By the time aid organizations began responding, rail-thin bodies were dropping dead in the dusty soil.
THE SUN WAS SETTING behind Laoshan's foothills when we rounded a bend in the trail, and there the dusty soil turned into packed mud.
In Ositeni, a village in central Malawi, a few withered maize stalks and yellowing cassava plants poke up from the dusty soil.
It is designed to slow the passage of monsoon flood-water, encouraging more of the precious liquid to infiltrate Ajit Pura's dusty soil.
The device, enough to destroy a pickup truck or tear apart several men, was buried beneath him in the dusty soil.
It's the patch of dark and dusty soil that reminds you perhaps you're not quite as good a gardener as you'd like to be.
Livelihoods are still tied to the earth, where people grow wheat and corn in the dusty soil, drill for the generous deposits of oil and gas beneath the surface and feed cows inside muddy pens that line the roads.
In the end, that explains its success: the British never intended to implant their summer game in India, yet it took root, like the trailing limbs of the banyan, wherever it touched the subcontinent's dusty soil.
Analysis of the dusty soil by Viking and Pathfinder lander instruments showed the principal constituent materials (in oxide forms by weight) to be silicon (SiO2; 46 percent), iron (Fe2O3; 18 percent), aluminum (Al2O3; 8 percent), magnesium (MgO; 7 percent), calcium (CaO; 6 percent), sulfur (SO3; 5.4 percent), sodium (Na2O; 2 percent), and potassium (K2O; 0.3 percent).
Researchers say this appears to be covered in many places by a soft, dusty "soil" about 15-20cm in depth.
