Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years ago Hassi Messaoud was simply an abandoned water hole, a navigational reference point for voyagers across the vast sea of sand and stone that the Romans called leonum arida nutrix- the arid nurse of lions. Today it has 5,000 inhabitants, sprawls over nearly 60 square miles of desert. Hassi Messaoud still has no women, no children, no church, no mosque. But it does have three hotels (650 rooms in air-conditioned cottages), two movie theaters, two swimming pools, an airport big enough to handle Caravelle jets, and 124 private firms, including an automatic laundry and a lemonade factory...
...French families have invested in Saharan oil stocks, and every month thousands of young Frenchmen apply for jobs in the Sahara fields. French newspapers refer to the Sahara as "our California," and the man most responsible for the Sahara agrees. Says France's Minister Delegate Jacques Soustelle: "This desert should come to mean to France what the Far West meant at a certain period to the American states on the Atlantic coast...
...prosperous future to share in economic and political equality with Metropolitan Frenchmen. Without the wealth of the Sahara-and the power it could furnish Algeria-the Constantine Plan would be an intolerable financial burden on France, and an unredeemable promise. Says Jacques Soustelle: "It is here in this desert region that the destiny of the French Republic will be settled...
...also one of the least visited. The sere, solemn world of Leptis Magna lies 76 desert miles east of Tripoli on Libya's Barbary Coast, reachable only by primitive bus or costly taxi. There are no guards in sight, and visitors often go home with a bit of the Classical Age in their pockets-usually a marble shard. It is possible for a traveler to ramble through this forest of fluted stone and broken stone bodies for hours without meeting anything at all of the present except himself, the burning...
...Spilhaus is a world authority on meteorology and oceanography, and a member of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year. As a member of the executive board of UNESCO three years ago, he made-only half facetiously-some arresting proposals: hauling Antarctic icebergs to water the Mojave desert, dyeing the ocean to control absorption of solar heat and thereby curb hurricanes, training porpoises to shepherd fish...