I
sank to the carpet, tucked my legs discreetly beneath me and did
my best to behave appropriately and follow the Emir's lead in
sampling the dishes. However,
I simply couldn't get the knack of rolling rice into a neat
little ball to pop into my mouth.
It must be an inherited art, and I was further
handicapped as a left-hander by having to accomplish this
impossible trick with my right hand.
Everyone joined in the effort to teach me, but I ended up
with very little rice and a great deal of grease on my hand so
that when I was offered a piece of fruit I couldn't hold on to
it, much to the general amusement.
A servant appeared at that point with a pitcher and basin
so that I might wash my hands and peel my orange.
About
this time Abdul Dahleh offered the casual comment that it was
too bad that the school teacher hadn't showed up.
Only then did I find out that it had been arranged with
the local Syrian lady who taught in the town school to be my
escort and translator at the women's dinner.
She had failed to appear and, fearing that I might be
uncomfortable dining alone with the ladies who spoke no English,
our host simply included me at the men's meal.
I
was shocked and embarrassed when I realized that I was, indeed,
an intruder in male territory.
With his inherent grace and courtesy, the Emir had never
given the slightest indication that my presence was
unconventional -- and probably unwelcome -- nor did any of his
guests. It was yet
another tribute to the art of hospitality as it is practiced by
a people who have carried the obligation of host to guest to the
highest degree.
Trying
to deal with this revelation as gracefully as possible, I begged
Abdul Dahleh to tell the Emir that I was most anxious to meet
the ladies, and I couldn't care less whether or not I had an
interpreter. When
this was relayed, there were immediate protests that I wouldn't
be comfortable since we wouldn't be able to speak to each other,
and I'd be better off where I was.
But, I had my pride and insisted until someone was
dispatched to bring a small boy to take me to the women's
quarters.
We
went out into the courtyard and up an outside staircase to the
high point of the visit. For
here were all the gaily dressed members of the female side of
the household gathered to meet me.
I felt like a celebrity, for that's exactly how they
treated me. And,
what a wonderful time I had with them.
After
the initial greetings and laughter at my graphic gestures of
impatience with the men for keeping me away from them, we got
down to some attempts at dialogue.
I told them my name, and my hostesses eagerly responded
by identifying themselves as well.
With about twenty people in the room, it was soon
apparent that I was becoming hopelessly confused, so they sorted
themselves out into smaller groups of each wife with her
children as well as a sub group of older female relatives who
turned out to be sisters of the Emir.
All this -- and all subsequent information -- was offered
by means of some very clever pantomime with a good deal of
pointing and counting of fingers accompanied by a flood of
commentary that, although the words were unintelligible to me,
told me volumes in tone and manner.
The acting was of the best, and we traded charades to the
amusement of the children who finally got up the courage to get
into the act too.
As
usual the children struck exactly the right note.
They brought out some little school books, the kind that
teach children to read by means of a picture on each page along
with the identifying word, and our communication improved
instantly. I would
point to an illustration and give them the English word, they
would come back with the Arabic and then we would all practice
the other's version with hilarity on both sides.
At
some point, an emissary arrived to rescue me from what the men
were sure was a difficult situation and a spirited dialogue
ensued through the closed door as the ladies and I shouted back
that we were having a fine time and to come back later.
Knowing
that I had already eaten with the men, they insisted only that I
have some sweets and tea as well as more fruit, and my
vocabulary expanded along with my midriff.
Periodically,
we would stop for a pop quiz and I would have to go around the
room reciting names and then test them on the English words for
various objects.
It
was a wonderful party, and when the time came that I really had
to leave, it was hard to break away and go back to the
comparatively sedate gathering of the men. This was my
introduction to the separate world of Saudi women, and the years
have confirmed what I discovered that evening -- in Saudi
Arabia, no matter where you may travel, the color, the fun and
the freedom from inhibition are always to be found in the
company of the ladies.
Travel
to what were then remote areas of the kingdom was a special
benefit of Dick's job. The company had set up semi-permanent
installations for the crews who would supervise the construction
of individual segments of the road system, and most of these
projects were already in progress. The desert camps were strung
across Arabia from Medina to the eastern edge of the Nafud, and
the company maintained a twin engine airplane to supply them.
The Beechcraft came
complete with Sky King, as he was known to all, the archetypical
bush pilot of adventure films and novels.
