National Geographic March 1980 [antikvár]

IT HARDLY SEEMS twenty years since I first sailed the Aegean Sea as a young journalist on assignment for National Geographic. The memories that one makes in Greece have an indelible quality; they remain vivid and immediate for years. Like so many others, I had put my Army years behind me and looked forward to a postwar world of material progress, enlarged trade, and the growth of democratic societies in the many new nations that were beginning to emerge in Asia and Africa. It was a time that held the possibility that the centripetal forces of growth and international development would puli the nations of the world closer together and bind them in a common interest of peace and prosperity. History, as we know too well, has countervailing forces-tribalism, nationalism, ancient animosities that smolder through the centuries, the ürge to group around a strong leader, to follow the man-or the woman-on horseback. Humán society has been rent many times in the past two decades by the eruption of such forces. The prevailing mode of government in most of the new nations förmed in the past twenty years has not been democracy but dictatorship-by the military, by strong men, or by political parties of many stripes and hűes. Greece herself has experienced internál crisis and external confrontation. But one of the most important continuing efforts that did succeed in these years was the attempt to harmonize Europe's many diverse economies. The European Common Markét, which now includes the European Economic Community, has quietly and decisively created an international force as powerful as the industrial prodigies of the United States and Japan. When Greece joined the EEC last year, it seemed a good time to renew our reporting that began in 1913 and included, in 1944, a memorable article by the noted scholar Edith Hamilton. Senior staff writer PeterT. White found that the Greeks still have the knack of living on that bittersweet edge of life that comes only from long acquaintance with the often ruined but always persistent hopes of history.^ THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINÉ VOL. 157, NO. 3 COPYRIGHT © 1980 BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY WASHINGTON, D. C. INTERNATIONAL COPYRIGHT SECURED March 1980 Journey to China's Far West 292 Rick Gore and Bruce Dale c hronicle an awakening giant in what they are told is "the best of times," as a National Geographic scientific team travels across rarely visited Chinese desert regions. Home to North Carolina 333 A California newspaperman returns to his native state tofind that the Sunbelt boom has not spoiled its TarHeel spiritand small-townflavor. By Neil Morgan, photographs by Bili Weems. Greece: "ToBelndomitable, ToBeJoyous" 360 Prosperingunder democratic rule and newly won membership in the European Economic Community, modern-day Greeks press on with their age-old business of getting the most out oflife. Peter T. White and James P. Blair report. Creatures That Deceive to Survive 394 Nature's web holds many an impostor in disguise, looking amazingly like something it isn't, observes natural science photographer Róbert F. Sisson. Bali Celebrates a Festival ofFaith 416 The beauty and complexity ofunique religious rites, held to restore harmony to the universe, are caught in a photographic essay by Fred and Margaret Eiseman, with text by Peter Miller. Treasure From a Celtic Tomb 428 An educated hunch leads archaeologist JörgBiel to dig into a rocky hillock in West Germany and uncoveranobleman's tomb of25 centuries ago, the most important early Celtic find ofthis century. Photographs byVolkmarWentzel. COW ER: A bespectacled elder ofLanzhou in northern China has witnessed remarkable changes that socialism and industrialization have brought. Photograph by Bruce Dale.