Word: mountainous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Amid the craggy wastes of Hashemite Jordan, wiry, Nevada-born Engineer John Monroe looks not much bigger than a pine sapling, but last week the local Bedouins were calling him "the Man Mountain." And why not? For if Allah, in his wisdom, sees fit to move a mountain, and a little man all alone pushes it back again, is not that man as good as the mountain...
...mountain that John Monroe put in its place was once an orderly peak in Wadi Shaib. Last month, local police patrolling the road to Jerusalem reported that it was walking away. Government officials at Amman at first viewed the report-and the cops-with suspicion. Then they went to have a look. Sure enough, there was a 40,000-square-meter chunk of mountain moving majestically down the valley in a slow-motion landslide. By nature's whimsy, fig trees that had been on one side of the road were now on the other, and bean fields had moved...
...price for the bean fields, but the question of what to do about a displaced quarter-mile of vital state highway still remained. Like a link of pontoon bridge that has drifted downstream, one stretch of the highway lay useless at the valley's bottom, and the vagrant mountain sat camel-like astride the rest. Jordan's ministers estimated that it would cost $400,000 and 40,000 man-days of labor to push the mountain aside, and Jordan's budget could never stand it. Then up stepped John Monroe, who had come to Jordan...
Ministers, prohibitionists and other mountain lovers began to protest, too. So many letters poured into City Hall that the mayor devoted a 30-minute radio talk to the bottle, the city engineer personally climbed up to the roof of the Zook Building to see if the ad complied with ordinances (it did) and city councilmen discussed an anti-bottle...
...Anyone who can't stand to see a little whisky, there's something wrong with them." At week's end the Battle of the Bottle was still unresolved; while waiting for a decision Denver chanted a bit of doggerel supplied for the occasion by the Rocky Mountain News...