Word: sand
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...events are behind the bonanza. First, the rise in the price of gold from $35 an ounce to $145 since the federal ban on private ownership of the metal was lifted in 1975. Second, the development of portable dredges, some weighing only 25 lbs., that suck in gravel and sand and separate the heavier gold grains and nuggets. A dredge costs as little as $160; diligent-and lucky-prospectors can make $200 or more on a weekend...
Director Dick Richards never dwells on any one cliche for long, and he moves the gory battle scenes along positively briskly. March or Die manages a fairly business-like air. But its limitation as well as its achievement is that it faithfully re-creates the sand-blown Legion epics of the 1930s. It is an instant late show. And like those oldies on TV, it is dotted with lovably preposterous lines. The immaculate Deneuve, looking in a filthy casbah like a woman at a Chanel showing, coos to Hill: "You don't belong here." Hackman stands amid the devastation...
...called "the boy with the yellow envelope." Normally, Western Union tried to send someone older, gentler, to break the news. And even when the bodies came home, the families were not so sure. Remembers one man: "There was much talk in the neighborhood that they just put sand or rocks in the coffin and didn't have bodies in a lot of them because there wasn't anything to put in." In one strange story, a husband was reported killed. His wife waited a year and then remarried, only to have her first husband reappear like Enoch Arden...
Nowhere have I seen so many mirages as I saw in Eritrea. To reach out one's hand for what is clearly a shimmering pool of water nestled among rocks, to see reflections in the water, and then to touch sand and feel insects biting: this happened several times, as if one could never learn the lesson. It got to the point where to save precious water, I dry-washed my hands with dirt, only later to find my fingers and palms itching from infinitesimal slivers of thorns hidden in the dirt...
Victims Pay. This spring four men were convicted of rape in Saudi Arabia's Al-Hasa province and sentenced to death. One, a bachelor, was beheaded. The other three were married and guilty of adultery as well as rape. They were buried up to their waists in sand and stoned to death by a mob that used small rocks instead of boulders to prolong their agony. Sometimes the victims pay too. When a German girl was raped by two men a couple of months ago, the judge ordered her flogged "as an accomplice to immorality...