Some of the smallest towns and villages have become deserted as people moved to the bigger towns and cities.
Eastwood gave no sign of being tired, even though other tables in the room had become deserted and he, like others in the crew, had an early-morning call.
So many buildings have become deserted and then torn down that great swaths of empty space remain.
By the end of 1988, dozens of villages in Armenia had become deserted, as most of Armenia's more than 200,000 Azerbaijanis and Muslim Kurds left.
Over the last half-century, an area the size of France in the northern part of Africa has become desert.
"This is partly symbolic, but we hope to save water too because our lakes have become deserts," deputy Bangkok governor, Amorn Kijchawengjul, said at the time.
The race on Sunday is the culminating moment of these race weekends, and by the time it is over, the paddock, in the space of a couple of hours, has already become deserted of all but the truck drivers, mechanics and others who put the road show together and take it apart.
The harsh answer, argues Richard Millet, a novelist and editor, in his recent book, "Harcèlement Littéraire", a devastating assault on the contemporary French novel, is that "French literature has become a desert".
As a result, the rural economy of the Karachi district has been devastated and much of the pasture land has become a desert.
When your own life has become a desert and no longer a source for your own happiness, you risk no longer being satisfied with what you do have––which is a lot.
It is still so extraordinary to see boats traveling any distance on the Tigris, which has become a smelly, shrunken, deserted, refuse-strewn ghost of its former splendor, that dozens of curious employees of a nearby power plant applauded and cheered when Mr. Ahmed capped his amber bottle and placed it among the others in what resembled a picnic basket.
