Lucerne in early October: a quaint little Swiss town, against a backdrop of snow-dusted Alpine peaks. Tourists loiter along the Spreuerbrucke bridge with its macabre Dance of Death paintings and stand in front of the deeply moving Lion Monument.

But one of Lucerne's most impressive sights wasn't in my guide-book. I found it by chance.

While at the Lion Monument, I noticed an entrance to a museum over to my left. Mildly curious, and with an hour to kill, I decided to stroll around the grounds to see what they had to offer. An hour-and-a-half later, I was still there-staring at a painting in disbelief: It showed Lucerne as a semi-tropical paradise complete with palm trees, a sandy beach bordering a river and an orange sun blazing across an ochre sky. Surreal? Well yes. But also, not a figment of artist Ernst Maass's imagination.

A painting by Ernst Maass depicting how Lucerne may have looked 20 million years ago.

The scene, reconstructed from scientific geological data, goes back twenty million years. Before the Ice Age. Before the Big Melt. Back to a time when the Alps were young and an inlet from the sea wound through the area around Lucerne. A time when mastodons (elephant precursors) and small rhinos roved the marshes, having crossed the newly formed land bridges from Africa. Crocodiles sunned themselves on the river banks, and flamingos danced on the shores.

There were shellfish, starfish, predatory snails and sea breams among more than a hundred species of marine life. Fossilised ripple marks on sandstone-once part of Lucerne's sandy beach-and the perfect outline of a fronded palm leaf found near the site of the museum, further testifies to a climate as balmy as that of Southern

California. It was staggering to realize that the fossilised shells, starfish and bird track imprints I was looking at were millions of years old. By contrast, and in terms of the earth's chronology, our average human life span is a mere nano-second of time.

Humbling thought!

Not the least of the Glacier Garden Museum's fascination is that it's the actual site of a geological excavation. Originally a stable and a barn stood here, but in 1872 the owner, Joseph Amrein-Troller, while digging a wine-cellar, stumbled upon a glacial pothole. Intrigued, he asked geologists to examine it.

To his astonishment, it was identified as a relic from the Ice Age. Further investigations at the site revealed several huge glacial potholes, the largest of which has a diameter of 8 metres, and a depth of 9.5 metres. I goggled as I looked down into its maw. Like a gigantic cochlea shell, the sides had been smoothed into swirls by thousands of years of glacial moraine, stones, gravel and melting ice.

Dribbling through swallow-holes in the surface of glaciers, the debris would have been churned under pressure and sucked into a powerful down-spiralling vortex. Nestled at the bottom of the pothole was a smoothly polished 'rock-nose' which had resisted 20,000 years of erosion. Moving from the outdoor exhibits into the Swiss-style timbered Museum building; I watched an engrossing audio-visual slide sequence which show-cased the formation of the Alps and the geological evolution of the Glacier Garden area through the millennia.

On climbing to the second and third floors, I discovered to my delight that the Museum also displays memorabilia of old Lucerne-lithographic prints, a model of the town as it looked back in 1792, miniature Swiss cottages, and several rooms with antique furniture: a Baroque bedroom with a baby's wooden trundle-bed, and a 16th century Renaissance buffet complete with china, and dining room suite. Tucked to one side of the Gardens is a rustic cottage which once belonged to the Swiss Alpine Club. The spartan interior is enlivened by a three-dimensional scene of a glacier displayed at one end of the room.

I then walked into the Museum's Labyrinth of Mirrors. The hall is made up of 90 mirrors laid at angles of 60, 120 and 180 degrees to each other-which has the effect of never-ending reflections of illusory corridors. I was spooked enough to tailgate a group of shrieking teenagers, who were having themselves a ball, and emerged before long into the bright afternoon sunshine. And, somewhat reluctantly, back once more into the twentieth century.

Margaret Deefholts is a Canadian freelance writer and author.