Word: sahara
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Salt routes crisscrossed the globe. One of the most traveled led from Morocco south across the Sahara to Timbuktu. Ships bearing salt from Egypt to Greece traversed the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Herodotus describes a caravan route that united the salt oases of the Libyan desert. Venice's glittering wealth was attributable not so much to exotic spices as to commonplace salt, which Venetians exchanged in Constantinople for the spices of Asia. In 1295, when he first returned from Cathay, Marco Polo delighted the Doge with tales of the prodigious value of salt coins bearing the seal...
...early as the 6th century, in the sub-Sahara, Moorish merchants routinely traded salt ounce for ounce for gold. In Abyssinia, slabs of rock salt, called 'amôlés, became coin of the realm. Each one was about ten inches long and two inches thick. Cakes of salt were also used as money in other areas of central Africa...
Though Antarctica gets less precipitation than the Sahara (less than 2 in. a year), nearly two-thirds of the world's fresh water is locked up in the polar icecap. Even bacteria are barely able to cling to life in the interior, but the coastal regions abound with seals and penguins, to say nothing of the whales that come from round the world to winter in Antarctica's icy, protein-rich waters...
...keep workers intellectually fresh, ROLM gives each employee three months of paid time off for every six years of service. Most people use the time to travel. One engineer crossed the Sahara Desert during his sabbatical, another trekked to Mount Everest. Says Executive Vice President Robert Maxfield: "When our people return from sabbaticals, they bring back a fresh attitude. They don't settle into the old ways of doing things...
...lived up to its promise as "the last possible adventure in our epoch." Nine days into the harrowing 6,200-mile course, Thatcher, Co-Driver Charlotte Verney, 38, and Mechanic Jean Gamier suffered a broken axle on their Peugeot 504 and then vanished in the vast expanse of the Sahara. A search party, led by Algerian and French military planes and helicopters, crisscrossed the desert sky while trucks and Land Rovers traversed the rugged terrain. Finally, last week, on the sixth day of the trio's disappearance, they were spotted, stranded between two small Algerian desert towns. Said Thatcher...