Who murdered the real Orient Express? Not even Hercule Poirot could solve this mystery
“It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. It consisted of a kitchen and dining-car, a sleeping-car and two local coaches.” So Agatha Christie began “Murder on the Orient Express”.
Abdelhamid began with Islam’s holy sites. With the help of Christian and Jewish entrepreneurs, he cut a line from the Mediterranean through Judea’s limestone hills to Jerusalem. It deposited its first load of pilgrims opposite the al-Aqsa mosque in 1892. Eight years later, he commissioned a track 15 times longer linking Damascus, the traditional starting point of the, or Muslim pilgrimage, to Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad is buried.
Seventy years later the tracks that joined continents lie in wreckage. From Morocco to Iraq not a single train crosses borders. Rusting carriages and engine hulks litter the sands. Cypress trees sprout between Lebanon’s lines. Rails were smelted into bullets like ploughshares into swords. Sleepers reinforced trench walls, and stations and repair yards became barracks and prisons. As in the murder on the Orient Express, the network fell victim to multiple blows.
The investigation into Lawrence reveals other leads. Many of his Bedouin recruits hated the Hijaz line for breaking their monopoly on transporting pilgrims and grain. “Jahash al-Sultan,” they called it, the Sultan’s donkey. It brought foreign mores, too, that disturbed time-honoured codes. Under the puritanical Al Saud dynasty, the Bedouin ripped up tracks from their new border to Medina.
The dismantlement continued with Israel’s independence in 1948. Israel blew up the bridge at Rosh HaNikra to cut off Beirut and plugged the tunnel through the South Lebanon hills, severing the line that linked Europe to Africa. The Israeli government also dissolved the Palestine Railway Company and dismissed many non-Jewish workers.
For years, Agatha Christie’s Express was the stubborn survivor. The leg to Baghdad folded in the 1980s, but the night train from Aleppo to Turkey limped on. Then came Syria’s civil war in 2011. It terminated all but a fraction of Syria’s 2,450km of track. The platform still stands in Aleppo where Christie’s “Murder” began, but her route east to Iraq was damaged in the bombardment of Islamic State. Mosul station was destroyed. The Arab Union of Railways dissolved in 2016.
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