Word: mudding
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...black, silver-sequined tent of a Moroccan chieftain sat a dark-haired beauty. And before her on a dusty plain, a multitude of bearded Berber tribes men played at war for her amusement. Outside the ancient, mud-walled city of Marrakech, the turbaned warriors wheeled and galloped, sending great swirls of dust toward the tent, fired their silver-banded muzzle-loaders into the air in thunderous explosions of good black powder...
...green alarm clock. A yellowed baby picture. A small wad of lire. A mattress. A red and black shawl. A lone playing card (the king of clubs). An ancient Olivetti typewriter. A crumpled Fiat. An electric pylon twisted off its concrete base. A church steeple protruding from the mud. Such were the scattered remains of a town called Longarone, which last week was wiped off the face of the earth...
...high Vaiont Dam, 2½ miles from the town. The splash sent a 300-ft.-high tidal wave across the reservoir. Spilling over the lip, the avalanche of water cascaded into a gorge leading to the nearby Piave River. It churned up tons of rock and mud, and hit Longarone. Then the flood bounced off a mountainside, turned around, hit Longarone again, and continued down the Piave Valley...
...leaped from their beds fearing an earthquake as the torrent of water and debris thundered past. Then they noticed that the lights of Longarone had gone out. In just seven minutes, virtually everything and everybody in the chalet-bedecked villaggio had been swept away by water or entombed in mud. With pickaxes and shovels, soldiers dug fearfully into the muck, by week's end had unearthed 1,500 bodies. Of Longarone's peaceful populace of 3,500, the carabinieri feared that only a handful survived...
President Villeda Morales, a pediatrician turned reform politician, almost made it; the coup came only ten days before elections to choose a new President. It undid six years of hard work to change the banana republic's image of mud-hut misery, one-crop economics and machine gun politics...