Word: uplands
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Like many race myths, the legend of Arjuna clothes a simple economic fact: in the upland valleys, existence depends upon a limited number of tiny terraced fields and the careful balancing of population against food reserves. Each family avoids dividing its meager tillage in ever-diminishing lots among its progeny by having the younger sons share the wife of the eldest son. Not only does this practice reduce the number of children in each generation, and keep each property permanently within the family, but it has some other curious results. Polyandry, for some reason not wholly accounted for by anthropologists...
...typical grower at last week's dedication was Paul R. Daggs, a spare, twinkling-eyed man who lives in Upland, Calif, and has 25 acres of lemons and oranges a few miles outside town. After Daggs sprays, irrigates and fertilizes his fruits, the co-op will pick, sort, grade and market about 16,000 boxes of oranges and lemons for him. They should bring approximately $150,000 on the market and, after all expenses, leave Daggs with a $15,000 profit for his year's work. Daggs sometimes complains about the heavy pyramid over his head...
...swirling, kingdom-come downpour streamed down the mountain spine to the narrow coastal plain, spilling out the tiny rivers into a torrent of yellow foam; it took the huts and the houses, the roads and the railroads, the bridges and the viaducts; it brought down landslides to crush the upland villages. Countless thousands were marooned on islands of high ground, perched in quivering treetops, watching and fearful as the mud-churning waters flowed past. Rubbing her prayer beads, an old lady said: "I have lived a long time, but I have never seen anything like this...
...rain had fallen, with a recorded peak of 21 inches at Hita, Oita Prefecture. The toll: 457 known dead, 1,114 missing, 901 injured; some 800,000 homeless; 4,000 homes destroyed or washed away, 300,000 homes damaged or flooded, 350,000 acres of rich paddy and upland fields ruined and gone. The cost: $50 million to $100 million. For Kyushu, where it rains twice as much as it does elsewhere in Japan, it was the worst flood catastrophe in 61 years...
Stretching for some 190 miles along the southern slopes of the Himalayas, north of India and south of Tibet, lies the most remote kingdom in the world. The upland valleys of tiny (18,000 sq. mi.) Bhutan are as green and inviting as those of Shangri-La, and the passes that lead into them just as forbidding. Icy winds howl along the snowswept plains behind the mountain passes to discourage the traveler. Rugged barriers of snow and ice rise as high as 24,000 ft. Dense semitropical growth clogs the lower valleys. Fever haunts the forests, making them uninhabitable...