Word: quicksands
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Central America, Mexico, Tschiffely & beasts plowed through jungles, swamps, deserts, mountain passes, across swinging bridges, in fair & foul weather. Once Tschiffely, on a dark night, tried to drive his comrades over a precipice; their horse sense saved him. Once Gato refused to budge; Tschiffely found he was facing a quicksand. Tschiffely refuses to manufacture adventures, but admits that once he had to shoot in self-defense. He often had passport trouble and was occasionally taken for a spy, but by the time he reached Mexico City his fame had preceded him: he was given the honor of opening a bullfight...
Once the party started to map a mirage. Another time they saw marmots pair off, stand "erect on their hind legs, grasping each other with their front paws, and dance slowly about exactly as though they were waltzing." Once a car partially sank in quicksand. Another time, in an old quicksand bed they found the four legs of a baluchitherium, largest animal that ever lived. Each leg was as big around as a fat man. A speck of white in the prevailing red of the desert sufficed to indicate a partially exposed fossil. After a little practice the men spotted...
...world's 780,000 mi. of railways about one-third is in the U. S. Some say that the plant is too big, that the $26,000,000,000 it cost was too much, that the peak of its usefulness has passed. The reason it is in quicksand is not that its trains are not on time but because its managers never dreamed they would have so few trains to keep on time...
...profit and production, that knows not God and prides itself in this ignorance; . . . its penitentiaries, enlarged and yet overcrowded; juvenile crime . . . divorce, with states like Nevada and Arkansas feverishly competing in the effort to make divorce easier, quicker and cheaper; apostles of free love and loose moral leaders . . . quicksand of companionate marriage, childless families . . . collapse of family felicity; our business world with its fraud and connivance . . . professional impurity . . . commercialized vice...
...engaged in tracking down an elderly emerald thief who lives in a tower equipped with bloodhounds, secret passages, a beautiful girl, and a masked hunchback with a penchant for strangling people with his bare hands. Typical shot: the criminal-in-chief dropping a rebellious henchman through a trapdoor into quicksand...