Going to the “holy shrine of Sheikh Adi … situated in the Kurdish hills near Mosul”, described last year as “hell on earth” in a Guardian piece, she writes that “there can be, I think, no spot in the world so beautiful or so peaceful”. My aching head and eyes made it more than ever seem a feverish delusion! It isn’t - it can’t be – real.” It has always for me the dreamlike quality of that first vision. Courts and temples and ruined columns … I have never been able to decide what I really think of Palmyra. “It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream. “After seven hours of heat and monotony and a lonely world – Palmyra! That, I think, is the charm of Palmyra – its slender creamy beauty rising up fantastically in the middle of hot sand,” she writes. More than 70 years ago, Christie recorded her arrival at Palmyra, her usually light tone giving way to one of genuine emotion. Photograph: © Agatha Christie Mallowan 1946/PR Car aboard the ‘Queen Mary’ on the Euphrates during Christie’s Syrian trip.
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