Word: afar
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...Afar triangle is a 40,000-sq.-mi. portion of northeast Ethiopia that lies at the juncture of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. It is a land of jagged mountains and cliffs, treacherous earth faults, active volcanoes and below-sea-level deserts where temperatures rise to a scorching 134°F. in the shade. Its only inhabitants are fierce nomads, one of whose reputed customs is to carve parts from battle victims and bear them home as trophies for their women. Yet the most awesome aspect of this Dantean terrain is the inferno that may be hidden...
...earth scientist's dreamland, Afar sits at the meeting place of three such giant rift systems. Two of these cleave the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, and geophysicists think that both bodies of water are gradually being widened into oceans at the rate of perhaps an inch or so a year as the lava pours out of the rifts...
Tazieff contends that the Afar triangle is, geologically speaking, a section of the expanding floor of the Red Sea. That floor, he says, has been uplifted by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other activity linked with lava flows from the Red Sea rift-whose axis has somehow been displaced slightly westward in the area of the triangle (see diagram). But the uplifting is only temporary, he writes in Scientific American. Only tens of thousands of years ago, a fleeting moment by geological standards, the Afar triangle was partially covered with seawater. As the Red Sea continues to widen and the subsurface...
...practical. Until people are known by numbers alone, the great city will continue to exist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was speaking of Manhattan, but he might just as well have been talking of London or Paris-or Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon or Justinian's Constantinople. Looking at it from afar, he said, was always to see it "in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty in the world...
...Carl Dixon (Michael Douglas), goes AWOL from an Eastern college. He returns to the family ranch-a spread about the size of Rhode Island-to make an important announcement: he has enlisted in the Army to see if he can love the enemy up close as he does from afar. But nobody listens. Dad and Mom (Arthur Kennedy and Teresa Wright) are too busy bickering. His crippled brother is off tomcatting around town, wishing he were fit enough to fight...