[Leica] Railway tunnels on the Rhine

[douglas.sharp at gmx.de (Douglas Sharp)]

No Larry,

as far as I know they used to be giants, but today are a bunch of 
dwarves in the state of Hesse in the service of a benevolent magician 
from Austria :-)

BTW: did you hear the true story about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and 
the 7 dwarves of Snow White fame?

Hamelin's kids were marched off and disappeared into a cave and were 
never seen again after their parents were unable to pay the piper.

There's quite a parallel to what really happened in the middle ages - in 
times of poverty, for example when rats destroyed stored foodstuffs, 
parents sold their children to work in the lead and silver mines of the 
Harz mountains - a short march over 7 hills from Hamelin (the seven 
hills behind which Snow White was the fairest in the land) -  very few 
of them ever came back.

The 7 dwarves described in that story pretty well match the appearance 
of children who have spent a life bent double in the dark and poisoned 
by lead, arsenic and antimony dust in the mines. Old people in that job 
were usually around 25 at the most.

Aren't fairytales just wonderful ;-)

Cheers
Douglas



On 22.02.2010 23:01, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:
> Doug Sharp writes:
>
> "There are many tunnel portals on the Rhine (and elsewhere, like in
>
> Switzerland, Austria, the UK) that were built to look like castles,
>
> however, these were almost all built in the 19th century, the last ones
>
> actually in around 1914, and mostly for decorative reasons."
>
>
> Thanks Doug. My source was a tour guide from Austria on a Rhine riverboat.
> You know of course that tour guides never exaggerate or lie for the sale of
> bigger tips. It is against the tour guide oath. Thanks for correcting me. I
> guess that Leicas aren't made by elves in the Black Forest either.
>
> Larry Z
>
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