Both Night Cries and beDevil are at first viewing so shockingly original they might have been made on Mars, though their dense weirdness is structured through Moffatt's highly original appropriation of midcentury film pioneer Charles Chauvel's feature Jedda (1955), about an Aboriginal girl brought up by a white family on a remote Outback cattle station, and Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi's four-episode ghost story, Kaidan (1964), respectively.

Nevertheless, cities such as Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Riyadh, Jedda and Kuwait are the sites of some of the world's most flashy buildings, constructed by international architects alas famous for their design ability rather than their understanding of Islamic culture.

During his stay in Jedda, the Saudi distrust of the Italians looked unmistakably obvious to Grobba, and became more so after the Saudi government expelled the Italian air mission in February 1939.