Word: ararat
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Jammal had obtained the wood, he unblinkingly told the network audience, during a 1984 search for Noah's ark on snow-covered Mount Ararat in Turkey. With his companion "Vladimir," he had crawled through a hole in the ice into a wooden structure. "We got very excited when we saw part of this room was made into pens, like places where you keep animals," he recalled. "We knew then that we had found the ark!" To prove he had been in the fabled vessel, Jammal hacked out a chunk of wood...
...fact, Jammal is an actor who has been telling versions of this story for years but has never been on Mount Ararat. Vladimir is a fictitious character, and the supposedly venerable hunk of "ark" wood is a piece of contemporary pine Jammal soaked in juices and baked in the oven of his Long Beach, California, home...
...environment, as in the Baltic states. Ever since the Soviet Union under Stalin began to industrialize in the 1920s, Moscow has built the republic into a leading chemical-production center. One result is chronic air pollution. "The air is so bad, you can no longer see Mount Ararat," complains a Yerevan resident, referring to the snow-peaked 16,945-ft. mountain some 30 miles away across the Turkish border...
Through dusty villages and neglected cities called Urgüp and Erzurum, Glaze-brook finally arrives at Kars in the "Land of Far Beyond." Near by, Noah's ark went aground on Mount Ararat, and the Eden of Islamic myth bloomed. Persian, Turk and Russian battled over Kars for centuries. More prosaically, we learn that, except for Norway, Turkey is the only NATO country to border the U.S.S.R...
...invocation of Mount Ararat is meant to raise the eyes heavenward, Thomas' repeated mention of Russia's greatest poets from Pushkin to Pasternak is obviously intended to heighten the moral tone of this melodrama of murderers, scoundrels and sadistic sex. As Thomas well knows, poets have historically served as a symbol of redemption in Russia. But merely dropping their names will not redeem Ararat for readers who expected more from the author of The White Hotel. -By Patricia Blake