Word: swarm
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...photographic evidence is unequivocal: his smile was different, the way he held his body was different. Walter Mondale was finally relaxing. Back in the north woods of his native Minnesota for a glorious week, he had no swarm of reporters around him constantly nagging, plenty of home-cooked meals (steaks, barbecued chicken, fresh fish), and time with the whole family in a rustic cabin on Gunflint Lake...
Below all the other layers of workers come the pepenadores, the rubbish pickers, who swarm like rats through the reeking mountains of garbage in the main city dump, the Santa Fe. There are about 2,500 regulars there, roughly one for each ton of trash dumped daily. By picking through the pile for resalable bits of metal or plastic, they, hope to earn enough to survive. Says Pablo Téllez Falcón, 45, the chief of the dump: "They regard us as the shabby people who work in the slime with a bottle of tequila in the back...
...military has also confiscated tons of weapons, along with private yachts and aircraft, and destroyed more than 200 other clandestine airstrips. A veteran pilot described the country's underworld air traffic as resembling "a swarm of bees combing the jungle for their honey...
...Greek landscape is not always so peaceable. Later in the novel, when the boys approach water, they are set upon by a cloud of stinging insects. Panagis reports: the main body of the swarm moved to block our way, and the air became so thick that the last rays of the sun could not penetrate it. It was as though the air had taken a visible body and was eager to show its pulse and its muscle, its twisting limbs at each point of severance, and its furious powers of regeneration....as its body blocked our view...
HAVIARAS'S powers broaden when he shifts from describing the countryside to describing humanity. As Panagis and the others move away from the insect swarm, they find a man lying unconscious and nearly dead by the water. When they look inside the baskets of the man's mule, they see "the severed heads of four or five young men and women. The mule's owner was a headhunter, receiving pay for the heads of leftist sympathizers: Haviaras lingers on such scenes, making us feel, in the thoroughness of his description, the impact they have on Greek children...