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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (adjective)
[FEB-rahl, FEE-brahl] 
1. of, relating to, or typical of fever; feverish: "Mary would test her children for febrile temperatures by pressing her lips against their foreheads."
Origin:
Approximately 1651; from Medieval Latin, 'febrilis'; from Latin, 'febris': fever. In action:
"But events were to overtake him. In February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran, overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic republic. A shudder of excitement and fear ran through Muslims everywhere. In November -- and bin Laden was later to refer to this as a crucial, formative event -- Islamic radicals seized the grand mosque at Mecca and held it against Saudi government forces. Bin Laden, young, impressionable, increasingly devout but still unsure of himself and his vocation, was stunned. Eventually, after much bloodshed, the rebels were defeated. 'He was inspired by them,' a close friend told The Observer last month. 'He told me these men were true Muslims and had followed a true path.'
Sooner than anyone expected, bin Laden got his chance to follow them. In the last days of the year Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan.
It is just 30 miles from the Afghan border to the febrile Pakistani city of Peshawar. The road winds down through the Khyber Pass, through the badlands ruled by the violent and unruly Pashtun tribes, past the relics of battles fought by men from a score of armies -- Greek, Arab, Mongol, Sikh and British -- and then disappears into the choking mayhem of the city's bazaars.
In the spring of 1980, with yet another army's tanks parked up against the frontier, Peshawar was seething with soldiers, spies, gun-runners, drug dealers, Afghan refugees, exiles, journalists and, of course, the thousands of sympathizers who had flocked from all over the Muslim world to fight the Soviet forces."
Jason Burke. "The making of Osama bin Laden," The Observer (November 1, 2001).
"I left the crowd to make my way around a traffic circle where grimy Volgas honked and sprayed slush as they passed and Zhigulis dodged trams with headlights flashing yellow through streaks of soot, and started across the long bridge over the Yenisey River. The air was frigid and the Yenisey, one of Siberia's great waterways, should have been iced over, but it was feverishly warm: a fog -- a febrile, slightly fetid vapor -- rose from it in curls and miasmic wisps and brought on a sweat and a penetrating chill. Since the construction of the thermo-electric plant upstream at Divnogorsk, the Yenisey rarely froze, and the city had warmed up. The fierce Russian frosts ('frosts so strong they burn your face,' as Siberians like to say) had become a matter of lore, like horse-drawn droshky and dueling counts on gentry estates."
Jeffrey Tayler. "'Would God forgive Lenin?',"[In a lonely tower above the mean streets of Krasnoyarsk, a wanderer encounters the fervent heart of Russia's abiding faith.] Salon.com (December 1, 1999).
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