As I opened my eyes that first morning in Saudi Arabia, I saw the morning light powering its way through the draped windows. Struggling to wake up, I became aware of a deathly quiet seeping into my consciousness. There were no birds chirping outside the window and almost no sound of human activity. Here at the edge of the city, we still had the luxury of the tranquil desert. But even in the residential neighborhoods in the heart of the city, the streets were almost deserted, as the combination of the climate and the culture kept the Saudis in their houses, protected from the cruelty of the sun and the prying eyes of strangers.

My first day in Riyadh was spent touring the city with others who had just arrived at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital. When the car sent to pick me up stopped in front of my apartment that afternoon, and I walked out of the air conditioning into the blazing sun, the thermometer mounted on the shaded wall outside registered a late-spring time temperature of 114 degrees. It would reach 120 degrees and more by June and would stay there until late September.

I fought to keep my long skirt from tangling between my legs as I climbed up into the four-wheel-drive Chevrolet Suburban and crawled into the back seat between two nurses. It was unbelievably hot. We bumped along on half-finished roads, dodging heavy Mercedes water trucks and deep construction pits. The sun hammered the car, and the air conditioner groaned and labored to keep the temperature just bear able. An intense glare, interrupted only by the optical illusion of waves washing across the road, rose up from the fiat landscape. The heat that had sent everyone indoors created a stillness that was somehow lonely. As I looked at the overwhelming ugliness around me, a heavy feeling of depression overcame me. The landscape was an endless monotone of grayish tan. There were no trees, hardly a shrub. The newer buildings were fiat-topped squares of dingy stucco that merged with the colorless ground. Mountains of rubble stood everywhere. In the mad rush of construction, bulldozers ceaselessly pushed dirt and debris from one building site to the next, increasing the size and content of the piles as the city spread outward.

The bulk of the government's development funds were being poured into Riyadh. Before the oil boom, Riyadh, ancestral home of the House of Saud and capital of the kingdom, produced nothing of economic value except dates. What little economic activity there was in Saudi Arabia before the Second World War was centered around the port of Jeddah, which received religious pilgrims from the Moslem world and a pitiful volume of goods from the West. In the 1950's and 1960's, the oil belt in the Eastern Province became prosperous with the development of the petroleum industry, shifting the kingdom's economy from the west coast to the east and still largely ignoring Riyadh. The oil boom of the seventies would provide the funds to make Riyadh, at last, the commercial and governmental center of the kingdom of the al-Sauds. But in 1978, the new star of Saudi Arabia was more like a desert outpost than an international city.

Much of Riyadh was still composed of cramped mud buildings, especially near the center of the city. The driver and guide on this tour was an American who had been in Saudi Arabia since 1976. In the manner of a cheerleader, he chatted on to his passengers about how much living conditions were improving and how much easier life had become as electricity, telephones, and supermarkets gradually established themselves. On each side of the street, I could see the brown porcelain of the newly installed electrical insulators clinging precariously from the walls of old mud constructions.

Emerging from a twisting side street, we drove into the central square of Riyadh, dominated by the nondescript fiat architecture and humble minaret of the main mosque. Circling right, away from the mosque, we passed the entrance to the Dirrah souqs ("markets"). Bright brass coffee pots hung along the outside wall and mysterious scents filtered through the air, imparting the timeless quality of the Oriental bazaar. Knots of three or four faceless women, totally clad in black, moved together toward the main entrance. An occasional lone woman, escorted by a man or her adolescent son, entered through one of the beckoning doors. Other men stood in the shadows of their shops or sprawled on intricately woven carpets of deep red, drinking tea from petite glass cups.

The car turned right again and went into the vegetable markets, where trucks from a dozen countries supplying Saudi Arabia with food un loaded their cargoes. We drove back toward the mosque and around the clock tower, an incongruous structure that some member of the royal family must have commissioned after a trip to Switzerland. Then on to Baatha, another marketing district. The area's cardinal feature was a broad, open sewage canal, which six months before had accommodated everything from human feces to the bloated bodies of dead donkeys. But now it was being filled in and within the year would become a wide, asphalt thoroughfare.*

We drove along Intercontinental Road, Pepsi Road, Chicken Street, and Continuous Flyover Road, all names devised by Westerners to compensate for the absence of street names. As we came back around the water tower, Riyadh's most distinguishing landmark, our guide offered typical directions to places Westerners were likely to frequent. The silver shops in Baatha were just left of the live chicken souq. And to reach a good picnic spot we should drive nine kilometers from Riyadh's last paved road and turn left where a bumper of a wrecked Mercedes stuck up out of a pile of rocks, then proceed across the desert to the first thorny tree that might provide some shade.

