Word: merv
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This book is a reverent and amusing hymn to a handful of adventurers who penetrated the bone-littered wastes of Central Asia during the past 125 years. Many of them stayed there, with their heads cleaved from their bodies by the bloodthirsty rulers of Bokhara, Merv, Kokand and Khiva. The most fascinating of these adventurers was one Joseph Wolff, a disputatious Jew turned Anglican missionary, who set out in 1843 to rescue two British officers held captive in Bokhara...
...Bokhara to liberate the British officers, Missionary Wolff stopped off in Teheran to shout down the Shah of Persia, paused at Merv for a three-cornered theological debate with a dervish and a Talmudic scholar. Arriving in Bokhara with its Tower of Death, verminous dungeons and treacherous Emir, Wolff grandly ordered that the British prisoners be handed over to him. "How extraordinary," exclaimed the Emir. "I have 200,000 Persian slaves here-nobody cares for them; and on account of two Englishmen, a person comes from England and single-handedly demands their release." Wolff was jolted to discover that...
...special correspondent of the New York Herald, who dodged both Cossacks and Turkoman cavalry in his daring 1873 coverage of the Russian conquest of Khiva; Irishman Edmund O'Donovan, representing the London Daily News, who was simultaneously held prisoner and elected prince by the Tekke tribesmen of desolate Merv. Said O'Donovan: "It is well worth while to have lived among the Tekkes to know the ecstatic delight of parting company with them...
...night was cool and windless as the runners lined up in Dublin's new Santry Stadium. Besides Elliott and Ireland's Hero Delany, the field included New Zealand Schoolteacher Murray Halberg, two other Australians: Merv Lincoln and Albert Thomas, a stubby little (5 ft. 5 in.) clerk from Sydney...
...would be silly to exhaust yourself in the heats," said Australia's Merv Lincoln after he loafed through a fast 4:07.9 mile to qualify for the National A.A.U. championships at Bakersfield, Calif. Aussie Herb Elliott felt the same way. But Herb Elliott, who at 20 shows every sign of becoming the greatest miler ever, seems constitutionally incapable of not cracking some sort of record every time he puts on his spikes. He breezed through his heat in 4:01.4, a new meet mark...