In every corner of the kingdom, generators for electricity are in place. Water is being delivered to homes and industries. Municipal buildings and hospitals stand ready to receive Saudi citizens. The rural areas have roads and the cities have cloverleaf highways, skyscrapers, and high-rise housing. Yet the life expectancy of a car in the kingdom is less than five years because of the lack of maintenance on the part of car owners and the shortage of service facilities and repairmen. The King Saud University in Riyadh is a beautiful monument of learning but the kingdom has almost no public libraries. Saudi Arabia now has a water supply of 500 million gallons a day but the water table is dropping so fast that the gracious old date palms in the wadi at Diriyah are dying. The government creates public parks and the Bedouins graze their goats on the grass. SAPTCO, the Saudi Arabian Public Transport Company, buys sleek buses of blue, white, and orange and then puts one route number on the front, another on the side, and a third in the rear.

The way in which municipal projects have been funded has caused the cities' populations to expect that progress in the future will continue as in the past. More importantly, the general population believes that they are only to be beneficiaries of these expenditures and do not need to contribute directly to raising the capital required to attain or maintain these projects and services. Not only do such services then become expected, but also more sophisticated, higher quality and, therefore, more costly services become considered necessities. This crisis of expectations will haunt further investments . . . as citizens continually force municipalities to forgo the less visible and glamorous operation and maintenance expenses for the new, highly visible projects. If the cycle of creating the desire for more, without the burden of paying for more, is not stopped, this will constrain municipal investments from serving the vast majority of the Kingdom's urban and village populations with either essential water and sewage, or maintaining the investments in-place.

During the oil boom, the solution to 'the problem of basic maintenance and every other problem was to throw more money at it. No longer master of endless wealth, Saudi society will now be tested to see how it measures up in maintaining what it has created.

Members of the Western-educated elite are making the transition from observers in the development process to managers, with a reason able degree of success. Lower-echelon bureaucrats are doing less well but have become part of the systems structured during the boom. Shop keepers and peasants are largely following their traditional occupations. It is the low-level jobs in the new economic order against which the Saudis are the most defiant. A Saudi may be put behind the wheel of a scheduled inter-city bus but he is still a son of the desert, master of his own destiny. The following letter to the editor appeared in the Arab News on February 11,1984.

On February 2, I went from Medina to Jeddah by bus. While going, after all the passengers boarded, the bus was taken to the garage for [a] checkup, which should have been done before the scheduled time of departure. While coming from Medina [after the service stop], the bus was being driven at a speed of over 140 kph causing panic among the passengers. Those in the upper decks were frightened and started crying with fear when other passengers forced the driver to stop the bus. Instead of tendering apology, the driver declared that he would better not drive, if he had to reduce the speed. This led to a controversy which was intercepted by the police passing by who then arranged to get another bus from Medina to take us to Jeddah.

The director general of SAPTCO, put to shame by the conduct of his employee, chose to deny everything in a subsequent letter. He claimed that the SAPTCO buses would only go 120 kph; drivers were forbidden to drive over 100 kph; the shaking of the bus was due to a sudden malfunction in the bus's support system, not excessive speed; and the driver, a Saudi, was considered one of the best as far as his character was concerned. And then he gave it all away. The company was considering placing an iron bar under the accelerator to make it impossible to exceed the mandated speed.

The Saudis might be better able to run the country if development had not come so fast and had been more balanced. As it is, too much of everything was built on too grand a scale. Hisham Nazer, former planning minister, summed up the oil boom when he said, "We built four lane highways when two would do. We overbuilt housing. We created an excess of electric generating power." * There was also a strong tendency to duplicate facilities, most of which had low standards. In 1983 Jaizan, a town of thirty-two thousand, had seven hospitals with three more under construction. The hospital in Diriyah was small and grossly inadequate yet it was on a major bus route, only fifteen minutes from major hospitals in Riyadh. With so much, it is impossible for the Saudis, still inexperienced in technology, untrained in mechanics, and fatally handicapped by a scanty population, to take over and manage their vast infrastructure successfully. The King Khalid International Airport, just one of three major airports, requires the labor of ten thousand people for its daily operation and contains mountains of computer banks that have to be serviced. Every facility constructed during the oil boom now requires plumbers, air-conditioner repairmen, electricians, a manager, and someone to sweep the floor. Saudi Arabia is learning that although the desert can be made beautiful, for every tree and blade of grass that is planted, it takes technology to pump the water and manpower to tend the soil to make them grow. As a result, the xenophobic Saudis have come out of the oil boom inextricably bound up with their foreign work force.

