While I'd never been to Pakistan, I'd seen plenty of towns like this one just across the border in Afghanistan, perched on a knife edge between life and death, settlements where the people had nothing in their lives except for war, a few goats and a lot of religion.
[…] I know every life is equally sacred, but that is a thought, another thought, I mean, all these valuable people who aren’t going to have their normal fourscore as it is now, these people aren’t going to be replaced, and it’s such a loss to the culture.
the elevation of my apartments furnished a subject for conversation, which, without somesuch help, we should have been in danger of wanting.
In winter the thermometer on the Mongolian plateau sometimes drops to –40° Fahrenheit, yet the camels wander about with no sense of suffering. On the other hand, the Russian explorer, Prejevalski, found the temperature of the ground in the Gobi Desert in summer to be more than 140° Fahrenheit, and the camels are apparently as indifferent to this degree of heat as they are to the winter cold.
