Word: pipings
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...launched the proceedings with a speech praising Egypt's armed forces. The review began. It was 11:30 a.m. As the first units rumbled by, Abu Ghazala began to explain to Sadat the purposes and capabilities of each piece of equipment. Relaxed and smiling, the President puffed on his pipe, savoring the show of Egypt's passing firepower. One of the vehicles and a motorcycle broke down near the stand, briefly disrupting the march-past, but the columns quickly reformed...
...spite of his seeming amiability, Sadat was not a gregarious man and had few intimate friends. One of them, wealthy Egyptian Contractor Osman Ahmed Osman, recalls that Sadat would remain with him "for two or three hours without saying a word, just chewing his pipe and thinking." A favorite Sadat pastime was a contemplative afternoon walk along the Nile near one of his ten residences...
Sadat enjoyed the comforts and perquisites of his rank, but hardly to excess. Apart from a weakness for fine English suits and imported Dunhill pipe tobacco, his tastes and habits were simple. He usually ate only one light meal each day. A devout Muslim, he never drank wine or liquor. He liked to spend quiet evenings at home watching private movie screenings, usually of American westerns...
...what some might call a lazy man's schedule gave Sadat a chance to think, and that made an enormous difference to the world. It took a lot of patient walking and pipe chewing to reach his crucial decisions. His longtime counselor Sayed Marei, who was wounded in last week's shooting, once observed that, "he takes a long time to make up his mind, but once he makes it up, it never changes...
Sadat was a noble man with a passion for peace. One day I sat with him in the study of the modest sandstone house that he used in Aswan. As occasionally happened, Sadat was brooding about something or other, puffing on his pipe. One could see the dhows on the Nile, the mighty river bisecting a very narrow strip of green and flanked on both sides by the vast dunes of a seemingly endless desert. The silence was interrupted by an aide, who whispered something into Sadat's ear. Sadat rose with tears in his eyes...