"They were going to interrogate him...the people from the Palestinian club wanted an observer there. I was right outside and there was this mob around the little door, and one security guard trying to keep the mob out. And I was too dark to take pictures but I just kept clicking to keep the pressure on and eventually they let in an observer...the danger of having it all recorded on film had scared them. And that impressed me with the power of photography. As I said earlier, I don't hold out any great hopes that it can change the whole world, but I certainly think that it's a force...it's especially a pressure on totalitarian systems.

On the kitchen counter at 36 Irving St. is an Etch-a-Sketch. On the grey face above the two knobs are not the usual convoluted stick men, shaky square house, or the even more usual quasigeometrical mess of random shapes and wiggles. Glaring from the screen is a squat, intricate medieval demon named Baphomet, who has a cross in his crotch, a flaming eye in his right hand and a nasty leer on his toothy face. Baphomet used to be regarded as the guardian of the gates of hell, and here, on the kitchen counter, in the squiggly confines of the Etch-a-Sketch, he has been quite vividly reproduced.

Mark has an amazing talent with the Etch-a-Sketch. For a while, he did a different one every day. Hamlet holding Yorick's skull. More demons, some of them on motorcycles. Scenes from the Arabian Nights. When he went back to Cairo to visit his fiancee, after finishing his thesis, Mark said goodbye to the house with a pyramid landscape, replete with all three pyramids, a blazing sunset, a camel and himself waving goodbye in the distance. The round knobs just don't look capable of it.

The demon Baphomet is actually outside Mark's usual field of arcane knowledge, as he specialized in Egyptology and Baphomet is of European origin ("Some of my roommates used to joke about him in the bathroom. 'Don't forget to wipe your feet on the Baph-o-mat.")Mark does, though, have command over a whole panoply of gods and kings.

"My interest in Egyptology began in third grade. It was a social studies class on Egypt. We had an assignment to do a design for the traps inside a pyramid. Mine went on for about three or four sheets of construction paper, and finally they had to tell me to stop," he laughs, "I had crocodile pits, everything...it was great."

Now, after five years as an Egyptologist, including a year and a half in Cairo studying hieroglyphics, and a thesis on the Old Kingdom, he can spin innumerable tales of the history and lore of the Middle East. Antara, a bastard son and warrior from the Jahaliya, the time before Islam. Akhnaten, who ruled before Tut, and founded the temple of the sun god. But though Egyptology was what originally took him to Egypt, "when I got there I was more interested in modern Egypt."

Since going there, this interest has broadened to the entire Arab world, and it is there that he intends to return after graduation. The last two years he spent at Harvard, Mark has been active in the Society of Arab Students, and he has also organized letter-writing campaigns for Amnesty International. His curiosity about experiences on the margins of conventional awareness has led him down the byways of myth and history to demons and ancient kingdoms and has also led him to the ignored and oppressed people of the world.

"I'm extremely interested in the whole Horn of Africa--Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia. Especially the war in Sudan." He's interested eventually in working as a photographer for one of the news services--particularly Reuters, which he admires for its ability "to get to the hard-to-get-to places." But, he says "I've been thinking about spending next year, if I can, working with a relief agency in Sudan. Just to get a feel for it and to try to understand the country. I'm interested in where the Arab world intersects with Africa...

"It's a gruesome civil war. It's unbelievable that it's so invisible to the West. If you're already interested you can find articles about Sudan--little columns on page 23 or whatever. But photographs really bring things home for people."