Word: dusting
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...flung frontiers, but probably none more desolate than the southern shores of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. Once a balmy oasis of apricot groves, fields of watermelon and rivers of fish so fat that each could feed a family, this is now a poisoned desert of salt and brown dust. The catalog of catastrophes that makes up one of the world's worst environmental disasters includes mankind's largest current tuberculosis epidemic and highest rates of anemia, the biggest dust bowl on earth and one of the most extreme ranges of temperatures?from 50C to minus 30C?on the planet...
...Nearly five years ago, while Mukhtar was out fetching water from a stream, his parents were killed by Taliban rockets. His three brothers, two sisters and the family camel died, too. When Mukhtar returned home, the only creature left in the village was a dog, which sat in the dust coughing up blood. The boy used his father's rifle to put the animal out of its misery. It was the first time he had used a firearm, and it took him four shots. Three months later, Mukhtar joined the rebel Northern Alliance army to learn...
...Aral. The former bustling port used to can 70 million tins of fish a year and import millions of tons of grain and coal. Now Moynaq's fleet lies beached in the desert just outside town, 100 km from the shore, its masts rusted sentinels in a fog of dust. The town is desiccated and almost deserted. The 2,000 people who remain strip the ship hulks for scrap and fish for chemically laced carp in a small, shrinking lake to the east. The population has abnormally high rates of acute respiratory infections and cancer, kidney disease, iodine deficiency, diarrhea...
Mukhtar is an infantryman in Afghanistan's rebel army. He can shoot a man in the beard from a standing position at 200 m or point out camouflaged Taliban bunkers through miles of dust. His platoon leader says the green-eyed soldier is the finest he has ever commanded, and Mukhtar takes the compliment with a shrug of his skinny shoulders. "I have been in the army for a long time," he says. "So I should be good at my job." Indeed, Mukhtar is a four-year veteran of Afghanistan's draining desert war. But he is only 15 years...
...treatment of standard theater elements—certainly of language—Wellman can be rather vampirish himself. He takes an old word or phrase, drains it dry and then raises it from the dust transformed. Characters in Dracula contort words in eerily brilliant ways, which only grow eerier as they become more possessed (“there is hair growing into my head,” sings one of the particularly mad). When they can’t find the words to describe the alien situations they come upon, they are forced to invent their...