What time is it, Sir? Do you mean Arabic time or western sun time? Arabic time? Well, at sundown you set your watch to read 12 o'clock.... Oh, Zulu time.' Well that's just basic Greenwich mean time but if you're going to Dhahran, Sir, you'll have to change to Greenwich mean time plus four unless they've gone on daylight saving time in which case... Sir? Sir?

They had come to find oil and they had found oil. Now the question was how to fend off the competition. One way was to market the petroleum as quickly as possible. In May 1939, after a spectacular visit designed to commemorate this historic moment, King Ibn Sa'ud turned the valve that would send his nation's oil to the world and let the world even further into Saudi Arabia.

You might have to go a long way to find an art gallery in Saudi Arabia but you wouldn't have to go anywhere to find art. All you would have to do is stand at the edge of the highway anywhere in the kingdom and watch the gayest trucks in the world go cruising by.

No, refineries do not move, topping units do not explode in rays of light and the deserts sands are not purple. They just look that way in the new experimental approach to what yesterday was just plain, old industrial photography.

While sorting papers in her attic a few months ago Mary Garvin Eddy came across three photostated clippings from the Times of London. She sat down to read than and was soon scribbling a letter to her grandchildren, a letter telling how the Eddy family years ago wrote one fascinating footnote in the history of the Middle East.

"A dense black arch enveloped the whole horizon, and the space beneath... was filled up with a body of dust of brownish, orange color, whirling around, and at the same time advancing... with fearful rapidity... the crash broke upon us like the boom of artillery, and the hurricane seemed... bent upon hurling both steamers at once to the bottom of the foaming river."