Word: belgians
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Three weeks after it collided with a West German ferry, the French container ship Mont Louis still lay on its side last week in 45 ft. of water, eleven miles from the Belgian coast. Gale-force winds and 15-ft. swells had broken it in two, raising fears that 30 steel containers filled with uranium hexafluoride, raw material from which nuclear fuel is made, might be swept out of the ship's holds into the sea. Then the bad weather broke, salvage operations resumed, and by midweek the first of the containers, originally destined for the Soviet Union...
...recovery finally put to rest wild rumors about the nature of the cargo. A Belgian senator had declared that the Mont Louis had been carrying, among other items, arms for the Soviet Union, an allegation that was curtly dismissed by the Belgian government. By week's end 13 of the containers of uranium were aboard a salvage barge, and crews from Belgium and England were able to mop up a three-mile-long fuel-oil slick...
...title is ironic: the unwanted plant is the author. All his life, Conrad Detrez, 48, has been inflamed by credos and causes. The Belgian youth became an ardent mystic and prepared for the monastic life at the Roman Catholic University of Louvain in the 1950s. A few years later he was a lay missionary in Brazil. There he was appalled by the misery of the masses he had come to inspire with the message of Christ. Soon he had become a follower of Marx and Che Guevara and a guerrilla fighting with the Communists. Eventually he was tried and convicted...
Young Conrad, the hero of the novel, grows up in a Belgian village in a home overrun with luxuriant potted plants. The hothouse upbringing keeps him devout, unworldly and suppliant. At a Catholic school he yearns to become a saint. Tormented by sexual feelings, he admits to his spiritual adviser that "two flies had landed on the page of one of my treatises and were fornicating and I didn't stop them." Conrad makes up for his lustful thoughts by committing holy books to memory and praying for the conversion of atheists. His confessions become so monotonously pure minded...
...first there had been widespread alarm, particularly when the ship's owner, the Compagnie Générale Maritime, was evasive about details of the accident. Forty-eight hours after the sinking, the Belgian government was still uncertain about the nature of the cargo on board. On the other hand, Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, had already revealed that the Mont Louis had been carrying a cargo of uranium. Confusion mounted when crew members claimed they had been told that they were shipping radioactive goods for medical purposes...