Word: desertic
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...train clacked on slowly, through the desert and up the mountains. As the coffee cups rattled in the dining cars the little marine said: "I haven't shaken so much since the night we went around Cape Hatteras, leaving the States." At Tucumcari, there was time for a beer at the station hotel: on the first round it cost a quarter; by the second the price shot to 40?. Said the red-haired sergeant from Rochester, not complaining, but just noticing: "Somebody's making money...
...years His Eminence, the Grand Senussi, Seyyid Mohamed Idris, had eaten the bitter bread of exile in a cozy villa on the Nile. But never did the spiritual and temporal leader of three million warlike, puritanical Senussi tribesmen give up hope of returning to his native desert. Never did he falter in hatred of the Italians who had cruelly dispersed his people and turned their holy city of Girabub into a fort. Over cups of China tea flavored with mint (Senussi Moslems may not touch alcohol or coffee), His Eminence entertained intriguing envoys from remote Saharan oases, helped recruit Senussi...
...snowy robes and tasseled headdress, His Eminence posed for Cairo cameramen. Then he climbed aboard a Western Desert train pranked out with plush chairs and fragrant with Nile roses. At battle-battered Tobruk, first stop, the British-trained Cyrenaican Guard of Honor smartly presented arms. Excited Senussi tribesmen bowed, kissed their leader's hand or the top of his sacred head. Down a strip of red carpet His Eminence swished majestically to a waiting British staff...
From Tobruk the cavalcade rolled on to the mud huts of El Mrassas. All across the desert burnoused villagers on camelback peered eagerly from sand ridges, hailed their long-absent leader with rifle volleys fired into the air. At the village gates there were more gunfire greetings. Local sheiks genuflected. Desert drums throbbed. Horsemen staged a riotous rodeo. His Eminence, calming the hubbub with a gesture, told his followers they must thank the British for driving out the Italians. Some day, he added, he hoped to go back to Girabub to live. While the tribesmen cheered, El Senussi retired...
...altitudes. He was the first to shoot a liquid-fueled rocket (in 1923), and at last account had fired one nearly a mile and a half high, at 700 m.p.h. Because he has published little on his findings and has experimented mostly in the privacy of a New Mexican desert, fellow rocketeers consider him a "mystery man." When war began, he went to Washington for still more secret research, dropped completely out of sight...