By 1975 foreigners began to arrive to staff the schools and hospitals that were opening. Housing that approached a Western standard was all but nonexistent. Some of my friends who arrived during this period lived in a succession of abominable places. Most were housed in dark, dank apartments not far from the Baatha souqs overlooking an open sewage canal. The evaporative coolers (air conditioning had arrived only in the newest buildings) whirled day and night, throwing water- cooled air into the stuffy rooms. The men went to work while the women stayed trapped in their quarters, except when they went out in groups to buy fruit, a few vegetables, and perhaps a little meat to prepare on the hot plates in their rooms. Life was hard and few people were willing to endure it. Yet I was about to join them.

Saudi Arabia was desperate for skilled labor. A majority of the Saudis were illiterate, and those who were educated had been taught the traditional curriculum of classical Arabic and the Koran, but no technical skills. To build the large infrastructure projects needed for economic development and to deliver the services that the Saudis now demanded required that the country import a highly skilled work force, primarily from the West, where most of these needed skills were found. To woo these Westerners to come live in the adverse conditions existing at the beginning of the boom, the Saudis were willing to pay well and to provide lavish fringe benefits. Everything - housing, utilities, transportation, sheets to sleep on, and pans to cook in was pro vided by the employer. Children could attend the finest boarding schools anywhere in the world and the Saudis paid. Vacation time was generous: for most, about sixty days a year. The opportunity for travel was unparalleled. Every employee got a round-trip ticket home once a year for himself and his dependents. So many people flew first class, courtesy of the Saudis, that most of the planes going in and out of Saudi Arabia were reconfigured to expand the size of the first-class section to about a third of the plane.

Even before the oil embargo, as a political scientist, I had developed a consuming interest in the Middle East. Watching events in Saudi Arabia that followed the embargo, I was pulled to the country as if by a magnet. I wanted to live there, to bury myself in events, to experience what was happening to this medieval society. But I could not go on my own Females received visas only as dependents of foreign workers or for critical jobs such as nursing. Fortunately, my husband shared my enthusiasm and began to send out feelers for job possibilities in Saudi Arabia.

In the fall of '977, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital (KFSH) in Riyadh asked Dan to come fill in for a dermatologist who was on vacation for a month. The hospital had been founded by the former king, Faisal, who was assassinated in 1975 just before the facility officially opened. The 250-bed hospital was conceived by the king as a royal clinic to keep members of his vast family from escaping to Lon don, Geneva, or Los Angeles on the pretext of needing medical care. Perhaps smarting from the grumbling about the hospital's cost and grandeur, Faisal, just before he died, expanded its role from royal clinic to the medical referral center for Saudi Arabia. But because housing at the hospital was in such short supply, I was denied a visa. So we decided that while Dan was working in Saudi Arabia, I would make my own tour of Syria, Jordan, and Israel.

At the end of the month, I met Dan in Amman and we returned home. He had been fascinated by the professional challenges presented by the quantity and diversity of rare diseases he had seen in Riyadh, and I was, by now, inescapably addicted to life in the Middle East. When the King Faisal Hospital called a few weeks later to ask Dan to come as a staff physician on a two-year contract, we seized the opportunity.

The decision to go to Saudi Arabia in 1978 was not to be taken lightly, but perhaps it was less difficult for Dan and me than it might have been for many others. This would not be our first foreign living experience. In 1962, shortly after we were married, Dan was awarded a fellowship to study primitive medicine, and we spent four months in the interior of Borneo living with the Ibans, a tribe of former headhunt ers. I experienced outdoor privies, snakes, cockroaches, monkey meat entrees, giant lizards, mosquitoes, and a face-to-face encounter with a Komodo dragon while happily surviving life in the jungle.

In 1978 Saudi Arabia in its own way was as much a frontier as Borneo had been. Few had blazed the trail before us. There were essentially no books on Saudi Arabia, and few people outside the oil industry had ever even been there. The orientation provided by Hospital Corporation International, the American management company for KFSH, was meager. But one fact that was indelibly impressed on me was the importance of respecting Saudi customs about the pro scribed dress for women. In public I was to wear a long dress with a high neck and long sleeves, and I was to cover my hair. From the few things I was able to learn about Saudi Arabia, I quickly realized that the kingdom presented an unparalleled opportunity for a journalist.