On the way back to the hospital, we passed one construction site after another where foreign workers raced to complete buildings to house government or business and apartment houses to accommodate the influx of foreigners. At the same time, the Saudis clung to their homes and shops, wary of the Western world that had camped in their midst. It was a wariness that would turn to hostility as Saudi Arabia's mad dash into the twentieth century progressed. The oil boom and its aftermath is not only economic history, it is a history of the relation ship between Saudi Arabia and the West. Recruited by the Saudis, the Westerners marched into Saudi Arabia armed with blueprints, construction equipment, organizational charts, and management skills. Originally welcomed as liberators, the Westerners in time came to be regarded as anartny of occupation bent on destroying the Saudis' traditional values. Through the various controls they could exert over the Westerners, the Saudis staged a defense of their society, while the Westerners with subtle determination resisted the Saudis' attempts to crush their own lifestyle. The Saudis and their Western work force coexisted in a state of tension that was not the result of ill will on the part of either, but rather resulted from a combination of Saudi insecurities and Western insensitivities. The Saudis with their money and the Westerners with their skills each fought to shape Saudi Arabia in its own image. Neither has succeeded in winning the battle.

*in the interim, a spate of new T-shirts showed up among the westerners. Out was the pristine white one with "Baatha Yacht Club" sedately printed in navy blue on the upper left front, and in was the yellow-orange one that screamed "Save the Bastha Canal."

Saudi Arabia in the 1970's was both exciting and exhausting for Westerners. No one attuned to world events could deny that living in the kingdom at that particular time in history was a unique opportunity. If one had the stamina, the sense of building a country from scratch was highly romantic. But not everyone was able to cope. The long hours and tremendous pressures of working in the midst of chaos produced a sizable number of cases of battle fatigue. It was stressful to live with the dictates of Saudi culture and the Saudi psyche. It was wildly frustrating when everything - the air conditioning, the stove, the water pump, the telephone - broke down and no one could fix them for days or weeks. It was maddening to reach the airport with confirmed reservations on a flight for a much-needed vacation to learn no such flight existed or that the plane was delayed for three days. Many became bored in a country where there were no movies, theaters, clubs, golf courses, or sports events and only a handful of restaurants. While many Westerners happily chalked up one year after an other, various studies done for Western companies sending large numbers of employees to Saudi Arabia estimated that as many as a third could not cope with the demands of their jobs, an alien culture, and the difficult living conditions. I saw a few leave within days. Others waited for their first leave, a vacation from which they never returned. Ian Dylan, a seasoned veteran of Saudi Arabia who had spent three years tracking the movement of nomads in the northern part of the kingdom, arrived at his new job at the Ministry of Industry and Electricity to learn that his predecessor was in a London psychiatric hospital. And Peter Wright, an American equipment company representative, arrived in al-Khobar to replace a man who precipitously fled the country to check into the Mayo Clinic with a whole spectrum of physical and emotional complaints. The most difficult aspect of living in Saudi Arabia was that life totally lacked any predictability. Every day was a surprise as the Saudis went through the throes of modernization. So much had happened so quickly that there were no systems in place. Procedures for paying phone bills and regulations governing the con duct of business changed from week to week, leaving everyone in a state of confusion. The Saudis themselves were so confused about where they were going, and if they even wanted to go, that much of life was characterized by abrupt starts and stops. The House of Saud, for its part, played an intricate game of pushing ahead with strong policies for economic and social development, while claiming to uphold age- old religious traditions that conflicted with modernization in order to placate the religious leaders. Government policy affecting all aspects of the lives of foreigners living and doing business in the country shifted daily, causing periodic waves of wonder and apprehension. Moreover, the lack of order and organization, concepts alien to Saudi culture, forced foreigners to pick their way through a minefield of conflicting messages and demands. One misstep that violated an obscure law or offended a Saudi's sense of honor could lead to immediate expulsion from the country. Yet the reward at the end of any trying day was to stand on a corner in Baatha, with a shwarma * in one hand and in the other a tepid Pepsi bought from the galvanized tub of a street vendor, for the sole purpose of experiencing the tempo of the time. Harried Western businessmen carrying fine leather briefcases picked their way along the sidewalk through crowds of Egyptians in flowing galabias. Tall Sudanese with lineal designs burned in their faces strode along among Yemenis, their heads swathed in bright colored turbans. Saudis straight off the desert honked the horns of their new Toyota pickups and raced through the newly installed red lights. There were those among us who had found a niche in Saudi Arabia.

