Like all hunters, Reda Abdul-Samad found the migratory birds irresistible targets as they swarmed down on this island of green in the gravel plains of northern Arabia. Until one day...

There was a time when any suggestion that traditional Arab forms could be married to modern architecture would have been laughed off the drawing boards. But not, we think, any longer.

The tortured ravines of Cappadocia might well have been scratched out by the devil, but the wondrous frescoed caves which honeycomb them are surely inspired by God.

Deep in the earth, vast land masses, straining against each other, suddenly shift; high above, the land buckles and heaves in nature's most terrifying cataclysm.

In Egypt they call him Goha, in Italy Jugale, in Turkey Nasreddin, but everywhere they laugh at the impudent wit of one of history's wisest fools.

In the quiet hours at dawn they begin to gather along the Beirut shoreline, almost unnoticed, somehow outside the hectic daily round of the city.