One of the jokes making the rounds of the expatriate community during the boom was about an interviewer who asked an American, a German, and a Saudi if sex were work or fun. The American said, "Fun, of course." The German said, "I work in my office all day, I come home, and I have more ahead of me to do. Sex is work." When a Saudi was asked, he paused, thought for a while, and then said, "It is fun. If it were work I would have a Pakistani do it.

The human components of the oil boom were the Saudis, as masters, the Westerners, as highly paid servants, and the great mass of manual laborers from the Third World, as beasts of burden. The TCN, or third country national, was a name coined by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers early in the oil boom to define a worker who was neither an American nor a Saudi. The name soon came to define any non-Westerner working for the Saudis, an identification that has endured. TCN is not a derogatory term but rather a harsh statement of fact that divides the clerks, maintenance men, drivers, and construction workers from the class of privileged Westerners. These "petromigrants" are a new slave class. They dig the ditches, build the buildings, sweep the streets, farm the land, drive the trucks, stock the supermarket shelves, clean the houses, and care for the children of the Saudis. Yet they cannot apply for citizenship, own property, or claim Saudi law for their children born on Saudi soil. They can be deported at will and are looked on by their Saudi masters with disdain. Despite the wealth of the Saudis and the technical expertise of the Westerners, much of what was achieved during the oil boom was done by the sweat of the TCNs.

*Quoted in Joseph Kraft, 'Letter from Saudi Arabia," The New Yorker, July 4, 1984, p. 50.

There has always been a foreign worker class in Saudi Arabia, largely clustered along the coasts. There were the hajjis who stayed on to work to earn their passage home. There were Africans who migrated across the Red Sea. Omanis who were escaping political unrest in Oman during the 1950's were followed by Yemenis in the sixties. But it was with the oil boom that Saudi Arabia actively sought and willingly paid for foreign worker class, which permeated every region of Saudi Arabia including the Nejd. As the boom wore on, these workers be- came ingrained in the economy, an indispensable commodity. In 1975 the expatriate work force (Western and non-Western) was 41 percent of total employment. In 1980 it was 46 percent, and by 1985, even in the face of recession, it had grown to 48 percent of the total work force.

Not far into the boom, the Saudis shifted from predominantly Arab labor to Asian labor. The Arabs, primarily the Yemenis and rural Egyptians, often lacked the skills needed for modernization, and those who were skilled, the Palestinians and the Lebanese, had about them the aura of political unrest. The Asians, on the other hand, provided an enormous pool of skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled labor that was both inexpensive and politically safe. By 1980 the Asians had become the Saudis' major source of manpower. At one time, there were so many Koreans living in barracks and lining up to march to work that some Westerners speculated that they were in reality a mercenary army masquerading as construction workers. But the Saudis were not con tent with just Koreans or Thais or Filipinos. The composition of the work force was constantly adjusted so the kingdom would not become overly dependent on the labor of any one country. Checkout lines at the supermarkets were illustrative of government policy in the private sector: every three cash registers were run by a Filipino, a Pakistani, and a Sri Lankan. This fluidity of nationalities was also due to the government's policy of shifting to the cheapest labor of the moment. Migrants from Bangladesh were among the last to arrive, willing to work for less than even the Pakistanis. But the symbol of the lowliest foreign laborer always remained the same: the rubber bucket made from an old tire that was used to move dirt, shovel-full by shovel-full, from one place to another.

In the Saudi embassies in Cairo, New Delhi, and Bangkok, I pushed through corridors crowded with men squatting, anxiously waiting for a precious Saudi visa. And every time I went through immigration in Saudi Arabia, I saw a new shipment of workers, clad in jeans and rubber sandals and wearing bright-colored company shirts with matching billed caps, lined up waiting to enter the kingdom. Their dark, sad eyes spoke of their acceptance of the inevitability of their fate, yet they undoubtedly were thankful for a two-year job in the dust and heat of Saudi Arabia.

Recruiting Third World labor was big business during the oil ~ There existed a whole international trade in indentured servants. In 1978 a contractor's advertisement in the Far East Report read, "Am I skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers available for immediate processing and transfer to Saudi Arabia." Pakistanis were recruited for wages of $200 a month through ads in Karachi's newspapers. Other companies promised Saudi employers quality manpower from Bangladesh, India. the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.

