Word: watered
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...scene to gladden even the most jaded cruise director. The open-air movie was filled to capacity with a bronzed, relaxed audience. In the swimming pool near by, energetic types were splashing away at water polo. From the "Bikini" bar came the clink of glasses and the hum of bar babble, and in the soft glow cast by indirect neon lighting, palm leaves fluttered...
Only one thing marred the luxury-liner atmosphere that hung last week over the self-contained little world called Hassi Messaoud (Blessed Well): the waves that billowed around it were of sand, not of water. Hassi Messaoud, the Dawson City of the great French oil rush of 1959, lies deep in the barren wastes of the Sahara, 400 miles (or three days by truck) south of Algiers...
Four years ago Hassi Messaoud was simply an abandoned water hole, a navigational reference point for voyagers across the vast sea of sand and stone that the Romans called leonum arida nutrix- the arid nurse of lions. Today it has 5,000 inhabitants, sprawls over nearly 60 square miles of desert. Hassi Messaoud still has no women, no children, no church, no mosque. But it does have three hotels (650 rooms in air-conditioned cottages), two movie theaters, two swimming pools, an airport big enough to handle Caravelle jets, and 124 private firms, including an automatic laundry and a lemonade...
...political maneuvers. His appointments (ten a day) begin soon after breakfast, among fine Aztec and Mayan treasures in his book-lined apartment on Paris' elegant Avenue Henri-Martin. By 10 o'clock he is in the office, and he often lunches there, washing his meals down with water. ("You see in me," he chuckles, "one of the rare Frenchmen who do not like wine.") Dinner, too, and often evenings are apt to be business affairs, after which, "Every night I read for hours. The academic addiction...
Biggest difficulty of all lies in supplies, of which Hassi Messaoud alone consumes 2,400 tons a week. Almost everything but water (which is mercifully plentiful underground) has to be flown or trucked into the camps from Algiers. A truck driver on the Algiers-Edjelé run, accustomed to six or seven blowouts per trip, and to having his truck frequently immobilized by sandstorms for days on end, says: "Every time I reach Edjelé, I collapse more or less where I stand, and swear I will never make the run again...