1.   The desert was luminous, starkly beautiful.

2.   The Vietnam War Memorial is a starkly beautiful testimonial to the bravery of the soldiers who served in Vietnam.

3.   Not only by geography but also by distinctive Celtic traditions and antiquities, starkly beautiful landscapes, and a climate so mild and un-British that even palm trees flourish.

4.   Some also ride horses and four-wheelers in the starkly beautiful desert that is their back yard.

5.   The result, filmed in the starkly beautiful Canadian wilderness, is a low-key and heartfelt story of a small town that lives for its amateur ice hockey team.

6.   Prince Gyanendra also kept out of the limelight but is respected for his conservation work in the starkly beautiful but impoverished kingdom.

7.   Scattered Tuareg bands still roam the starkly beautiful horizons of northern Mali and neighboring Niger, light-skinned ethnic Berbers as mysterious as ever behind indigo veils.

8.   The Nanjing memorial is a starkly beautiful complex of galleries and walkways of rough granite blocks, surrounded by beds of stones representing the dead.