The TCNs were exploited by everyone - recruiting agencies, their employers in Saudi Arabia, and their own governments as unscrupulous operators on both sides took advantage of men desperate for work. At the height of the boom, a number of Third World countries became remittance economies dependent on the money their nationals working in Saudi Arabia sent home. In 1982 Pakistani workers delivered $2.16 billion in foreign exchange to Pakistan's economy, 93 per cent of the country's merchandise export earnings. Not only were workers in Saudi Arabia filling the coffers of their home countries with foreign exchange, but what they eventually realized from their earnings often fell victim to the currency manipulations of their own governments. Saudi Arabia paid Korean workers in dollars through the government of Korea. The workers' families were then paid in local currency so the government could maximize on the foreign exchange. And the Marcos government of the Philippines forced its citizens to remit a percentage of their earnings through Filipino banks paying the official exchange rate instead of sending money to their families in dollars that could then be exchanged on the black market. *

The economic downturn in Saudi Arabia has been devastating to the remittance economies of the Third World. With the end of the giant construction projects of the Third Development Plan, the number of TCNs would have declined regardless of economic conditions. But it was the recession in Saudi Arabia that forced the government to cut back on every activity possible. The ripple effect then wiped out the jobs of stone masons and hod carriers, clerks and drivers, as one small business after another went under. There are still thousands of Third World nationals working in Saudi Arabia, and with their governments heavily dependent on their earnings, no embassy presses for its workers' rights. Unlike the Western employees, whose embassies push for the release of their jailed nationals, the TCNs are forgotten men. One government official of the Philippines told me quite frankly that some Filipino workers he was charged with protecting would "fall through the cracks."

The conditions in which a TCN lives and works in Saudi Arabia depend on his employer. Although the government sets minimum standards in housing and food, maintains strict labor laws on working conditions, mandates compensation for workers or their families in case of injury and death, and provides a labor court known for its fairness to foreign workers, the system fails in protecting foreign workers. There is neither the commitment nor the numbers among the Saudis to en force the rules. Employers are not responsible to anyone on a routine basis for the welfare of their employees. The only enforcement of the law comes after a worker appeals to the labor court. Handicapped by ignorance and language, most workers either are unaware of their rights or have no knowledge of how to press their claims. And the court is slow. It takes months for a case to be heard. A worker who has filed a claim often receives no salary from his embittered employer and is forbidden to work for anyone else without risking his work permit while the case waits to go before the court.

* In the end Marcos lost. The army ran the black market in currency when Marcos cut out its profits, sectors of the army began to turn against him.

One of the functions the Saudi press served in the later years of the boom was to air workers' written grievances against their employers. Obviously a privilege reserved for the educated, these letters painted a true picture of the plight of many from the Third World. Chauffeurs, paid no more than $500 a month, were worked fourteen to sixteen hours a day with no overtime pay. An Indian doctor working in a private clinic was denied his annual leave. An engineer employed by a construction company had not been paid for six months. A group of Filipinos and Pakistanis had not received their salaries, bonuses, or vacation pay for periods of eight to sixteen months. The 5 percent social security tax was being deducted from the wages of another group but their employer had never enrolled them with the General Organization of Social Insurance.

During the construction explosion, most foreign workers were employed by large construction companies and lived in camps. Accommodations were spartan by anyone's standards. They lived two to a room hardly larger than a stall and ate in a common mess. The workday was ten to twelve hours. The work week was six days left with no recreation except a basketball hoop and perhaps a big metal tank in which to sit to cool off, the one day off a week was spent wandering the souqs or cutting each other's hair. The camps, though smaller, still exist. As depressing as they appear, there is a camaraderie in which men share the burden of separation from home. Nevertheless, a desperate depression arising from loneliness, grueling work, an alien culture, and no social outlets stalks even the most cheerful of personalities. Suicide is an occupational hazard, especially in the summer. What keeps most TCNs going is the knowledge that at the end of a two-year contract they can go home with more money than they ever believed possible. Passengers on flights going east out of Saudi Arabia are burdened with mammoth multi-speaker tape players, television sets, bits of gold jewelry, boxes filled with presents for relatives, toys for their children, and even clusters of grapes carefully packed in woven plastic shopping bags. Men who came to Saudi Arabia in sandals go home in shoes, and their pockets are filled with enough money to handsomely support the family for the year. Some accumulate enough to buy land, moving them from the peasantry to the landed gentry.

