Word: sere
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...Indira Gandhi, dressed in a crisp sari, stood in the scorching early summer heat on the north Indian plain and asked that question dozens of times in Hillaur, a small village in her parliamentary constituency of Rae Bareli. The country around her told the answer: acre after acre of sere, treeless, wind-whipped fields, most of which are worked by harijans (untouchables) who sharecrop but do not own the land. Long miles of highway are untarred. Few people can afford the 300 rupees ($33) needed to wire their homes for minimum lighting provided by two light bulbs. Electric irrigation pumps...
...Atop a sere, windblown hill rising 2,000 ft. above the central Sinai desert, 170 American men and women this week assume the task of securing the fragile peace between Egypt and Israel. Dressed in bright orange uniforms-so that they can be easily seen against the sun-baked sand-the members of the State Department's Sinai Field Mission are operating monitoring stations in the Giddi and Mitla passes, scene of three wars in the past 20 years. The puny American presence could scarcely halt an armored column intent on starting a fourth war. Rather, since Egypt...
...climate is as burdensome as the loneliness. Temperatures during the day frequently soar above 110° F. and at night occasionally plunge below freezing. The silence is total, except when broken by wind whistling through the sere brush. Often the passes turn into wind tunnels, with sandstorms gusting through at 20 and 30 miles an hour. In the winter, sudden cloudbursts can cause flash floods...
...Pilbara district of northwestern Australia's outback is a sort of hell. There is barely enough vegetation on the stony hills and sere plains to support the area's population of wild donkeys, kangaroos and emus; only rock pythons, death adders and hoards of stinging insects seem to have adapted comfortably to the climatic extremes: winds that reach velocities of 140 m.p.h., dust storms that swirl out of the nearby Great Sandy Desert, noonday temperatures as high as 180° F. For man, it is as hostile a place as any in the world...
...Philippines; a tin city of corrugated-roof barracks in Guam, once used by the crews of the B-52 bombers that devastated much of Indochina before Congress grounded them in August 1973; barracks at huge Travis Air Force Base in Northern California; an Evangelical church in the sere hills of Los Gatos, 50 miles south of San Francisco; a beer hall in Mount Angel, Ore., where Benedictine sisters from a nearby priory were attending the confused, weary children, many of them polio victims...