The sound of sudden inhalation followed, like water being sucked down a drain. I caught a glimpse of a pinkish gray hump before it vanished beneath the murky surface. “Boto,” said Soldado as he tossed his cigarette butt over the railing. The legendary Amazonian river dolphin. It surfaced again, and this time the animal sprayed water ten feet into

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Much of what was known in the Latin West about the intellectual life of the classical world was transmitted to it by Muslim scholars in Spain.35 The commercial life of the Muslim world had been far more advanced than that in much of Europe. Prestige goods and luxury wares, as well as silver and gold, flowed west into Europe, not the other way

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