The female domestics who arrived in numbers in the 1980's provided a whole new dimension to the foreign labor scene. The first thing that caught my eye when I walked into the airport on my return to the kingdom in 1982 was a group of Sri Lankan women in bright colored saris asleep on the floor in front of the immigration counters. During my first two years of residency in Saudi Arabia, they would not have been there. Previously barred from Saudi Arabia on the grounds that they were a social disruption, women are now briskly recruited by employment agencies to serve the well to do among the Saudis. Foreign women are now as much a part of Saudi Arabia as the foreign men. But in some ways, their lives are even harder than those of the men. Farmed out as domestics to individual homes, they are denied the companionship of the work camps. Even if the working conditions are reasonable, a woman can suffer by living in a state of total isolation. Usually speaking no Arabic and no English, she toils away in solitude for her master. At the end of each year, she goes home for her one-month's annual leave and then returns to begin another year separated from anyone with whom she can even talk. Other women not only experience the loneliness but endure difficult working conditions. Some are put on strict food rations or live in closets. At the beck and call of their employers, they often labor twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not knowingly behaving as unconscionable or cruel task- masters, the Saudis, as a whole, have yet to learn the difference between service and slavery. In Saudi culture, hiring is commonly confused with possessing. Periodically, domestics are driven to desperate acts. A Sri Lankan woman, working for $117 a month for a middle- class Saudi family in Riyadh, jumped off the balcony of the apartment house where she lived because her employer never allowed her to leave the premises. But for others life can be quite different. The diminutive, usually young Oriental women serving as nannies for the wealthy can enjoy an extravagant lifestyle. Educated and hired because they can speak English, the nannies share in the life of the hareem. They attend the weddings, are clothed by their employer, receive lavish gifts, and sometimes travel abroad with the family.

Yet the threat that hangs over the head of the female servant of the wealthy as well as the servant of the middle class is that her duties can also include serving as a concubine to the men of the house. Even though Mohammed formulated exacting instructions for servants and slave girls, the new slavery in Saudi Arabia does not fall under the rules. Since they are outside of Arab culture and beyond the protection of a man, foreign servants are fair game for the sexual advances of men. The typical victim of sexual slavery is a non-Moslem woman of south Asia who suffers from a combination of a wife who makes her life miserable, a master who believes he has hired a mistress, and adult sons who think of the baby sitter as an adult plaything. Evoking a reaction somewhat like the stimulus of foreign travel, the foreign nanny can trigger the same chasm between Islam's exacting rules and the Moslem's internal system of ethics. Their excesses restrained by their presence on Saudi soil, some Saudi men nevertheless see the maid as a test of their sexual prowess A domestic who becomes pregnant by her employer can be incorporated into the household as a wife or as an umm walad, or mother of a child. But most return home in disgrace, sometimes with a generous settlement and sometimes at their own expense.

The plight of foreign domestics is viewed as a serious social problem by Saudi Arabia's religious and political leaders. Yet the root of their concern is not so much the well being of foreign domestics but rather the disruption in the social fiber caused by the introduction of foreigners into the family domain. Unlike the manual laborer who is confined to his work camp, the female domestic enters the sanctity of the home. Among the issues that arise out of this phenomenon is the ambivalent hostility of Saudi women toward their own domestic. While prizing the maid's services, the wife fears her servant may be taken into her husband's bed or, even worse, brought into the family as another wife. Ultimately, the issue of female domestics is another facet of the Saudis' paramount concern about their foreign work force. While dependent on their labor, the Saudis are tormented by the shadowy threat of social and political disorder they see arising from the presence of foreigners.

The government's official attitude toward the hordes of TCNs is control. Amils, or workers, are regulated through visas, work permits, permits to travel within the country, and jail. Periodically, the police and immigration officials stage roundups of workers illegally in the country. The Overstayers Bureau, charged with responsibility for the illegals, loads them on trucks and transports them to the nearest airport for deportation to their countries of origin. As many as four thousand can be held in jail at one time, awaiting deportation.

