Word: aridity
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...seasons, almost 4,192 hits, ago. The brush-cut hair that blew to bangs and billowed to bouffant has been tamed and dyed. The kneesprung crouch has lost barely a trace of temper. The burly body remains respectably taut, a gunnysack full of cantaloupes and cannonballs. The seamed and arid face, a slowly eroding riverbed, is as wide open as a gap-toothed grin. It is the map of an obstinate man with 737 doubles who still flings himself flat and breaststrokes like a gopher into second base...
Drawing upon sources as diverse as long-classified FBI records arid the Wellesley Magazine, Seagrave, a journalist who grew up on the China-Burma border, feverishly ransacks the past. He resurrects old Shanghai and recollects, in passing, such spicy background scenes as the sailors' prison in San Francisco, a "bin full of murderers, cutthroats, sodomists, and mutineers dredged from the leaky hulls that jammed the docks." He also does some riffs on Chinese secret societies, the erotic kinks of foot-bound "sing-song girls," and the power of opium in a culture in which at least one Chamber of Commerce...
...tallest volcano is three times as high as Mount Everest, and its great rift valley plunges to over four times the depth of the Grand Canyon. Global dust storms with winds up to 300 m.p.h. sometimes obscure its arid surface, which is pocked with vast gulches and deltas apparently left by ancient rivers. And maybe, just maybe, its stones bear fossils of primitive creatures that vanished billions of years ago with the waters that gave them life...
What those developers are only starting to realize is that deserts are not what they appear to be. Arid, sparsely vegetated and seemingly inhospitable, they look like nature's waste lots, ripe for occupation and improvement. Even the word desert implies "unoccupied." But despite the shortage of water and wide temperature fluctuations, deserts are the host of a wide variety of species, each of which has adapted in its way to life in a desert ecosystem. Couch's spadefoot toads can live underground for much of their lives, awaiting some moisture before they come up and breed. Saguaro cacti...
...conflict in Darfur is literally rooted in the soil. Most of the region's 6 million people are farmers and herders, who cling to the valleys where the soil is less sandy, or nomadic graziers, who migrate between the arid north and the south, which blooms green after the rains every August. Though most of Darfur's farmers are African and its nomads Arab, the two groups have mixed easily. Centuries of intermarriage have blurred the most obvious distinctions: nearly all Darfurians are black, Muslim and speak Arabic. Disputes between the two are traditionally settled using tribal laws as complex...