Come, Tell Me How You Live!

So this week has been full and busy, but I've managed to squeeze some time in to read the book "Come, Tell Me How You Live" by Agatha Christie Mallowan

I will go into a more indepth description in a later post, but I enjoyed the poem at the beginning which I'm going to share with you below.

A-Sitting On A Tell
(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)
I'll tell you everything I can
If you will listen well:
I met an erudite young ma
A-sitting on a Tell.
"Who are you, sir?" to him I said,
"For what is it you look?"
His answer trickled through my head
Like bloodstains in a book.

He said: "I look for aged pots
Of prehistoric days,
And then I measure them in lots
And lots of different ways.
And then (like you) I start to write,
My words are twice as long
As yours, and far more erudite.
They prove my colleagues wrong!"

His accents mild were full of wit:
"Five thousand years ago
Is really, when I think of it,
The choicest Age I know.
And once you learn to scorn A.D.
And you have got the knack,
Then you could come and dig with me
And never wander back."

I was thinking how to thrust
Some arsenic into tea,
And could not all at once adjust
My mind so far B.C.
I looked at him and softly sighed,
His face was pleasent too....
"Come, tell me how you live?" I cried,
"And what it is you do?"

He said: "I hunt for objects made
By men where'er they roam,
I photograph and catalogue
And pack and send them home.
These things we do not sell for gold
(Not yet, indeed, for copper),
But place them on Museum shelves
As only right and proper.

"I sometimes dig up amulets
And figurines most lewd,
For in those prehistoric days
They were extremely rude!
And that's the way we take our fun,
'Tis not the way of wealth.
But archaeologists live long
And have the rudest health."

I heard him then, for I had just
Completed a design
To keep a body free from dust
By boiling it in brine.
I thanked him much for telling me
With so much erudition,
And said that I would go with him
Upon an Expedition.....

And now, if e'er by chance I dip
My fingers into acid,
Or smash some pottery (with slip!)
Because I'm not placid,
Or if I see a river flow
And hear a fall-off yell,
I sigh, for it reminds me so
Of that young man I learned to know -

Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow,
Whose thoughts were in the long ago,
Whose pockets sagged with potshards so,
Who lectured learnedly and low,
Who used long words I didn't know,
Whose eyes, with fervour all a-glow,
Upon the ground looked to and fro,
Who sought conclusively to show
That there were things I ought to know
And that with him I ought to go
And dug upon a Tell!