IT was when the men in moon suits arrived that it really sank in. There they were, with breathing apparatus and impermeable all-in-ones, gingerly taking away the material that had been sitting for five years in an open-air scrapyard in the middle of the busiest part of town. Vegetables and meat had been sold around it, children and devotees of the neighbouring mosque and church had walked daily just metres from what was being treated like a ticking bomb. It was glass from the factory at the top of the town's forest-lined ridge, which produced nearly 10 million thermometers 1 a year for export to the West without a puff of black smoke in the sky. And it was being taken away using technical gadgets by a crack decontamination team for special disposal by experts in the United States of America. It was so dangerous that the soil beneath it was going too. The glass was edged with a poison