A surface of silicon was revealed as a land of gentle, steadily rising undulations, in which the track of the probe could be seen like furrows dug with a plough.
He provoked controversy recently when he suggested that a cancer patient was cured by a regimen of vegetable juice and coffee enemas.Whether the royal brow furrows in response to technological innovations or contemporary architecture, the prince's theme appears to be a fear of modernity.
They were reduced like him, as he was flung into the furrows of the potato field to the level of mute sticks or leaves, tossed in the wind and burned, or used as floats.Painting the BuddhasSome argued that he was lucky.
Getting out is his only option, and to judge by the abandoned steadings and overgrown furrows further up the valley, it is a decision which has been taken by many others before him.
And yet the mood of this exhausted country is far from jubilant.In Mosul, 320km (200 miles) north of Baghdad up the Tigris river, the governor of Nineveh province, Doraid Kashmoula, furrows his brow, fiddles with his worry-beads in one hand, stubs out yet another cigarette with the other and reels off a litany of woe in his dankly curtained office.
If their fields are irrigated at all, they are flooded wastefully, with water flowing down furrows on either side of the crop, taking valuable nitrogen with it.
Frogs hid in the furrows left by their tyres.
Most people reckon they can draw up a list of the world's great powers the United States, China, Japan, Europe, Russia (well, the brow furrows when you reach the last two or three, but let that pass for the moment).
"The spooks, who once sat in cubicles steaming open the glued-down flaps of a few dozen suspect envelopes, now have more fertile plains to furrow and the marvellous means to do it.
There's still much brow-furrowing and brush-stabbing to Timothy Spall's hale, hearty, grunty performance as JMW Turner – an acquired taste, for all the garlands lavished upon it – but it's in the service of a narrative that locates an honest streak of mania in the man's genius.
Sutcliffe, of the famed "Hobbs and Sutcliffe" opening partnership, is one of the greatest Yorkshiremen ever to furrow his brow at a fast bowler.
