Through the lens of a photographer visiting in a remote Lebanese village, a photographer who could resist them no longer, comes the winsome charm, the shy beauty, the healthy vigor of these artless, lovely, children of the mountain.

Nobody could ever quite reconstruct what happened, but whatever it was, it was enough. Some tiny tick or scratch or jar, some bubble of gas as inconsequential as a hiccup, and all that enormous curbed energy erupted in destructive flame.

From Abqaiq to Ras Tanura, both oil communities in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, it is usually no more than a 90-mile drive. For a very good reason, however, two Aramco "' supertrucks" recently added 125 miles to the trip—most of them in empty desert.

He was a man as stark and unyielding as the desert wastes he traveled. And although he was also a peerless explorer, when he returned to write one of the world's epics of survival he saw it not as a tale of adventure, but as a monument to uncorrupted English prose.

For Saudi Arabia the great jets of the Kingdom's airline—now the biggest fleet in the Middle East—are silver needles that stitch together the far flung parts of the immense Arabian subcontinent and weave a tapestry of progress high in the desert sky.

Romans, Saxons and Ecuadorean Indians collected sea shells as charms. Fiji Islanders wore them as jewelry. North American Indians used them for money, Phoenicians for making dye. And Aristotle, naturally, wrote a treatise on them.