Word: earthen
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...Soviet-era air base outside the town of Khanabad, Uzbekistan, 90 miles north of the Afghan frontier. Their mission was simple but dull: Secure the airfield. "God, this can't go on for six months," Perez said to himself during one of his 12-hour shifts patrolling the earthen berms that encircle the base. "Something's got to happen...
...commune, Hu spent years hauling sacks of earth to reclaim land as Chairman Mao had ordered. A pumping station worked day and night to lift water from her fields over a dike and into Dongting Lake. But the dike ruptured in 1996 and swept away Hu's earthen house. Her family rebuilt it in brick, which they thought would withstand anything. Then the flood that hit two years later took half of the house away again. "I dreamed of moving higher, but we had no money," she says...
...know what was happening, watch the knife, and not stop it. But even tranquilizers couldn't lull 15-year-old Manju Kumari to her fate. In his police confession, Karmakar says his wife, daughter and three accomplices had to gag Manju and pin her down on the earthen floor before the shrine. In ritual order, Karmakar wafted incense over her, tore off her blue skirt and pink T shirt, shaved her, sprinkled her with holy water from the Ganges and rubbed her with cooking fat. Then chanting mantras to the "mother" goddess Kali, he sawed off Manju's hands, breasts...
...punishment for resistance. You can still find human bones here, says Nasir, my guide. The Taliban were great art looters as well as destroyers, it seems: they dug here for treasure and, in the process, brought human remains to the surface. To illustrate this, Nasir pokes around in an earthen bank with a stick, discarding bits of animal bones, and finally pulls out a human vertebra. The soldiers offer a more pleasant souvenir: fragments of pottery, smashed by Genghis Khan's men. "Take it, they're everywhere," one man says. "We just throw it away...
...lava be stopped? Some 70 bulldozers have been used to build earthen walls to divert lava away from inhabited areas, while planes and helicopters have dropped water to slow its advance. And there's always prayer. Carmelo Cavallaro, the parish priest of Nicolosi, who led the faithful in seeking divine intercession, says, "Faith can move mountains." What he should have said: Faith can move mountains that move...