While Dan shifted his patients in Atlanta to the care of other doctors, I packed, put our business affairs in the hands of strangers, took our nine-year-old son, Cohn, out of school, closed up my house, told my friends good-by, and left my parents with a family portrait in case we never came back. Three months after making our decision to leave, we boarded an airplane for Riyadh.

It was the first part of May 1978, the height of Saudi Arabia's oil boom. The Saudia airlines jumbo jet from London was fully loaded that night, as it had been for months before and as it would be for months ahead. The airline was the conduit through which the outside world was shuttled into and out of the secluded microcosm of Saudi Arabia. Except for a smattering of Saudi nationals returning home from holiday in London, the passengers were all foreigners. They represented a new kind of servant class, highly skilled and highly paid, recruited literally to build a country.

Near midnight the 747 touched down on a runway laid out on a barren and seemingly lifeless desert. Beyond the mounds of pale, sandy soil lining the tarmac, there was nothing - no houses, no highways, no parallel runways, no lofty structures - just the crusty dirt and one low, rambling building defined as an airport only by the blinking light atop its flat roof.

As the pilot touched the brakes, the Saudis in the oversize first-class section began to gather near the exit door. The men, dressed in long white shirtdresses known as thobes * and white head coverings held in place by a black double-corded ringlet, carried packages from Harrods, the tailors of Savile Row, and the chic shops of Regent Street. Their women were formless figures engulfed in black cloaks and heavy veils. Clutched to their shrouded bodies were big, heavy cosmetics bags filled with the promises of the London perfumeries and cosmeticians.

* One of the distinguishing characteristics of Saudi society is the uniformity of dress among n'en. Except for the coolest months of the winter, when he might don light wool or polyester, a Saudi man wears the white thobe. His head gear is composed of a skull cap over which is placed a gurra, a triangular folded cloth of either white or red-and-white check. It is held in place by an agal, which the Bedouins traditionally used to tether their camels.

The abaaya, or black cloak, worn by women hat large sleeves and hangs over the head. Unlike the Iranian chador, it does not cover the face. Two styles of veils are seen on Saudi women. Rural women commonly wear a veil that drops from a velvet band across the forehead and leaves the wearer's eyes exposed. Urban women wear veils made of a heavy gauzelike fabric that completely covers their faces and is anchored at the top of the head by the abaaya.

As the plane rolled to a stop on the tarmac, I could see a miniature collection of the world's luxury cars of the period - Rolls Royces, Mercedes, Cadillacs - clustered below the wings of the aircraft, their drivers leaning against the expensive bodies. When the exit ramp locked into place, the cabin crew threw open the door and quickly moved to block the aisle while the world's new ultra rich deplaned. The men, their wives trailing behind, descended the steps and embraced the men meeting them, planting a kiss on each cheek and then the nose. Within moments, the cars were loaded and sped off into the night.

The rest of us tumbled out into the heavy heat. Spring was long past, and the summer was already upon us. We were herded toward a bus, not old but rattling and wheezing from lack of maintenance. I gathered up my requisite long skirt and struggled aboard the bus. The crowd behind me surged forward and the crowd in front staggered under the weight of sleeping children and heavy hand luggage.

We neophytes to Saudi Arabia were in a trance. Physical fatigue, anxiety, and the enormous emotional drain associated with total up rooting lay over me like a sodden blanket. The people crammed together in the wheezing, belching bus laboring toward the terminal spoke very little. Suddenly we jerked to a stop. I took my son's hand and followed my husband into the great unknown.

The scene inside the airport was chaos. Baggage handlers of a dozen different nationalities, speaking a dozen different languages, were tossing luggage off an antiquated conveyor belt into a makeshift holding pen. Passengers who missed their bags as they flew by yelled at the handlers while climbing over the barricades in a frantic effort to retrieve their suitcases. Others who had arrived days earlier wandered through the mountains of unclaimed baggage in an odyssey of despair, searching for their lost possessions.

