Just four davits poking out of the water off Port Sudan mark the spot where a courageous Italian captain scuttled the Umbria at the outbreak of World War II to save its dangerous cargo from capture—a cargo that lies there to this day rusting under a growth of coral.

"I had seven idle hours to catalog the joys of desert travel: skin that shrivels to that of a ... mummy ... eyeballs that ache and twitch from the blazing glare, lungs that rasp with dust ... cracked lips ... soreness in bone and muscle ... eardrums ringing from the growl of the diesel engine..."

To Ibrahim Ali Badran, the days start in futility and end in numbness, with emptiness, monotony and boredom in between. Ibrahim is a refugee and for 20 years he and his family have plodded through life in a haze of hopelessness in which the future has little meaning and every day is as long as a lifetime.

The discovery of oil in Dammam No. 7 and the loading of the first tanker were landmark events as the '30's drew to a close, but there were other changes too: the quiet efforts to define frontiers, and the arrival of replacements for those who had found the oil and gone along.

Who's Mrs. Mooslie? Well, she's a sort of an artist. Not quite a cartoonist but not really an illustrator either. A caricaturist, maybe? Yes, a caricaturist, that's what she is. And one day as she was passing through the Middle East, she looked out the window, smiled, picked up her sketch pad and...

The stonemasons who erected the little temple of Dendur on the banks of the Nile some 2,000 years ago could have never imagined that it might someday vanish beneath the waters of a lake—or that its rescue would mean reconstruction in a land that no one dreamed existed.