THE
TOWN THAT ISN'T THERE
An Orient Express Mystery Poirot Never Solved
Train
journey murder-mystery tours have become very popular, perhaps inspired
by a certain mystery novel with a fastidious Belgian detective. Riding
the Swiss Rail train across the Swiss-Italian
border,
winding up the long grade toward Brig, you travel the tracks followed
by the Simplon line of the legendary Orient Express of literary and
movie
fame. Change trains at Brig or Visp on the Matterhorn-Gotthard Bahn
line to Zermatt, the route of the Glacier
Express where it climbs along sections of cogwheel track
up the steep valley and the track path has made a change since the
romantic golden days when
Hercule
Poirot
unearthed
the intricate
plot
of a dozen
murderers (see Matterhorn
Gotthard Bahn).
As
you pass along the slope of a long deep valley, the rail track curves
sharply away from the
mountainside passing around a cascaded pile of crumbled stone
and high in the canyon gap above, a wall of white clings between the
rock
crags like the glass sharp edge of the broken end of a popsicle. The
pile of stone is where a Swiss Alpine village once stood. The jagged
white above
is the sheer terminus of a glacier. One heavy winter the snow was too
much for the mountain to hold and an avalanche of ice brought down
the ancient
mountainside rock, burying the entire village and it’s sleeping
inhabitants. Gone in an instant. I wonder if Poirot could get Mother
Nature to confess
to this mass murder. © Bargain
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SEE ALSO:
GORNERGRAT BAHN
WALLISERHOF CHALET HOTEL - ZERMATT
JUNGFRAUJOCH
