Word: mountain
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...search. He flashed the mining company's office at the sister village of Ny-Alesund (pop. 1,000), then set out to rouse the sleeping villagers of Longyearbyen. He organized a dozen ski patrols of two and three men each, assigned them to nearby mountain lookout positions. Soon three men rushed back from their patrol to report seeing the orange parachute drifting down from the sky. It had fallen into the mountains south of the village, not far from the Russian mining community of Barentsburg...
Tibetan aides gave further details of the flight from Lhasa. As relations with Red China worsened, food stocks were prepared for a quick journey, and part of the fabulous Potala treasure was crated for mountain transport. On the morning of March 17, as tension rose in Lhasa, officials filtered from the palace in small groups, ostensibly to visit other monasteries. That night, dressed in the robe of a poor monk and without his customary glasses, the Dalai Lama left the palace as if taking a stroll, but he was shadowed by bodyguards. His mother and brother departed even earlier...
...alert villages ahead of them to prepare horses, yaks, porters and guides, the Dalai Lama depended on Tibet's famed arrow message service, a primitive but effective system under which messages tied to arrows are shot across rivers and deep ravines along key routes. Arrow messages, couriers on mountain ponies, native runners brought word that the Red Chinese had sealed off all the passes into Sikkim and cut the rope and bamboo bridges leading into Bhutan. The only escape route left open was the one the Dalai Lama took, over the rough trails to Towang on the Indian border...
...dark, animistic Bon Po religion of primitive Tibet and swarms with demons and fiercely copulating gods. The world is haunted by such specters as the ro-langs, or standing dead. They walk with their eyes closed, never change direction, and their touch is fatal to human beings. There are mountain demons who suck the life from unwary travelers, demons who cause hailstorms and earthquakes and eclipses. The Tibetan Buddhist contemplates an intricate pantheon, from the five Dhyani-Buddhas, who share the guardianship of the world, to hosts of spirits. Yet, writes Tibetan Scholar Maurice Percheron: "All, from the Dhyani-Buddhas...
Richard Strauss completed his last opera, Capriccio, in 1941. but the world that he and co-Librettist Clemens Kraus invoked in their "conversation piece for music" was as remote in spirit from the chaos of a Bremen or a Mannheim as Strauss's Bavarian mountain retreat was from the final convulsions of the Third Reich. The subject is opera itself-the relative merits of words and music-and it might just as aptly have been summed up under the title Six Characters in Search of an Opera. In a rococo salon near Paris, the six main figures sit chatting...