Books: Terror in the Desert

BY THE NORTH GATE (255 pp.)—Gwyn Griffin—Holt ($3.95).

The "gate" of the book's title is taken from a Chinese poem in which a lonely man in a watchtower looks out across a barbarous and a desolate land. But it is also the gate at which the sentinels of civilization have always stood guard and always died in the end. The scene of this modern tale of horror is Africa, where the Roman watch fell to the Vandals 1,500 years ago, and where today the British guard is falling to nationalism. Whatever its accuracy as an omen, By the North Gate is one...