Years ago just the mention of the famous Orient Express was enough to evoke images of romance, danger, intrigue and elegance. That this reputation was never entirely justified and is today more than slightly out dated is the gist of this amusing report from Brainerd Bates who rode the Express from Paris to Istanbul a few months back and found the trip as hard on his illusions as on his appetite.

In this installment, the second from Wallace Stegner's book on the pioneering period in Aramco's history, the author focuses on the crucial three and a half months when Lloyd Hamilton sat down with the shrewdest men in Arabia to hammer out an agreement on how and when the search for Arabian oil would begin.

 From the air it was almost unbelievable: wide rivers foaming angrily through the deserts, village streets awash, the desert vastness transformed into a swamp of shallow pools and small ponds, and, at one place, a lake more than half a mile long, with waves breaking against the great trans-Arabian pipeline and a film of oil spreading across the surface. The Great Badanah Flood was underway.

Among the approximately 300,000 Muslims who made the pilgrimage to Mecca last year was an Aramco photographer named Shaikh Muhammad Amin. He, his wife, and his mother and father, who had begun their pilgrimage in Pakistan, crossed Saudi Arabia by train and by car to make what in Islam is the most sacred of their duties to God. On the way he recorded the look and the feel of a pilgrimage as seen and made by a Muslim.

"See Naples," they used to say, "and die." In Lebanon they paraphrase it: "See Jounieh and live." Jounieh is a small village north of Beirut, a village of red roofs and quiet streets on a strip of sand just below a deep bowl of forested cliffs and pine clad mountains. It is also one of the loveliest places in the world.

There was always a hint of excitement in the Bible's short reference to "Ur of the Chaldees", a suggestion perhaps that the fame of Ur needed no amplification. But the real excitement did not begin until Sir Leonard Woolley carefully scraped away the earth of ancient Mesopotamia,' found Ur and unlocked some of the most puzzling mysteries in archeology.