The confusion was made even worse by the number of bags most of us had. We were coming to an underdeveloped country in the midst of frantic expansion, where everything was in short supply. Essentially we had brought along everything we needed for a whole year. My family, which had a history of going to Europe for two weeks with one carry-on bag apiece, had twelve large pieces of luggage, including a typewriter.

There were no porters and only six dilapidated luggage carts, so the fifty feet from the baggage claim area to customs presented a major logistics problem. We picked up as many bags as we could carry and pushed the rest along with our feet. The arrival "lounge" was so small that the lines before the three customs counters snaked in and out of each other. Even the ever-polite British, the originators and vigilant defenders of the queue, were pushing and shouting as they tried to get through the mob with their suitcases. Gathered along the walls in casual chatting groups was a sampling of Saudi men. With no apparent purpose in the general scheme of things, they fondled their plastic prayer beads and watched as their new servants struggled toward the gates of the kingdom. The plane had landed at
midnight. It was approaching 2:00 A.M. when we presented ourselves for customs inspection.

Saudi Arabia probably has the most tyrannical customs organization in the world. The list of items forbidden in the country is long and vigorously enforced, a list whose restrictions are rooted in the Koran and the politics of the Arab world.

Saudi Arabia is the cradle of the Islamic religion. Mohammed, the seventh-century prophet whose revelations became the foundation of Islam, was a native of the scruffy, dry mountains of western Saudi Arabia, where the holy city of Mecca nestles. As possessors of two of the three holy sites of Islam, Mecca and Medina, the Saudis see them selves as having a certain birthright as defenders of the faith. There fore, if other Moslems are pious, the Saudis must be even more pious. If other Moslems are faithful to the teachings of the Prophet, the Saudis must be even more faithful.

Coupled with their assumed birthright as the elect among Moslems, the Saudis are the Puritans of the Moslem world. They are followers of Wahhabism, a sect that is among the most fundamental, rigid, and intolerant in Islam. Wahhabism demands of its adherents exacting compliance with the dictates of Mohammed. At the same time, the Saudis harbor an almost pathological fear that temptation on the path of religious purity is beyond man's ability to resist. For centuries, Saudi Arabia's barren deserts protected its purity from invasion by outside sin. But with the oil boom, the country was suddenly being flooded with thousands of heretics from the Christian West who brought the sins of their decadence with them. The religious authorities and the House of Saud had made it an article of faith to stop temptation at the borders of the kingdom. Standing like a bulwark between Saudi society and eternal damnation was the Saudi customs agent, charged with the preservation of purity.

Customs was one of the few areas of government employment in which only Saudi nationals were permitted. Manning its borders with nothing but Saudis presented sparsely populated Saudi Arabia with an enormous manpower problem. To meet the personnel demands, young men were pulled out of villages, given a crash course in English, and sent to the front. Before the late 1970's, the average Saudi customs agent, in all likelihood, had never been exposed to anything outside the confines of his own village, did not possess much beyond the essentials of life, and was probably a devout adherent of the Wahhabi sect of Islam. At his post, he was mildly resentful of the infusion of foreigners coming into his world and was charged with the responsibility of protecting his country and his society from the ravages of sin. Little wonder that he was a tyrant.

The big three on the forbidden list were pork, alcohol, and pornography. Because the Moslems follow some of the same dietary restrictions as orthodox Jews, pork is regarded as unclean and banned from the country. Alcohol, in any form, is totally forbidden to a Moslem and is, therefore, banned from the kingdom. Lust in any disguise is forbidden by the Koran and so anything that compromises the modesty of women is banned.

When a customs agent went through an incomer's luggage, his eye would move beyond the obvious, such as a bottle of gin or Penthouse magazine. Everything entering the country was suspect. Mouthwash was often seized because it might contain alcohol. Fashion magazines with ads for lingerie were destroyed. I had a book of knitting patterns mutilated, apparently because the models were too scantily clad. Guide books to the museums of Europe were confiscated, for the Venus Di Milo, the paintings of Botticelli, and the David were all classified as pornography. Even the Mona Lisa's seductive smile on occasion fell victim to seizure.

