THE man who covers the Middle East for TIME must be a correspondent with his suitcase always packed, habituated to many small cups of sweet, strong coffee, tolerant of camels and Jeeps, and ready to entrust himself constantly to planes that have varying degrees of reliability. His area covers more than 5,000,000 sq. mi., or almost half as much again as the U.S. Middle East Bureau Chief George de Carvalho has seen a great deal of it in recent weeks, and though this adds up to a lot of sand in his eye. he has had the spur of a news story that has come alive in half a dozen spots at once.

Before the revolution in Iraq. De Carvalho hied himself to the fighting in Yemen, where he went deeper into royalist territory than any other U.S. correspondent. It was rough going, at a "tropic latitude and a mountain altitude," with nights freezing and days burning. It wasn't only the peril of dodging Egyptian fire; once, miles from the front, a bullet whizzed by, and then as he flattened himself, an other. Out from the brush, rifle in hand, came a woman. "I thought he was an Egyptian," she said. Among the galabiya-wearing Yemeni, only Egyptians are known to wear pants, and "your trousered correspondent" became an obvious target. De Carvalho emerged after 23 days in Yemen with a vivid story (TIME, March 8), establishing that the battle for Yemen was not going as Cairo said it was. Last week De Carvalho was in Jordan, reporting for our Nasser cover, and at the palace was greeted with a grin by King Hussein: "You scared us with those reports we got of your death in Yemen."

To help out with the cover reporting, TIME'S Bonn Bureau Chief James Bell flew out to Cairo to interview Nasser. To call Bell an old Middle East hand is to limit him geographically: he is an old Far East hand, an old Africa hand and an old German hand, as well as being a far-from-old and far-from-home Kansan. Back in the days when the young Egyptian army officer overthrew King Farouk's corrupt regime, Bell was the first correspondent to discover and report that the real head of the junta was not Mohammed Naguib, but an unknown colonel named Nasser. Now, seeing Nasser for the first time in nine years. Bell methodically noted his grey temples and greying hair and a figure as trim as ever. Weight? Nasser laughed: "I don't think anyone has asked me that since the last time you did. I think it's 85 kilos [187 lbs.] And I think I'm still 182 centimeters [6 ft.] tall."

THERE were other TIME correspondents traveling to faraway places for stories in this issue. From New Delhi, James Shepherd made his way to Sikkim's remote capital of Gangtok to see the charming wedding of the Crown Prince to his American bride.

Hope Cooke. Everyone was invited to lunch, and 5,000 came. Outsiders were introduced to chang, a "barley beer that works something like an atomic reactor," reports Shepherd, and is drunk through long, hollow bamboo tubes. Sikkimese were equally awed by being introduced to martinis.

Off to Costa Rica with President Kennedy to report his triumphant visit went two members of our Washington bureau, Jerry Hannifin, an old Latin American hand, and William Rademaekers, our new State Department correspondent.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.