Summary

This section is essentially exposition, introducing the characters and the situation.

Early on a cold wintry morning in Syria, a young army officer keeps the famous Belgian detective Hercule Poi-rot company as Poirot waits to board a train. As they make small talk about the weather and about the mystery Poirot has just solved (a mystery the officer knows nothing about), an efficiently attractive British woman named Mary Debenham looks out the window of her compartment, sees Poirot, and comments to herself that he seems both peculiar and harmless (see "Quotes", p. 12). The following day as the train travels across the Middle East, Poirot observes the relationship between the apparently reserved Miss Debenham and the gruff, also British, Colonel Arbuthnot - reserved at breakfast, more friendly at lunch, surprisingly passionate in the evening, when Miss Debenham represses the Colonel's advances with the comment "Not...