The Yellow Train

By Roon Lewald

Historic names and events in this autobiographical story are essentially unchanged, except for the fictitious names used for the news agency “ANI”, the young journalist “Archie” and the eyewitness “Petra Wagenaar”.

Over a century after Nietzsche proclaimed that God had been dead for long enough to start smelling offensively, the thunder of his broadside against the hypocritical bourgeois religiosity of his day continues to reverberate. All the major churches have seen their congregations dwindle at an alarming rate in recent decades and the ivory towers of Christian establishment theology have been shaken to their foundations.

However, I myself haven’t completely ruled out the possibility that a sentient deity may still be clinging to an unobtrusive existence in our ethically relativist, science-worshipping age. Such a God would know that we could do with divine help, even if we don’t think so. The lack of any conclusive evidence for or against a living God hasn’t stopped me wondering whether it was this survival-skilled deity whose presence I half-consciously sensed during a major story I covered as a news agency correspondent many years ago. It was one of those terrorist hostage-takings that hogged world headlines for days on end in the 1970s, long before 9/11 batted terrorism into an entirely new league of horror.