Added to these was the restriction on anything that propagated an other religion. Reading material about or symbols of other religions, including Bibles and crucifixes, were contraband. And those who had failed to heed the warnings about shipping in artificial Christmas trees or other Christmas decorations with their household goods paid the price. The trees were invariably seized. While one helpless family stood by, I watched while customs officials dropped its Christmas ornaments, one at a time, on the floor and crushed them under their sandals. A few bewildered little girls even saw their dolls torn apart be- cause an inspector regarded them as idols.

Any printed matter that reflected unfavorably on the Saudis or Moslems in general was confiscated. The definition of unfavorable covered virtually everything about Saudi Arabia, the Arabs, the Middle East, or Islam that was not printed by Saudi Arabia's own Ministry of Information.

In addition, Saudi customs carried on the Arabs' political war against the state of Israel. Products made, or suspected of being made, in Israel were taken. Coca-Cola and a range of other common products whose companies did business in Israel were banished from Saudi Arabia. Books by Jewish authors were confiscated. During one period, Saudi customs decided James Michener was Jewish and seized all of his books carried in by arriving passengers.

In almost every case, the decision about what would be permitted in the country and what would be confiscated rested with the individual customs agent. There was little chance of appeal.

In fact, however, vigilance on the part of the Saudis was a necessity since almost every Westerner, at some time, engaged in petty smuggling. Yeast for homemade wine was brought in, disguised as aspirin or sewn in the hems of women's dresses. Book jackets were substituted to get banned books into the kingdom. And someone was always trying to smuggle in canned ham.

But this was something I would learn in the future. Now I was fac ing the customs officer. Poised over my bag, he raised his arms high above his head and swooped down, running his hands along each inner side of the suitcase until he had plunged to the very bottom. There he burrowed until his parted hands met, clasped them together, and raised them up again as if seeking air after a deep dive. Neatly folded clothes went everywhere as a second customs man rummaged through the heap. Shaving kits and cosmetics bags were dumped out, the contents thoroughly searched. Reading material was examined for author and con tent. I had with me the classic sociological study of the Arabs, The Arab Mind, by the well-known scholar Raphael Patai. It was grabbed out of my hand and thrown on the mound of books already seized.

Inspection completed, we were dismissed. Dan and I nervously stuffed our possessions into our bags while the Saudi who had done all of the damage yelled at us to move on. The scrutiny of my possessions had left me feeling violated. But even stronger was the feeling of humiliation that Saudi customs imposed on all the foreigners who passed through. We were herded like animals, treated with contempt, and finally shoved out the door to confront Saudi Arabia.

It was now 3:oo A.M. Staggering through the door of the arrivals section, we were overwhelmed by the mob scene beyond. The airport police were beating self-appointed porters with night sticks, vainly trying to keep a path cleared in front of the door. Beyond this narrow neutral zone, which continued to change in size and shape as the crowd surged and ebbed, was a mob of at least a hundred people holding signs reading "Roltzman," "Corps of Engineers," "BAC," "Bechtel," "Seimens," "Lockheed." This was the rendezvous point for the new ar rival and his employer. The company representatives were there night after night to collect the ever-increasing numbers of Westerners com ing into the country. One of the enduring mysteries of Riyadh was that all international flights, arriving or departing, operated sometime between midnight and 2:00 A.M.

There was no sign for the King Faisal Specialist Hospital bobbing in the crowd. We had no idea where to go or what to do. With nowhere to sit (the airport had no chairs), we gathered up the luggage once more and crawled over sleeping people scattered across the floor until we found a protected place to stand while Dan went in search of a tele phone.

