Word: fetid
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There is seaminess as well as glitter in Bombay. Air India's Boeing jets coming into Santa Cruz airport swoop low over miserable mud and bamboo huts, where the air is fetid with the stomach churning odors of cow dung, urine and rotting humanity. The broad, smooth expressway from the airport into Bombay is lined with dismal rows of tenements, where more than a million people are crammed in small, single rooms and share whatever toilets exist with dozens of neighbors. One of every 66 Bombay residents has no home at all-except for the dark undersides of staircases...
Diarist John Evelyn of the 17th century knew not what the 20th would bring. London last week looked as if it had slithered to the bottom of the Thames. Smothered by smog as fetid and impenetrable as river sludge, traffic stopped, airports closed, and more than 100 ships swung helplessly at anchor. For four days and nights, the dark, satanic peasouper dumped grit and grime over 22 counties, cocooned 125,000 miles of icy roads, and caused 20,000 automobile breakdowns. The worst fog that London has known since the "Black Death" that took 4,000 lives...
Devil's Yard, the best of the four novels, is a searching examination of the mind of 20th century totalitarianism. The novel is set in a massive, fetid prison near Istanbul, in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, but the prison is obviously a modem police state in miniature. Guilty and innocent alike are cast into this prison where all standards have disappeared. Its chief warden is a masterpiece of characterization, both repellent and sympathetic, a tyrant trapped by fate as his victims are trapped...
...week. Curfew was moved from 8:30 p.m. to midnight. Some 250,000 Moslems who, in terror of their lives, had stayed home from work for the past two months, now trooped back to their jobs. Buses were running and mailmen made their rounds. Garbage, which had accumulated in fetid piles for weeks, was again collected. Europeans sat at newly opened bars and cafes, sipping anisette and eying the passing Moslems. There was little fraternization, but at least the streets did not resound to S.A.O. bombs and gunfire...
Given the chance, the poor people would fill the vacant apartments in short order. About 85% of Beirut's 500,000 people live in apartments, many of them overcrowded. Near the fetid Beirut River and in rubbish-strewn vacant lots across the city 10,000 refugees live in squalid shacks built from flattened kerosene cans. A 1954 master plan for the city has yet to materialize, largely because of soaring land costs that have sent the price of a plot on the glossy Corniche that measures about 50 ft. by 20 ft. from...