Word: silts
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...been unable to get out. Perhaps the bank of a prehistoric river caved in on it. It sank down into the cold, Pleistocene mud, which kept out the air and preserved the body. With the coming of winter, the mammoth was frozen solid; the river kept on dropping silt. Moss and peat kept the body insulated...
...between July and October, a great gush of muddy water floods the narrow, fertile valley. For the ancient Egyptians, who did not demand too much of their sacred river, the flood was fine. They built mud dikes around the fields, and caught the flood water in shallow basins. The silt settled to the bottom, keeping the soil fertile, millennium after millennium. When the water. was gone, the peasants planted their crops, often without plowing or other preparation, in the wet soil...
When SESP came to Cametá in 1944, the town's 550 families were getting their drinking water from the silt-laden Tocantins River. Their only plumbing facilities were the jungle bush behind their rickety shacks. Cametá had no doctor, and there is no record of how many Cametenses died each year from dysentery, hookworm, malaria and typhus, but these and other communicable diseases accounted for 55% of all deaths in the Amazon region which includes Camet...
Along the silt-yellow Rio Magdalena the talk was of hard times. "There's not enough water, not even for alligators if there were any," said one dark-skinned boga de agua dulce (freshwater sailor) squatting idly on a pier. "They hunted alligators to death," remarked another, "and now the ghosts are cursing this river...
Chickens & Whistles. Ever since the Conquistadores, the long (1,071 miles), broad Magdalena has been Colombia's chief traffic artery. It was always silt-laden, a river continually chewing at its banks. The coming of steam made things worse; woodburning stern-wheelers stopped to cut into the tropical forests for fuel. That made for greater erosion, and also for a quicker rain runoff, with the result that the river could be high one day, low a few days later. Sandbars piled up so fast that steamers could not follow the same course from one day to the next...