My immediate problem was somehow to keep control of our lug gage. Scurrying through the crowd were tiny little men dressed in skirts and turbans. They were Yemenis, natives of the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula. Left without oil, the dwarfish Yemenis migrated north early in the boom to become the backbone of Saudi Arabia's manual labor force. They mixed cement during the day and carried bags at night. I found that it took everything short of brute force to keep them from seizing our bags and running off to load them into our nonexistent vehicle.

For anyone arriving in Saudi Arabia for the first time, being met by a resident was crucial. And because whole systems were not yet functioning in the kingdom, new arrivals were missed as often as they were met. The reasons varied. The telex with the arrival date and flight number may never have made it through the inadequate and over loaded communications system. Or the flight had been overbooked and the expected new arrival might not have been able to secure a seat for five days. The car coming to pick up the passenger may have been hit by one of the new Saudi drivers, and since there were no public telephones and absolutely no message service at the airport, a person de layed had no way of notifying anyone.

The newly arrived novice was unaware of the monumental problem he faced in moving from point A to point B. Ground transportation from the airport was all but nonexistent, for limousines and public buses had yet to reach this Arabian frontier. The only public transportation available was the hundreds of yellow Toyota taxicabs whose drivers were eager to take people anywhere for an outlandish price if the destination could only be established.

Language was at the root of much of the newly arrived foreigner's difficulties in functioning. Most Westerners did not have even a smattering of Arabic. And the Saudis had not yet been forced into learning English in order to communicate with their new servant class. That left the new arrival to cope as best he could.

If the stranded traveler had a telephone number to call, and access to the airport director's personal phone, he was fortunate. Riyadh had no telephone directories. But even if the caller actually reached some one, the person at the other end, in all likelihood, spoke no English and would hang up. If the caller then, in desperation, tried the number again, the telephone by this time probably was no longer working.

Pleas for assistance from Arabic-English speaking Saudia employees were fruitless, as they were overwhelmed by the mobs in front of the ticket counters trying to get on departing flights.

So the next step was to gather up the bags and move outside to get a taxi. In the rush toward modernization, it seemed, the government had bought every Saudi a car and made him a taxi driver. Taxis were everywhere, with every driver blowing his horn for customers. If the stranded traveler could make himself heard over the noise, he could tell the driver where he wanted to go. But since the driver probably could speak no English, the well-prepared arrivee might have a card printed with the name of his company, on one side in English, one side in Arabic, on the off chance that the taxi driver could read. The problem remained that there could be no address on this card, since Riyadh had few street names and no house numbers.

In the end the only way anyone could move around the city was to know exactly where he was going so he could direct the driver there street by street, comer by comer, in Arabic.

More than a few stranded Westerners were taken home for the night by other hospitable Westerners who might well have been in the same situation at one time.

Fortunately, Dan was able to use the director's precious telephone to get through to the hospital and talked to an English-speaking Egyptian, who dispatched a car to fetch us. The Yemenis were still swarming around our luggage as I sat on the floor, snapping and snarling at them. Cohn, clutching his worn and much-loved Curious George doll, was sprawled across my lap, asleep.

At last the Sudanese driver from the hospital arrived. He spoke no English except "King Faisal." He held the horde of Yemenis at bay while three of them loaded the luggage. Apparently, the fifteen Saudi Riyals (approximately $4.40) apiece to carry the bags fifty feet was considered an inadequate tip. The porters, in their distinctive skirts and rubber sandals, shook their fists and screamed as the driver bundled us into his car and sped away through the maze of yellow taxi cabs, drivers and potential passengers engaged in the Middle East's timeless ritual of bargaining.

Riyadh, in the middle of the night, embodied in miniature what was happening to the country as a whole. There were stretches of the road from the airport to the hospital that were so quiet they seemed to have been asleep for centuries. But interrupting the tranquility were the massive construction sites, where tons of steel rose out of the dust of millennia. The frantic race to build something where nothing existed before went on twenty-four hours a day. Bathed in the light of huge round floodlights, hard-hatted construction workers, with gauze masks over their faces to filter the rising dust, crawled through the superstructures. Foremen shouted orders; trucks plied in and out of the sites. And looming overhead like the new national bird of Saudi Arabia were the ubiquitous bright yellow construction cranes.

