The Hotel Imperial was still regal, with its dusty red roof and turrets and newly buffed neo-Classical facade standing sentinel over the town, as they had since 1912.
The high-rise buildings inside the compound, with their bright blue swimming pools on apartment balconies, jar against the dusty red roofs of the surrounding, low-lying favelas.
It was a city of "dusty tin roofs, urban wasteland of scrap iron and thistles, [and] parched hillsides".
Surrounded with rich Malian farmland and dotted with white thatched-roof huts, the Niger River snakes into the horizon on one side, and a dusty road connects the property to the sleepy town of Sélingué.
Ms. Amin and Mr. Rasool, 27, grew up across the dusty road from each other, where each family had expanded in a string of houses so close together that their roofs nearly touched.
Soon, the emblem of the dusty Wild West spread to his roof and wrapped around the house.
Conical thatch-roofed huts flanked the dusty clearing in Rumbek.
MOLASUR, INDIA — On a rainy day in the South Indian village of Molasur, a dusty warren of thatch huts, tiled roofs and brightly painted temples, I met a man named M. Das.
But for now, a dusty mud shack with its plastic roofing is all she can call home.
Families come great distances to sit in this dusty roadside stall with nothing but a thatched roof and a bunch of plastic tables.
