Word: loess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...scene was Honan, a province about the size of Missouri, but inhabited by 32 million peasants who grew wheat, corn, millet, soybeans, and cotton. Honan was a fine flat plain whose soil was a powdered, yellow loess which, when wet with rain, oozed with fertility. And which, when the rains did not come, grew nothing; then the peasants died. The rains had not come in 1942, and by 1943, Honan peasants, we heard in Chungking, were dying...
...musings on our manifest destiny--he looks out over "the watershed of the Mississippi, the valleys of Ohio and the plainslands of Missouri, a continent in itself as surely designed for America's use as a woman's womb for the seed of humanity"--and memories of the red loess in the mountains of Siam. The whole thing gets to be a little diffuse...