Word: overgrown
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...civil war in 1975, Aytat and Suq al Gharb lived in peace as summer resorts. Wealthy Arabs were drawn to the towns' cool mountain air scented by thick stands of parasol pines. Since the fighting resumed in earnest last October, the villages have become ghost towns. Gardens are overgrown, grape arbors drop their fruit into rotting piles. The newer four-and five-story apartment buildings are dotted with jagged black holes, evidence of frequent artillery exchanges. Virtually all the windows in both towns have been shattered by explosions, and prudent homeowners have replaced them with double layers of sandbags...
...support in Congress and the country for his program, the U.S. will find it difficult to achieve the stability it seeks in Central America. The Salvadoran army is in trou ble, weakened by a corrupt and generally incompetent officer corps. Until recently the army was no more than an overgrown police force that kept 9-to-5 hours, five days a week, in its halfhearted struggle against the leftist guerrillas, and this attitude is changing only very slowly. The commanders had refused to adopt counterinsurgency tactics, like using small mobile units to pursue the rebels. Most of the army...
...Mirrors was turned into an infirmary by the invaders; the French avenged the German insult in 1919, when the Allied leaders gathered in the same hall to sign the treaty ending World War I. But by then the palace had been gutted, and the gardens were shabby and overgrown. Visiting the grounds in 1923, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was appalled at the neglect and donated $100,000 for restoration, which included a new roof for the Hall of Mirrors...
...eccentrics and obsessives. Allie pays $400 for an abandoned jungle settlement called Jeronimo. "It's about as unimportant as a place can possibly be," he says happily. "You talk about starting from scratch. Well, Jeronimo is scratch." Within weeks, Allie's manic energy transforms a rank, overgrown clearing into a neat, well-ordered community. As he keeps improving his creation he boasts, "The Iron Age comes ... A month ago, it was the Stone Age ... digging vegetables with wooden shovels and clobbering rats with flint axes. We're moving right along...
...world that remains is dark, damp, and overgrown, peopled with primitive hunter-gatherers and horrible mutants. The language, too, has undergone a mutation: in Hoban's version of English reinvented from scratch, spelling, sentence-structure, and vocabulary have all taken on a childlike spontaniety and simplicity...