These skirmishes are taking place in a sparsely populated land of sand, shrubs and occasional oases.

Rocks, scrub vegetation, an occasional oasis, its green stopping with the irrigation system as abruptly as if sheared with scissors.

"I think all of us long for an occasional oasis from every inclination or idea costing $8 to $10 million," said Michael David, the company's president.

These stretches were relatively short and had the essential network of occasional oases that established the routing as inexorably as pins in a map.

Other than the occasional oasis, the only relief from the bleak desolation was the Euphrates, half a mile east of the road the army was taking.

Behind them lay the interminable vista of the desert, dotted here and there with an occasional oasis.

Only an occasional oasis laying low in semi fertile valleys fed by mineral laden volcanic soil breaks its moonlike landscape.

For those who simply can't get giddy pondering the latest hairstyles on "Friends," the public system, however flawed, provides at least an occasional, and indispensable, oasis of substance.

But the journey from soup to nuts, both narrative and metaphysical, that links the evening's occasional oases is slow going.

Yet the occasional oasis makes the search worthwhile.