Word: firsts
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Their first ten days of driving took them 1,000 miles across rough roads through the depths of the Turfan Depression, one of the world's lowest spots, and around the vast Takla-Makan desert. The clinical thermometer in Vincoe Paxton's first-aid kit rose to 108°. The brakes on one of the jeeps failed, and its steering gear broke. Then its frame collapsed...
Some 20 days later, Paxton's party reached the first settlement in Ladakh Province, on the Indian side of the Himalayas. But the worst day was still to come. At Kardang Pass the travelers faced a 400-foot glacier, slick as mirror-glass and tilted at a 45° angle. They dismounted and crept on foot up a narrow path hacked in the ice. Donkeys and horses had to be helped up the treacherous slope. Gallant Vincoe had come close to the end of her tether. The caravan cook encouraged her, step by step: "Put this foot here...
...before him. The gunfire of China's war was audible in the Portuguese colony. Through Porta do Cêrco, the massive, yellow brick border gate, poured panicky peasants and deserting Nationalist soldiers, clamoring for haven from the advancing Reds. Black sentries from Mozambique allowed them to pass, first stripping the deserters of weapons. By week's end, over Pak-sha-leang, a Chinese fort overlooking the single road into Macao, the gold-starred Red flag of Communist China waved ominously...
...Time for Questions. A unique blend of Mediterranean and Oriental cultures, Macao is the Far East's oldest European colony. It is smaller than Manhattan, and its population (300,000), mostly Chinese, is less than Newark's. Four centuries ago, it became Europe's first port in China. In the 19th Century it was eclipsed by Hong Kong, which is four hours southeast by steamship. It fell into a somnolent decadence, lived shabbily on gambling and other shady practices, until even in the Portuguese homeland it became known as the shameful "city of sin and opium...
...Labor government's grandiose, three-year-old project of planting a vast acreage of groundnuts (peanuts) in the bush wastes of Tanganyika, East Africa. The nuts were supposed to yield margarine and add extra calories to Britain's meager diet. Last week, Labor bigwigs were reading the first summary of the project's progress by the Overseas Food Corp., which the government created to run the groundnut scheme. It was a most embarrassing report...