The effect was to make Riyadh look like a surrealistic painting. Small mud houses and scruffy stucco apartment houses slumbered in the foreground, while rising out of the placid background and dominating the scene were machines contorted out of shape by the harsh lights and operated by seemingly grotesque figures bent on their urgent activity. In those early morning hours, few of Riyadh's inhabitants were yet aware of how menacing the pace of development was to their traditional lifestyles.

By 4:oo A.M. we arrived at the gate to the King Faisal Specialist Hospital. The hospital complex was located at the edge of Riyadh on land donated by the royal family. Former King Faisal's palace, with its green tile roof rising through the palm trees, was just beyond the main gate. KFSH was the showplace of the capital. The buff stone building exceeded in design and quality anything else in the city. Sit ting on the site of a former date grove now carefully landscaped, the institution had the feeling of a garden. Dominating the entrance was a spewing fountain highlighted with garish colored lights. Cool water cascaded down into a pool, breaking the stillness of the night. New trees, struggling to sink in their roots, were scattered about in the greatest luxury of all - grass! KFSH boasted the only public grass in all of Riyadh.

The employee housing compound across the street had been left much as the rest of Riyadh, bare and dusty. As we pulled to a stop at the gate, I began to see the outlines of the buildings where I would live. Numb by this time, I did not yet feel the full impact of the gap between the recruiting company's promises about life in Riyadh, presented in their color brochures and 35-mm slides, and the reality. All I wanted was a bed.

The guard on the gate was Lebanese. He had his job because he could speak some English. I soon learned that a great gulf existed between being able to speak some English and being able to speak English. The same was true of those of us who struggled to speak some Arabic and those of us who could actually operate in the language.

My husband slowly pronounced his name and then spelled it. The guard consulted his official-looking clipboard, perused the list, and said there was no Dr. Mackey listed. With great patience, Dan said that he must be on the list. The hospital had known for several months when he would be arriving.

Through the list again. No, the only doctor expected that night was a Dr. Sanstorm. Finally the guard was convinced that, regardless of the name on his list, there was no other doctor in sight. The stalemate ended and our car proceeded through the forbidding gate into a cluster of prefab townhouse apartments laid out like a little community~ Not a soul stirred. The night shift workers had long since gone, and the morning shift was still drifting through its
dreams.

The car stopped in front of I 3E. We all grabbed for the bags and staggered in the door. There we faced what was to be our new home.

The front door opened into the dining area, which contained a For. mica-topped table and four stainless steel chairs. The kitchen was just large enough for one person. On the counter was a survival package designed to get us through the first few days. It contained tea bags from India, instant coffee from the United States, cubed sugar from Singapore, a box of salt from China, a jar of jelly from Switzerland, a loaf of bread of local origin, and some powdered milk, origin un known.

The living room was furnished with a foam rubber cube covered in bright purple fabric, which I later learned was the sofa, a plastic coffee table, and a collapsible wooden chair, sitting under an enormous paper lantern Upstairs there were two tiny bedrooms and a bath. All of the walls of the 8oo-square-foot apartment were cheap imitation wood paneling.

By now it was 4:30 A.M. We stood amid our mountain of luggage in a daze. Cohn was bleary-eyed and far beyond whining and complaining. I numbly wondered, Where is the three-bedroom apartment we were promised? Where is the bougainvillea lazily creeping over stucco walls? Where are the exotic bazaars and the mystery and intrigue of the East? I finally collapsed into bed just as the mournful sounds of the muezzin calling the faithful to morning prayers drifted over the compound and Saudi Arabia's newest arrivals. We were there; now it was up to the Saudis to decide if they wanted us, and the rest of the new servant class, to stay.
This is the question that the Saudis have never answered for them selves. As I rode through Riyadh that first night, the contrast I ob served between the tranquility of the sleeping Saudis and the mad pace of the working foreigners characterized the great truth of the oil boom. The people and their leaders believed that they could buy the physical development that they wanted without disturbing the stability of their traditional society. It is an illusion they still fight to preserve.