Word: sworded
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...smoke of the village cooking fires mingles with the evening mist rising off the Kameng River as two Indian engineers appear on the balcony of the Dewana Hotel. Our heads are surrounded by a hungry halo of mosquitoes, and on the street below, a Nishi tribesman wielding a sword wanders drunkenly among yapping dogs - until a half-century ago, his people had engaged in the quaint practice of headhunting. "You're perfectly mad to come here for a holiday," one of the engineers bellows. "For us, this is a punishment posting...
...Kameng is also territory of the Nishi. Fierce forest dwellers, the Nishi wear a bird-beak hat (a fashion trend that has driven the Great Indian Hornbill to near extinction in Arunachal), carry a long sword and wear a stuffed rodent around the neck to ward off evil jungle spirits. I'm hoping to see real Nishis on home turf, not the sorry figure wobbling in the alley below...
...Nishis gather as we prepare our vessels at the water's edge. "Is it elephant skin?" asks a boy, poking our raft. A Nishi unsheathes his sword from a monkey-fur scabbard, and waves it over his head, dancing. In broken Hindi, he calls out: "Hey! Next time, you bring me a foreign woman!" The Nishi has been impressed by the posters of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in a tea shop up on the road, and believes they may be worth a few wild cattle in trade. As we head into the current, a few younger Nishi gather...
...government wants the car companies to believe that it has put a Sword of Damocles over the head of the industry. If GM and Chrysler look up, they will see it is not really there...
...took a special brand of cruelty to stand out amid the horrors of the Holocaust, but "Ivan the Terrible" was no ordinary sadist. As a Nazi guard, Ivan earned his sobriquet by ushering thousands of prisoners - sometimes hacking them with a sword as they passed - into the gas chambers at Poland's Treblinka death camp. After the war, he vanished. Decades later, in the late 1970s, U.S. authorities fingered a suspect: John Demjanjuk, a retired autoworker residing in a Cleveland suburb...