Word: sand
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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That cold December day in 1903, a gusty north wind was blowing across the sand dunes of North Carolina's coast. The wind blew sand into the eyes of Wilbur and Orville Wright as they moved their awkward flying machine out of its shed at Kitty Hawk. Orville, a short, neat man with a heavy mustache, stretched himself flat on his stomach on the lower wing, between the two chain-driven propellers. The twelve-horsepower engine coughed, spat and began to clatter. With Wilbur running alongside holding one wing, the plane teetered down its wooden launching rail and rose...
...paraboloid (a slightly deeper curve than a hollow sphere), accurate to two-millionths of an inch. Each grinding and polishing was done with fanatical watchfulness. Visitors were asked to remove their shoes, like pious worshipers at the door of a mosque; a single grain of tracked-in sand might scratch up the glass and spoil months of work...
...cross Sand River in a small boat. The current is very strong, the water yellow and dirty. . . . Here we missionaries can live only in hiding. Here are many churches, but only a few which are not Red schools, assembly halls, headquarters, or depots for grain confiscated from the people. At 2 o'clock in the afternoon we arrive at the den of the Reds. The sick Father, a Chinese secular priest, is lying on his bed, pale and exhausted. The village Christians tell me that the Father is spiritually rather than physically sick...
...between them, holding both their hands, but it was a dark, rainy night, and neither saw the open manhole. The child fell through, tearing a ring from her father's finger. Eight miles away, where the sewer empties into Puget Sound, her body was found in the sand...
...father digging a well in a corner of the family farm beneath which there was obviously (to Pieter) no water. Pieter suggested another spot. His father tried it and struck a cool, clear gusher. Pieter nodded wisely. Some years later his schoolteacher lost a gold ring under the sand and Pieter found it for him with a single glance. Ever since then Pieter (now 16) has been kept busy peering through rock and sod in search of underground treasure...