Word: sere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...town of Biskra rolled a cautious column of halftracks loaded with olive-uniformed Algerian troops. Spears of sunlight flashed from the lenses of binoculars as nervous officers searched the streets for signs of the enemy. But the town was empty of armed opposition, and all eyes lifted to the sere, sawback massif that reared beyond. Up there, among the blue defiles of the Aures Mountains, waited the latest defector from Premier Ahmed ben Bella's socialist paradise, and with him were 9,000 well-armed veterans ready for resistance, rebellion or death...
...look like the rocks of their rocky land, like faintly sentient boulders. The big island's landowners and the rural police consider them scarcely human and treat them accordingly. The shepherds bear their lot with lithic indifference. All day long they drive their tiny flocks from pasture to sere pasture, working literally like dogs. In the evening they eat curd and flatbread. At night they sleep sometimes in rude stone huts, sometimes on the mountainsides among their sheep. They live for their sheep-they would die without them. They are poor, so poor they cannot afford to make even...
...cost the French army hundreds of hands to put the Tuaregs in a kissing mood. The fierce, veiled warriors of the high Sahara gave up their murderous ways only in 1917, when they settled uneasily into a pastoral life as goat and camel herdsmen in the sere, sand-scoured mountains north of Timbuctoo. Last week in the Republic of Mali, some 5,000 Tuaregs decided the kissing had to stop. Holed up in the Adrar des Iforas, a parched, 40,000-sq.-mi. redoubt that straddles the Mali-Algerian border, they prepared to fight off half of Mali...
Shot on location in Greece and Turkey, the movie pays respectful tribute to those sere landscapes that feed souls but starve bellies. More eloquent than a land are the faces of its people. Kazan feelingly catches the poetry of peasants, which sometimes works against him because his native extras emanate an ancient sadness only hinted at by the professionals playing at stage center. Awkward dubbing mars the film too, for the disembodied voices on the sound track draw attention to themselves...
Caravans shows more research than imagination. Michener studs his skimpy narrative with Afghan legends and interminably breathless descriptions of the sere and bleak Afghan landscape. All he succeeds in doing is making Afghanistan seem like Hawaii West...