Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...wanders out into the desert, accompanied by the dearest of his four wives, to begin a search for the oracle that, he is told, will tell him how to end the drought. It seems cornballed at first, simple adventurism, but Updike is never simple. Through Ellello*u. Updike sings an elegy to the open spaces he seems to have just now found: the vast blue sky of Africa, and the rolling plains of the 1950s America in which both Ellellou and Updike attended college. This makes the most beautiful part of the book, striking in its images and complex...
STRANGE THINGS are happening Down Under. Thunder crackles across cloudless skies, huge chunks of hail fall in the desert, black rain plops eerily down on Sydney. What could possibly be causing it all? The National Weather Bureau assures everyone that these mysterious phenomena are only the side effects of industrial pollution. But are they? As thousands of tiny frogs appear in the city's streets and the sky takes on a pulsing violet glow, it looks like there might be something a bit more sinister than carbon monoxide behind Sydney's strange weather, something far more deadly...
...family, with its estimated 5,000 princes, has its roots in the lives of its people. Its members are married into the families of commoners all over the country. They take their places in the chain of command below nonroyal superiors in the civil service. Saudi rulers take their "desert democracy" seriously: even the lowliest citizen can approach King Khalid or Crown Prince Fahd with a complaint at their daily majlis (council...
...love. Corrugated by rugged mountain ranges, the area receives an average of 10 in. of rain a year, usually all at once, vs. 36.5 in. in more fertile northern Pakistan, near Kashmir. In summer, temperatures can rise to 130° F. In winter, they can fall to subfreezing levels. Desert scorpions and other noxious fauna abound. Prolonged exposure to Baluchistan can be fatal: when the army of Alexander the Great marched across it on the way home from India, two-thirds of the men died. But local folklore has it that Baluchistan's towering hills are carpets covering vast...
...Iran are unreliable, with the result that the country has become a vast rumor mill. Says an elementary school teacher at the U.S. compound of Shahin Shahr, near Isfahan: "We alternate between panic and being very blasé. Some days we don't get a thing accomplished." Desert picnics, once popular, are now regarded as too big a risk for families to take. Says one American housewife: "It's a big social event to sip coffee and listen to the BBC." Armed guards patrol the gates and grounds of American compounds, and at Shahin Shahr, colored flags alert...