* A Middle Eastern sandwich made from thin layers of lamb sliced off a standing rack slowly tuning on a rotisserie and served in flat Arabic bread with a mixture of parsley, tomatoes, lemon juice, and spices.

A colorful kaleidoscope of people was drawn to Riyadh during those first years of the boom. In addition to businessmen, physicians, paramedics, administrators, and consultants, I counted among my friends and acquaintances the son of the last Turkish governor of Palestine, the heir apparent to the nonexistent throne of Kurdistan, and a stocky freshman with a missing front tooth who appeared regularly at diplomatic functions in Jeddah, claiming to be chief of an obscure tribe in the Cameroons

That first year in Saudi Arabia, I wrote almost as many stories about the Western experience in Saudi Arabia as I did about the Saudis. Although the Westerners were being paid phenomenal salaries, they lived with the same shortages with which the Saudis lived. Saudi Arabia's primitive transportation system was overwhelmed by the kingdom's insatiable appetite for steel, cement, machinery, electrical sup plies, automobiles, and consumer goods. With enormous amounts of money chasing scarce supplies, market shelves stayed largely bare. But it was the essentials that were missing, not the luxuries. The Saudis' passionate love of perfume kept the shops stocked with hundreds of gallons of expensive French scents, but there were no fly swatters. There were Rolex watches but no Band-Aids. In the scramble to accommodate, Westerners found ingenious substitutions for all manner of things that they took for granted at home. With no Thermos bottles, the children went to school swinging plastic bottles of frozen water encased in a sock for insulation. A wide array of metal springs were pressed into service for curtain rods. Prayer rugs became pictures for the wall. Big empty fruit and vegetable cans scavenged from communal kitchens were turned into waste baskets. Bits of aluminum foil from air-conditioning insulation, boxes, string, and plastic bags were hoarded, for nothing was casually thrown away.

The shortage of consumer goods extended to food. There were only two "supermarkets" in Riyadh when I arrived, the Western-style Spinney's and, down the street, the small, dark, and odorous Riyadh supermarket. Both were miserable places to shop. The shelves at Spinney's were usually empty of the basics, while the cramped quarters of the Riyadh supermarket were stuffed with dented, long outdated tin cans of milk and tuna, molding cheese, and spoiled meat.

The supermarket was for staples like flour, sugar, and tea. Potato chips, cookies, ice cream, spaghetti sauce, and breakfast cereal were only memories of another time and place. There was an ample supply of vegetables and eggs, but meat was a major problem. The mutton, camel, and goat from the local butcher were slaughtered among flies and rats and hung in the open without refrigeration. There were frozen chunks of low-grade beef, scrawny Bulgarian chickens, and plastic tubes filled with a little ground beef and a lot of ground soybeans that the few cold-storage houses in Riyadh imported. The only place where quality meat was available was from a roving meat truck, the project of an enterprising American who imported frozen beef and sold it at exorbitant prices to Western expatriates. Unfortunately, the truck was closed down in 1980 for selling smoked turkey that tasted suspiciously like ham.

Although no one ever faced going hungry, Islam forbade us pork because it was deemed unclean and vanilla extract because it contains alcohol. Local law forbade ground nutmeg, which was believed by officials to be hallucinogenic. The Arab black list forbade us Coca- Cola. And port congestion frequently forbade us everyday items such as sugar, cocoa, or coffee. With the high transportation costs and the delays in the ports, prices were exorbitant. The Saudi government heavily subsidized the staples of the Saudi diet - lamb, rice, and flour - keeping their costs inordinately low. It was imported food, food to satisfy the tastes and desires of the Westerners, that was so expensive. In 1978 prices, a can of green beans cost $1.50, a box of laundry soap was priced at $7.00, and six small wedges of cheese sold for $2.80.

