"The Al-Batin Diaries" are the intimate record of a year spent by William Bryant in a remote military base in Saudi Arabia where he was assigned to produce basic medical texts for Saudi students. King Khaled Military City is a world without women populated by young Third World construction workers whose lives and desperate sexual practices are described in detail, along with those of Saudis and other Arabs. The journals are full of notes for the comic erotic novel that Bryant is writing at the same time, the text of which is included in the second part of the book.