Word: sniff
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Whooshing from airport to similar airport, jet travelers usually find the world a pretty homogeneous place. Theroux destroys this illusion. His often snail-like pace (one local in southern India makes 94 stops) gives him the not always pleasant chance to sniff out local differences. "The first condition of understanding a foreign country," T.S. Eliot once wrote, "is to smell it," and Theroux misses nothing, from the burned coal that permeates Indian train stations to the poisonous industrial fumes of Osaka...
...criminal underworld, the aristocratic thief outwits crushers (cops), noses (informers) and Establishment nibs to assemble the four keys needed to grab the gold. By subversion, bribery and tricks far dirtier than the king's men ever dreamed of, the ringleader and his scruffy accomplices come within a sniff of the swag, only to meet their greatest obstacle: an obscure law of physics...
...northwest, a region of rugged, treeless hills where only cactus and mesquite seem to flourish. There were heavy rains in November when, as Baptist Missionary Vance Brown puts it, "the people went crazy planting like they've never planted before. And then we didn't get another sniff of rain for seven months." The winter crop was lost and the spring crop, which normally would be planted in April, was never put in at all. To make matters still worse, a mysterious disease called "yellowing" has killed coconut palms that were a source of nourishment during previous droughts...
...Noble Savage. Biblically reminded that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," assured by anthropologists that Homo sapiens is descended from a killer ape, shocked by recent accounts of a primitive Ugandan culture based on sadism (TIME, Nov. 20, 1972), modern man is inclined to sniff suspiciously at any breath of air from the morning of the world. But this air is genuine and fresh...
...Yuval, 19, is a tank-corps officer stationed in Sinai. For years the family lived in a house in the Tel Aviv suburb of Zahala, just around the corner from Moshe Dayan, but decided to move last year. For one thing, says the vivacious Leah Rabin with a sniff, living next to Dayan was noisy because his motorcade was constantly careening around in front of their house. Her husband, by contrast, is a shy man of simple tastes who "eats only for nourishment" and has a preference for salami. As for clothing, groans Leah, "God forbid that his suits should...