Any kind of labor unrest takes on the specter of political unrest. Periodic explosions of violence from frustrated men is a common theme in work camps, disorder that sends tremors of fear through the House of Saud. When Turkish workers rose up at Tabuk in 1977, the government immediately dispatched a C- 130 Hercules from the Royal Saudi Air Force to fly them directly back to Turkey. As a security measure, Iraqi workers were removed from the King Khalid Military City when King Khalid visited the site in 1978. I once lost a part-time houseboy to a brawl between Pakistani and Thai waiters at the Atallah House hotel when all were deported in less than twenty-four hours. But brute force against the amils is a rarity for the House of Saud's own political reasons.

Saudi Arabia's ruling family is tied up in the dilemma of its fear of foreigners and its self-proclaimed obligation as the major defender of Islam. The government openly follows a policy of discrimination against immigrants in every walk of life. The "separate development" of the native and immigrant communities is a politically acceptable way, from the standpoint of domestic politics, to discourage foreigners from seeking permanent residence in Saudi Arabia. Typically the immigrants are looked down on by the Saudis, who generally mistrust and suspect other Arabs, are contemptuous of south Asians and regard Far Easterners as "infidels." This attitude of superiority, based upon the Saudis' view of themselves as Islam's chosen people, makes the Saudi national insensitive to the tide of feeling among non-nationals. Furthermore, the Saudi population continues to cling to the myth that the kingdom can be rid of its foreign workers whenever its chooses.

While escaping criticism of its treatment of non-Moslems, the House of Saud is increasingly suffering a stain on its piety in its treatment of non-Saudi Moslems. Palestinians want a home and a passport. A group of Burmese who fled to Saudi Arabia to escape religious persecution after the Second World War are demanding citizenship. Pakistanis, Syrians, Indonesians, Sudanese, and Eritreans want to be treated with a respect they believe is due all Moslems. It is this exclusiveness of the Saudis that opens the House of Saud to the charges of being "unislamic" by Muammar Qaddafi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and other opponents of the regime.

The very notion of using Muslims and Arabs as "foreign workers" who are denied the rights enjoyed by Saudi citizens, introduces a discrimination based on nationality that runs counter to basic Islamic and Arab principles proclaimed by the regime as the foundation of its legitimacy. This contradiction leaves the regime vulnerable to devastating criticism by potential domestic opposition and hostile outside powers, and the workers themselves receptive to agitation on those grounds. *

* Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), p.224.

Although recognizing that its tough immigration policies are destructive to its image, the royal family values the reality of internal security over the illusion of its image in the Moslem world. And like the presence of Westerners, the large work force from the Third World is forcing profound changes in the society. In 1983 a joint meeting of the interior ministers of the GCC countries stated in an official paper that the economic development of the region had made substantial changes in the social life of the gulf peoples. "Some of these changes were positive but the rest were negative because of the presence of alien manpower which . . . carried a lot of customs and traditions which did not suit us." *

Some Saudis speak ominously of waqt-aI-takhreeb, the period of destruction of the entire indigenous social system, which they claim came with the influx of petrodollars. Saudi society no doubt has been corrupted by the expatriates. When I came to Riyadh, it was possible to drive around the city with a box of cash on the back seat of the car and never worry about theft. By the time I left, some stores were checking parcels to prevent shoplifting. Cars and houses could no longer be left unlocked. Pickpockets prowled the aisles of supermarkets and the baggage claim areas of the airports. Somali women had staked out a section of Riyadh and turned it into a red light district. Customs officials became more concerned about searching for drugs than for alcohol. And the Ministry of the Interior was giving cash rewards for information on criminal acts. Most of the petty theft and drug trafficking is blamed on members of the Third World work force. (Westerners are more sophisticated and are guilty primarily of white-collar crime.)

Throughout the oil boom, the Saudis talked endlessly about effectively reducing the number of expatriates in the kingdom but they were able to do little about it.

The hiring of expatriates on an increasing scale for government office duties . . . is the concern of the Civil Service Agency. A committee therefore has been set up . . . to consider the issue from all sides. There was a previous committee for the same purpose. . . . The present committee is an extension of the former, and is seeking comprehensive solutions to the problem.**

* Arab News, December 1, 1983.

** Saudi Gazette, November 3, 1979.

The economic recession has succeeded in reducing the number of TCNs in Saudi Arabia but their presence is still large and inescapable. The Westerners continue to manage. The Egyptians and Indians are civil servants. The Filipinos run the grocery stores, repair the cars, operate the telex machines. The Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Bangladeshis dig the ditches and sweep the floors. Oriental nannies, who cannot speak Arabic and are alien to the culture, raise the children. And a host of nationalities from the Arab world educate the next generation of Saudis.

