Word: terraine
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...shadow of the Rocky Mountains on the rolling terrain of Browning, Mont., sits a squat, 40,000-sq.-ft. powder-blue building that houses a most unusual factory. The clattering machines that each day churn out 600,000 pens, pencils and markers are ordinary enough, but the work force is special. The warehouse manager, for example, is Donald Little Bull, and the second-shift supervisor is Le-Roy Bullshoe. The chief executive is Chief Earl Old Person, 52, head of the Blackfeet tribe and chairman of the Blackfeet Indian Writing...
Readers of The Scotch (1964) are reminded of the dour, industrious breed of Canadian farmers that molded the future agricultural economist, Harvard professor, Washington bureaucrat, journalist and diplomat: "A long day following a plodding, increasingly reluctant team behind a harrow endlessly back and forth over the uninspiring Ontario terrain persuaded one that all other work was easy...
...embarks on elaborate multiple fantasies of ifs, he enters abstract forests of luck and chance, of contingency and probability, where each speculative path opens onto a thousand new possibilities. Usually the mind penetrates only a few steps, looks nervously over its shoulder, then bolts back to the hard terrain of actuality. Luck is, by definition, mysterious, a force that may really be the clunkingly erratic, everyday version of the divine mind. Luck is God in a scatterbrained and even amoral mood, with his sense of justice out of commission. Or, agnostically, luck is the collision of the random with human...
...summer China's central Hubei province suffered weeks of torrential rains that led to the worst flooding the country has seen in 26 years. While giant dikes held back the main torrent of the mighty Yangtze River, 142 branch levees burst, spilling water over the low, rice-growing terrain, affecting some 6.2 million peasant families. Says one observer of the disaster area: "Much of the land is covered by silt and debris, and can't be cultivated. There are villages where absolutely everything has been swept away." Though a cleanup is well under way, tens of thousands...
...stop listening to their wise tutors and begin behaving suspiciously like members of the human race. The Canopean overseers sadly change the place's name to Shikasta, "the hurt, the damaged, the wounded one." In The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five (1980), Lessing unveils a different terrain in her new universe. A queen and king from adjoining regions are commanded by the mysterious powers to marry and restore fertility to their kingdoms. They do not like each other. Their struggles to obey the order are comic, poignant and ultimately successful...