Word: simplon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...refitting job finished, the Carlins beat their way from London to the English Channel and drove across to Calais. They motored over the Simplon Pass into Italy, crossed Yugoslavia and Greece. Outside Zagreb they had their only flat. On through Ankara, across high, arid plateaus, down through the Taurus Mountains and across Syria the Half Safe chugged along. In Iran the craft was mistaken for a Russian tank and got a military escort to the Pakistan border. At twilight in Teheran the Half Safe smacked into a traffic island but suffered only a slight loss of paint...
Next morning at 9:30, after waiting for Europe's famed Simplon-Orient Express to roar along the nearby tracks on its way from Sofia to Istanbul, the Greeks opened fire with machine guns and mortars. After 60 minutes' bombardment and no reply, four bedraggled Bulgars crept off the sandbank and sloshed across the river into the woods on the Communist side. By nightfall, despite a constant barrage of propaganda insults on the Bulgarian and Greek radios, and much continued fluttering at U.N., General Manidakis was able to report that all was quiet on the Evros front...
...over on the ferry from Hälsingborg, got bogged down when a French gendarme sent them on a 30-kilometer detour. The Palermo starters, who ran into the toughest driving of all, had to ferry across the Strait of Messina and take a railroad flatcar ride through the Simplon Tunnel. They also hit fog at Florence and sleet at Milan. Though the Italians got a special dispensation to exceed the rally's maximum 65-kilometer-per-hour average speed (because of time lost at the Simplon Tunnel), they still had trouble with blinding snow along the French stretch...
...British Diplomats Donald MacLean and Guy Burgess was still a mystery without solution. A "well-informed source" said that the pair crossed the Pyrenees from Spain into France last week, traveling under assumed names; tourists said they saw them hurrying into Italy from Switzerland by way of the Simplon Pass; some amateur sleuths were sure the two had doubled back on their own trail, were back in Britain and hiding. When a daughter was born to Mrs. MacLean last week and her husband failed to give any sign, police all but abandoned hope that he and Burgess were still...