Word: gobi
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rather like a subway rest room on disinfectant day. Besides, the odors are strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache. What is more, the smells are not always removed as rapidly as the scene requires: at one point the audience distinctly smells grass in the middle of the Gobi Desert...
...circulation booster, Le Matin's question was an unqualified success. Press and public not only buzzed over the antic notion of an auto trip across Asia and Europe, but within six months five teams were in China, ready to follow the caravan track north and west into the Gobi Desert. There was no need for road maps; there were no roads. There was no sure fuel supply; what was available had been hopefully shipped ahead by camel. But in Peking on the rainy morning of June 10, 1907, one of the roughest car rides since the automobile engine drew...
Across the Gobi they sputtered. The drivers soon found that the trial was as much a test of men as machines. Dried out by the desert, the travelers drank the oily water from their radiators to keep alive. They used blowtorches to heat their meals when they could not bear using camel dung as fuel. Bridges collapsed under them, their cars sank hub deep in mud or sand, brakes gave way and the cars slid down steep, rocky hillsides. The Tri-Contal gave up its tiny ghost, but the other four somehow made it to the Siberian border...
...Pacific. But on one occasion last year, a mass crossed Japan that had seemingly got lost. It arrived from the west, dropping radioactive rain on much of Japan and radioactive dust on the northern island of Hokkaido. A sample sent to Tokyo proved to be ordinary dust from the Gobi Desert, which often falls on Japan. It must have got its radioactivity from a "hot" air mass that passed near the Gobi...
Some Western scientists reckoned that the Russian explosion took place in Eastern Siberia or in the Gobi desert. British scientists guessed that its intensity was in the neighborhood of 15 megatons (the most recent U.S. blast at Bikini is usually estimated at between ten and 20 megatons). Excited newspaper headlines (and some discreet Communist prodding) led fainthearts and opposition parties in most of the affected nations to demand an immediate stop to all atomic tests everywhere. Yet even in France, where the wails were loudest, the most intense concentration of radioactivity was ar below the top level that human beings...