TIME Correspondent Edward Behr. 36, served in the British army in India, worked as a reporter for Reuters in London and Paris, and as a member of our Paris staff has traveled through most of Europe. For four years he covered the Algerian war, and wrote a book about it last year.

In short, he has been to enough familiar and remote places to know better than to be beguiled by tourist brochures. But in the course of a 13-day tour through Communist Albania, on which he reports this week, Behr found the gap between fact and pictured fancy even wider than he expected. "Visiting Albania." he said, "is like putting the clock back and waking up in the Balkans of the 16th century, with telephone wires, modern weapons, and a little motor transport added."

Behr woke up to the backwardness of Albania early in his stay. Setting out to replace a razor (he had lost his suitcase in Budapest), he discovered that the only kind available was locally made -and lethal. It worked only by taking off large slices of skin. Behr mentioned this casually to his Albanian guide, who replied simply: "There is always some trouble about our razor." The shopping trip had one advantage: Behr got one of his few chances to talk alone with a native Albanian, a pharmacist who had been to Paris years ago. and who plaintively asked whether things were the same on the Left Bank.

Behr's guide was well aware that he was no tourist, but decided that throwing him out of the country was pointless. In turn. Behr knew that the driver of their touring car was a member of the secret police. To divert the guide's attention while a photographer took pictures. Behr (in fractured German) tried to engage him in conversation. Once, when the guide mentioned that he had translated Bertolt Brecht's play, Mother Courage, into Albanian, Behr diverted him by describing at length a meeting with Brecht in Paris in 1953. Behr found the guide, who had never been outside Albania, almost pathetically curious about the outside world. And for those curious in turn about Albania, the hardest place to survive in all Europe. see Behr's report in THE WORLD.

COVER Artist Boris Artzybasheff is well known for his gift of playfully animating spaceships, big drill presses, power lawn mowers and other solemn objects. On this week's cover, he has not only given life to the moon rocket, but left a hidden message on the moon for taxpayers to ponder.

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