Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Egypt's economy was already strained when Sadat succeeded Gamal Abdel Nasser as President in 1970. Since then it has got worse. One of the problems is geographic: though vast in area, Egypt is mostly desert. Fully 96% of its population is jammed into a narrow green belt averaging seven miles in width and 500 miles long in the Nile Valley. Another problem is the population itself, which is growing at a million per year despite belated efforts to control...
...money may prove to be well spent. A 19th century biographer of Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat who completed the canal in 1869, said that the waterway "traced for civilization a pacific and productive route across the sands of the desert." It also saved mercantile countries huge sums in shipping charges. Closing the canal has cost an estimated $10 billion in the extra expense of sending goods around Africa's southern tip. By the end of this week, when the first convoy starts north from Suez city, ships traveling from the Persian Gulf will be able...
Raisuli, Sherif of the Berbers ("The blood of the prophets flows in me") kidnaps a beautiful American woman, Eden Pedecaris ("He is a brigand and a lout") and sweeps her off to his castle in the desert. President Theodore Roosevelt is outraged ("Arabian thief! I want respect!"), and the U.S. Government dispatches an ultimatum to the powers in Morocco: "Mrs. Pedecaris alive, or Raisuli dead." There follow fights, betrayals, skirmishes, duels, U.S. Marine action and a couple of full-fledged battles. Nothing much like it ever happened in history, but it makes for a lovely adventure...
...support the area's population of wild donkeys, kangaroos and emus; only rock pythons, death adders and hoards of stinging insects seem to have adapted comfortably to the climatic extremes: winds that reach velocities of 140 m.p.h., dust storms that swirl out of the nearby Great Sandy Desert, noonday temperatures as high as 180° F. For man, it is as hostile a place as any in the world...
Howroyd turned to the world's desert areas for useful precedents and found two in the ancient settlements of the Middle East. To overcome the feeling of being surrounded by hostile nature, the Arabs had built walls around their cities. To get relief from the fierce sun, they had crowded their houses close together so that one shaded another. Howroyd followed, and updated, those principles. He situated Shay Gap in a semicircle that not only lends a sense of protective enclosure but also provides late-afternoon shade. Similarly, the town's prefabricated houses are tightly clustered in groups...