a shoe fetish? (Okay, that would be my sister’s and my best friend’s favorite fetish – but who knew it was Agatha’s? She seems so … sensible.)

Is that what’s kept her mysteries so alive, so relevant despite vast changes in the world? That Dame Agatha was really, at the heart of it all, just one of us? True, reading the book delayed me from finishing the closet cleaning, but I eventually gave away stacks of clothes. Other folks will enjoy them, and I no longer have to worry about why they don’t quite work the way I remembered.

I have, however, avoided the mall and any clothes shopping and a chance encounter with a clerk who identifies me immediately as the size I am rather than the size I’d like to be. I’d rather write than face that.

Hope you have a stack of new books to read for the new year – and go ahead, laugh out loud.