Christie on the Jaghjagha

COME, TELL ME HOW YOU LIVE (225 pp.) -- Agatha Christie Mallowan --Dodd, Mead ($3).

The local knowledge of the Near East shown in several of Agatha Christie's thrillers (Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile) was acquired at firsthand, as her first travel book now proves. It is a breezy, completely unsinister tale of a couple of winters she spent before the war in Syria, where her husband, Archaeologist Max Mallowan of the British Museum, went to dig.

Jouncing in & out of wadis (valleys) in a locally built truck, the Mallowans scouted for Chaldean 600 B.C. tells (mounds) near the Habur and Jaghjagha rivers. To her consternation, Mrs. Mallowan was drafted as a gynecologist by the Arab women. Reports amateur gynecologist Mallowan: "The commonest gesture is an expressive rubbing of the abdomen. This has one of two meanings: a) acute indigestion, b) a complaint of sterility. Bicarbonate of soda does excellent work in the first case and has attained a somewhat surprising reputation in the second."

In the course of recounting her adventures, Author Christie tells a good deal about Syria, about archaeology, and about herself. Christie fans will find some clues to the origin of various matters in her mystery stories of the period. There is, for example, the gentle cult of the Yezidis, some of whom are hired as diggers. They worship Shaitan (Satan), whom they believe God has placed in charge of the world. No Christie reader will fail to recognize the prototype of Mr. Shaitana, a curiously devilish figure in Christie's Cards on the Table.

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