Word: aridity
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...central character in both works is a thin, ascetic prophet known only as the Counselor. He walks clad only in a purple tunic, through the arid hills of the Sertao region promising salvation from the destruction which, he says, the lord will visit upon the wicked at the end of the century. When his band of followers becomes too numerous to wander the scrublands, he takes them to a hidden valley, Canudos, where they await the end of the world around them. But before the new century dawns, the zealots of Canudos draw the attention of the Brazilian government, which...
...Botswana, a land so arid that its currency is called rain, proudly sends a yachtsman to represent the nation. And Israel cheers 30 athletes and promises 1,000 tourists, though the country has yet to win a single medal. This will be Communist China's first major presence in the Olympics; they are bringing a contingent of 353. Egypt and Italy will be sending the largest delegations they have ever sent. Singapore wouldn't miss it; except for boycotting in 1980, that country has participated in every Olympics since...
...skinny youth barely 20, he left his parents in Poland and in 1932 came to what was then called Palestine, carrying the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland. How he and other fervid believers founded the Negba kibbutz in 1939, digging wells and building huts on an arid patch 30 miles south of Tel Aviv. How he and his comrades, armed only with Molotov cocktails and a handful of shells, held off a dozen Egyptian tanks in 1948, that exhilarating year in which the state of Israel was created...
...show by a single painter so hogged the attention of visitors or looked so effortlessly superior to everything else on view by living artists. One enters it with a sense of relief: here the wearisome traits of much contemporary art, its honking rhetoric, its unconvincing urgency, its arid "appropriations" of motifs, are left at the door, and the slow-surfacing complexities of mature, articulate painting greet...
...center their livelihoods on the ibex, a wild mountain goat that they hunt with arrows tipped with the poison wolfsbane (rock carvings of the ibex are scattered throughout their mountains). The Minaro also raise sheep and goats, grow grapes, from which they make wine, and in spite of an arid climate, plant a little grain...