Word: mudding
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...dust over California's Mojave Desert. Oil-drum devices released mushroom clouds to simulate atomic attack. In the 105° heat, smoke generators threw up acrid screens. Fighter-bombers singed the sand with the blast of their afterburners. The normally green Colorado River turned brown with machine-swirled mud, black with slicks of oil. Helicopters chattered, machine guns clattered and men swore...
...hustle Premier Nguyen Khanh's regime into stepped-up action against the ever more aggressive Red guerrillas. The latest factor that hampers U.S. efforts is that old Asian standby, the rainy season, which is now beginning over South Viet Nam's Mekong Delta. As usual, while the mud and discomfort would seem to be the same for both sides, they favor the enemy...
Creeping Crickets. Twice a day, usually in early afternoon and again at dusk, the warm monsoon rains patter down. The paddies of the delta are already flooded ankle-deep. Plodding patiently across them, in a tableau ancient as the land itself, peasants in conical hats and mud-caked pants thrust pale green rice shoots into the fertile soil beneath the water. And in the humid dusk, countless crickets sing out-or get themselves captured by small boys who sell them to gambling elders for cricket fights...
From Khartoum to Aswan, the Nile runs through bleak desert. This is Nubia, the land of the Cush, of the mud-building Fung people, of temples and heat, where the Nile hurriedly bears its load of diluted loam over transverse ribs of crystalline rock, granite and diorite-the Six Cataracts. Below the Second Cataract, it skids through a 100-mile chute, the Batn el Hagar (Belly of Stones), studded with gleaming black islets. Then below Aswan it enters the Egypt of antiquity. Here the neolithic men of North Africa gathered as the grassy Saharan plains dried up into desert following...
Already many lesser structures have gone under. The distinctive mud houses of some 50,000 Nubians, their walls of tobey (from which Spanish takes the word adobe) gaudily painted with symbols ranging from scorpions to flowering steamboats, dissolve and collapse as the Nile laps among them. Of 43 villages, 33 have already been evacuated, their citizens relocated in stone-and-cement villages replete with grocery markets and food-processing plants, at Kom Ombo, 40 miles north of Aswan. Many Nubians resent the move. Their culture, which survived waves of invaders from the Egyptians to the Turks, seems doomed to certain...