As a result of the presence of so many foreigners, the urban areas of Saudi Arabia have become huge caldrons of Third World humanity and American fast-food chains. The number of foreigners increased so dramatically over the ten years of the oil boom that Riyadh, Jeddah, and al-Khobar became nondescript cities, stripped of their Saudi character by the economic planners and masses of foreigners. The Saudis themselves became lost in the crush. The Baatha souqs, usurped by the aggressive and cunning Yemenis, assumed the milieu of a totally different country. As I prowled the covered alleyways of the bazaar, the Yemenis would badger, wheedle, and connive to make a sale. There was seldom a Saudi merchant in sight. It was as if the Saudis had abdicated their traditional bazaar skills to the foreigners in order to retreat behind the walls of their new houses to ponder the crumbling values of their society.

J remember being in Baatha one Friday afternoon, pushing through the crowds of Pakistanis, Afghanis, Bangladeshis, Koreans, and Sri Lankans and suddenly wondering what would happen if even a portion of these poor and tired men had guns. It was far from an original thought. The Saudis do feel threatened by the TCNs. Groups of various nationalities are present in the kingdom in such large numbers that in rare unguarded moments Saudis of influence voice fears that they are a potentially hostile army. Yet the more realistic threat of the influx of Third World nationals to Saudi society is that they will never go home. For many, life in Saudi Arabia, no matter how strained, offers more than the ravaged economies of their overpopulated countries.

Saudi Arabia is not a melting pot. Even after ten years of economic boom times that brought in hordes of foreigners, the Saudis remain a rigidly insular people, shutting out everyone except their own kinship group. If by the second generation of their residency in Saudi Arabia these foreigners, especially the Moslems, are not integrated into the social and political structure, they may become a source of serious political opposition. This is a threat not only to the House of Saud but to any Saudi government that discriminates against non-Saudis. To believe that the present distinction between Saudis and non-Saudis will not survive past the current regime is to fail to understand the nature of the Saudis themselves.

As contemptuous and distrustful as the Saudis are of the third country nationals, it is still the Westerners whom the Saudis most resent and fear. Western xenophobia has always existed in Saudi Arabia, although during much of the boom it was masked by a strong tradition of politeness and hospitality. But as the economic downturn accelerated, the hostilities began to emerge. Invitations to Saudi homes, which poured in when I first went to Saudi Arabia, all but disappeared except from very Westernized Saudis. Isolated incidents of vandalism against Westerners occurred. At the Oleya Villas, a Western compound occupied by King Faisal hospital employees, vandals smashed the hoods and trunks of cars parked on the street and then scaled the wall to damage the rest of the cars parked inside. When the Saudi soccer team defeated Korea and qualified for the 1984 Olympic Games, the victory parade contained ugly incidents of attacks on Westerners watching the festivities. As the economic outlook worsened, the more strained the atmosphere became. The Saudis' natural reserve took on subtle tones of hostility. Behind their masks of civility, Saudi suspicions about the Westerners' motives and resentment of their lifestyle rose. The Saudis' ability to disguise their feelings of inferiority in the presence of Western skills was wiped away by doubts about their financial future. Even though the salaries of the Westerners were sliding along with those of the Saudis, silent resentment of the Western presence was as strong as it had been when Saudi Arabia was first awash in money. In saying my good-bys to Saudi Arabia, I went to Jeddah's Old Town, the kingdom's historic window on the West. I walked through the dim, twisting streets too narrow for a car, enjoying the traditional architecture distinguished by closed wooden balconies suspended above the street, where the women could gather to watch the scenes below. Shortly I became aware that my presence was not welcome. A motor bike brushed by me as if deliberately trying to hit me. Boys threw orange peels before dashing into an even darker alleyway. Turning onto another street, I was confronted by a collection of several young men who shouted at me in perfect English, "Go back where you came from."

It was as if the words of Abdul Aziz uttered on the horizon of the oil rush were ringing back through the decades. "My kingdom will survive only insofar as it remains a country difficult of access, where the foreigner will have no other aim, with his task fulfilled, but to get out." *

*Quoted in David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud (London. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981), p.406.