Word: drift
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Wrapped around the flattened underside of the earth is a massive, high-domed shield of rock and ice. This is the Antarctic Continent, a frozen and almost lifeless wasteland studded with glistening mountains that stand like icy tombstones over a cosmos-sized graveyard. In its skies, angry clouds drift over seas of corrugated sastrugi and sparkling glacial spillways. To the explorer this continent of 5,000,000 square miles-three-fourths as big as the U.S. and Canada combined-is a geologic throwback to the Ice Age. It is the world's most hostile environment of earth...
...Violent Land. The men of Operation Deep Freeze found the continent a harsh, hauntingly beautiful and, above all, strange land. The snow crystals that drift down over its great central plateau seem dry as sand. Yet, because there is little ablation-return of moisture to the atmosphere-this light precipitation has become a glacier of up to a mile or more in depth. Under its own weight the ice moves glacially, spilling down off the plateau, flowing imperceptibly but inexorably toward the sea, squeezing through valleys, crawling over hills, plunging down the sides of mountains in great frozen cataracts. What...
...winds up to 200 miles an hour sometimes come howling like banshees down off the highlands, often to be followed by unearthly silences. The antarctic has other tricks: when a man breathes its winter air, he not only can see but hear his breath, for as the frozen moisture drifts back across his face, its ice crystals break against his ears with the tinkling of hundreds of tiny bells. When the uncertain light of an overcast day is trapped beneath the clouds above and the snow below, everything between fills with a thick and milky film, devoid of feature...
...when Faisal spoke of "beloved Egypt" and regretted her "present woes." There are Iraqui elements which are far more Kremlin-inclined than Faisal or el-Said, and which would ally Iraq with the Syrian and Egyptian camps if they could gain power. Some observers sense a gradual anti-West drift in Iraq, but do not find it alarmingly serious...
...Boris manages a few of these, though he is habitually massive-browed and troubled. ("Yet happiness eludes my sad, my tortured soul.") In one of the most delightful scenes, his minister, Prince Shuisky, guilefully played by N. Khanayev, reports that the pretender's forces are nearing Moscow. Catching the drift of the wind. Boris remarks that there is no pretender, the pretender Dmitri is the sovereign, "and Shuisky for perjury shall be quartered...