Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...French found North Africa largely desert, and in places they have made it bloom. The million and a half Frenchmen who now live there regard it as their only home. Equally important, France's African empire, all of which might fall if strategic North Africa is lost, is the last remaining assurance that France is a great power. "Without it," Frenchmen argue with incontestable pessimism, "France will have no place in the 21st century. We shall be 40 million Frenchmen against nearly twice as many Germans. We shall become another Portugal...
...Bica, in the Brazilian state of Ceará, without rain for three years. "With the proud hospitality of the backlands we were invited to share the only food in the village. The meal was xique-xique (cactus), grilled over a small fire and eaten with a morsel of desert rat. When we left, we gave the mayor what food we had in the car: some oranges and biscuits. He thanked us and said the gift would go to the village children...
...Columbus died there, broken and disappointed. Castilians, who manage to scratch a living from the harsh earth, are a tough, grave and proud people. They speak the purest Spanish of Spain. The climate is "nine months of winter, three of hell." The land is a windswept steppe, almost a desert. "The most magnificent monotony in the whole world," says Sacheverell Sitwell. It has been said of Spain that it seems more a part of Africa than of Europe. This is even more true of the Castilian plateau than of the green and garrulous south...
...Archaeologist Jean Perrot of the French National Center of Scientific Research was assembling workers last week to excavate some of the strangest dwellings ever built by man. The original find was made in 1952, when Perrot and a team of diggers were investigating a small hill on the sandy desert south of Beersheeba. For three months he had found little; then one day a workman, who had just urged him to call the whole thing off, fell through the sand into a deep cave. Perrot climbed down after him with professional precaution and found what he thinks was a village...
Most students of Bible history believe that the Negeb, Israel's southern desert, was an uninhabited wilderness when Abraham (a middle Bronze Age man) came to Beersheeba about 1500 B.C. One short reference puzzled them. The book of Genesis (14:6) refers to Horites (cave dwellers) who lived "by the wilderness" and were smitten by Chedorlaomer, King of Elam. But until the fall of Perrot's man, no trace of the Horites had been found...