Word: mud
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...religious and patriotic mission-"to give ands to France and souls to God"-proved too strong. He was ordained, and went to minister to the Tuareg, 900 miles south of Algiers. His parish covered 1,500,000 square miles of the Sahara. His parish house was a small mud hut in Tamanrasset, 400 miles from the nearest French outpost. His daily meal was a miserable date-and-barley stew. Within a year he translated the Gospels into Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg, writing with an ink made from charcoal and camel urine...
...dismissal of four of the perjury counts against Owen Lattimore. If the American public has ever desired a scapegoat for the victory of Communism in China, it has been Lattimore. Ever since Senator McCarthy called him the "top Soviet agent in America," he has taken a continual barrage of mud. By last November his name had been so completely blackened that even defenders of the Truman Administration's Asian policy shied from debating the charges that he was an agent of Soviet conspiracy...
Ninety miles inland from the Persian Gulf, the oasis of Buraimi has slumbered for centuries. Its 8,000 inhabitants subsist on dates, camel meat and milk, and live in eight, mud-walled villages scorched by the gusts of the shamal. No one knows for certain to whom Buraimi belongs. Northward lies Trucial Oman, "protected" by the British; westward lies Saudi Arabia; all around is uncharted waste, so desolate that even the Arabs call it Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter...
...fine old-fashioned Palmerstonian display of Empire. R.A.F. fighters buzzed up and down the 750-mile-long camel tracks running into Saudi Arabia, searching out reinforcements bound for Turki. Jeep-borne Oman levies roamed everywhere, terrifying camel caravans. From a 40-foot-high Beau Geste-like tower of mud-brick reinforced with palm logs-containing storerooms for food, water and ammunition, and slotted for rifles-a young British major named Peter MacDonald was happily running the show...
...with another souvenir (a Malayan parang, a vicious native knife which a British sergeant had given him), the traveler from Illinois logged a misadventure. Flying over the jungle near Kuala Lumpur, his helicopter caught fire and made a forced landing in a paddyfield. Stepping out unharmed into knee-deep mud, Stevenson cracked: "Where is my parang? I want to kill a bandit." At week's end, Stevenson was ready to take off for Bangkok, with stops at Rangoon, New Delhi and Karachi before heading on to the Middle East...