Even with all the other shortages, it was the shortage of housing more than anything else that caused Westerners the most anguish. Very little housing existed that approached a Western standard. And like everything else, incessant demand had pushed housing prices to soaring levels. Since foreigners are barred from owning property in Saudi Arabia, Saudi nationals who were in favorable positions to acquire land became wealthy by using interest-free government loans to build rental property, which they then leased to Westerners. In 1973 modern three-bedroom house in Riyadh rented for about $8,800 a year. By the end of 1975, this same house would bring an annual rent of $26,460. And by 1978, the luxury villas (the Saudi term for a single-family house) could cost $147,058 a year, payable in advance. Westerners recouped their costs by simply upping the prices on their contracts. Thus, the petrodollars the West paid for its oil circulated through the Saudi economy and back to the West.

In my first two years in Saudi Arabia, I moved from the tiny prefab townhouse we first occupied to a house in a compound of ten villas in a Saudi neighborhood and, finally, to a metal prefab behind Medical City Village that was about the size and style of a double-wide trailer. Each place had its own personality. The kitchen in the townhouse was so small that unless the wastebasket sat in the hall the refrigerator door would not open. The villa was a great, graceless barn of approximately 45oo square feet, built of cement block and stucco, void of even one piece of interior wood, and with only enough furniture to fill the 8oo square feet I had just left. As was customary in a Saudi-style house, the front door opened onto an enormous foyer that served as a prayer area, complete with two lavatories for washing before prayers.

The house stood in an upper class Saudi neighborhood. Directly across the street from the compound was an empty lot strewn with debris. A minor prince in the royal family lived on one side, while on the other side was a group of Bedouins, the nomads of the Arabian Peninsula. They lived in packing cases, and their bright new taxicabs, which had been presented to them by the government, were parked outside. And like true nomads, they had brought their flocks to the city with them. When our children ran through the compound yelling "goat alert," it was the signal to grab mops, brooms, and broken boards and charge out to chase the large, long-haired Nejdi sheep out of the garbage cans.

Ten months later we moved to Rainbow Villas, a collection of metal prefabs that had all the ambience of Stalag 17. There were twenty-four such houses in all, with five washing machines to share among us. The air-conditioning unit was mounted on the unshaded flat roof of the house so that it caught the full heat of the sun. The temperature in the house never dropped below ninety degrees in the afternoon, and be- cause none of the water pipes was laid below ground, heat rose out of the toilets all summer long. Moreover, the metal construction expanded so much during the day that the house groaned all night as it cooled off.

It was life on the frontier. Packs of wild dogs that might attack any animal or human that got in their way still roamed Riyadh in 1978. There were also rats, scorpions, snakes, an occasional wild donkey, and horde upon horde of aggressive flies that mercilessly attacked the eyes, nose, and mouth in their desperate search for moisture. And someone was always falling down an unmarked construction hole.

Although Westerners existed with the hardships and did without everything but the bare necessities, we had the best of what was available. Everything about our lives was governed by a set of conditions different from those governing the rest of the expatriate work force * and even the Saudis themselves. We had the best housing, the highest salaries, and access to whatever recreation was available, for the Saudi government was pragmatic about its labor needs. To attract and keep the Westerners whose particular skills they so desperately wanted, the Saudis had to make life as painless as possible for the Westerners while still protecting their own culture. Even with the high salaries, a West erner deprived of recreation and crowded into intolerable housing was not going to stay. Everyone else, from the illiterate manual laborers from the Third World to the highly educated and urbane Lebanese, suffered more from the physical shortages and the Saudis' strict code of conduct than did the Westerners. Although the Saudis in the work force rejected the recreational amenities provided to the Westerners because of their religious beliefs, they chafed under the two-tier salary and housing system in which the Westerners dominated. But there were so few Saudis in the work force at the time that the political repercussions for the House of Saud were inconsequential to the goal of recruiting Westerners to develop the country. In essence, the House of Saud often allowed the Saudi nationals to lose out to the demands of the Westerners.

As a result of the different conditions imposed on the various segments of the population, Saudi Arabia was a composite of several separate worlds. The manual laborers from the Third World lived in construction barracks, worked long hours, and stayed largely confined to their quarters after hours. The Westerners' lives were divided between the strict culture of Saudi Arabia that existed outside the walls of their housing compounds and the best imitation of the Western world that they could create inside. Finally, the Saudis lived in a world being physically torn apart, their culture under attack by the presence of their Western work force while they themselves tenaciously clung to their past.