Tall, with graying hair and steely blue eyes, he played
the part to perfection and literally ruled the air. He kept his
own schedules independent of company needs or policies and
certainly without regard to the personal wishes of his
passengers. But, his flying skills had been proven when he rescued the
airplane, which had sat in the desert for a year after his
predecessor had crash landed it with the American Ambassador and
his daughter aboard. Fortunately,
no one had been hurt, but the plane remained there slowly
filling with sand until Sky King came along and flew it out when
nobody else could.
He
was as temperamental as an opera diva and given to spontaneous
flights to Beirut "to have the engines checked", but
he was a great pilot to fly with who could always be counted on
to find those little dirt landing strips among all the thousands
of miles of beige landscape.
If
he hadn't existed, he would have had to have been invented, so
perfectly did he match my idea of an adventurer in Arabia.
I loved flying with him and so did Woof, who had not
returned to commercial flying after that first trip from Jeddah
to Riyadh. If we
had to spend some time in Jeddah, she was driven grandly to the
airport by Ali Harbi, sitting in the back seat like a duchess,
to be taken out to the plane where she occupied the copilot's
seat. For a dog of
exceedingly humble beginnings, she was literally flying high,
and she would look out the window to watch the ground drop away
and then settle herself comfortably for a journey that often
included stops at the camps en route where she would be spoiled
rotten by the cooks.
For
me, flying the camp circuit with Sky King was a personal flying
carpet ride, an extraordinary opportunity to explore the endless
expanse of the desert kingdom in all its diversity.
At small plane altitude, differences in the terrain were
easy to distinguish, and the very nature of flight provided a
unique perspective. It condensed into real time all the
alterations that nature's forces have shaped over millions of
years, and the changing landscape simply unrolled beneath us
providing a natural history of the peninsula from sea to sea.
To
drop out of the sky into an undulating sea of sand and find one
of our small crews waiting for their mail and supplies was a
surreal experience. What
had they and their kitchens and showers and Land Rovers to do
with the desert that engulfed them?
Like latter-day Alexanders, they would conquer what had
been unconquerable, turn it to the uses of the world and then
move on having left behind the indelible imprint of
civilization. Eventually,
there would be a highway and with it would come the debris of
travel -- ruptured tires, aluminum cans and a blossoming of
plastic.
But,
I didn't think of the consequences then.
I could only enjoy being witness to the excitement of an
immediate challenge that didn't allow for future concerns for
the environment. A world was changing here, and, if only by
marriage, I had become a part of it.
It was exhilarating just to be present when new forces
were being exerted on a land unchanged for centuries.
We
could spend a couple of hours to several days at any one camp,
depending on whatever Dick's particular mission might be, and I
often had plenty of time to scout the local communities and meet
some of the inhabitants to whom I was often an object of
interest as a western woman, in many cases, the first they had
ever encountered. And,
while it is true that in a public place I might gather a curious
crowd, in private, I was accorded the same hospitality as my
husband or the company engineers.
In lovely old mud houses or a Bedouin tent, there was
always the same gracious welcome I had received in Ar Rass.
Those
were heady excursions for someone who had grown up on adventure
and travel books. A
day's drive by Land Rover might take us to two separate villages
similar in architecture but strikingly different in color,
depending on the content of the soil from with the mud blocks
were made. A pink
town like Bukhariyah contrasted sharply with the yellowish-white
buildings of villages in areas that were rich in gypsum.
Subtle differences in decoration could be spotted as
well. In a tiny village near Hanakiyah, the few houses were
embellished with something resembling bas-relief, a feature not
found in any of its neighboring communities.
Everywhere, the
essential design themes of desert architecture were played out
with variations that spoke of the creativity of a people who
could impose an individual aesthetic on a harsh and restrictive
environment. There
is something in the desert that breeds individualism, and it
must be contagious. A
young American woman, married to one of the Syrian contractors,
chose to accompany him to live in the vastness of Qassim, and
everything about her simple block home from her garden to her
candle lit dinners spoke of her originality of spirit.
Infected
by the same virus was one of our company wives, who created a
festive holiday atmosphere at her husband's camp by stacking
graduated tumbleweeds and decking the resulting structure with
beautiful decorations in three sizes -- camel, donkey and goat
droppings respectively -- dried and sprayed with gold.
She also conducted mandatory calisthenics classes each
morning for the crew, a rather less welcome innovation.
Much
as I loved flying the circuit, the jewel among my memories of
the desert was the overland trip from Jeddah to Riyadh, circling
northward through the camps.
Perhaps, we were foolish in ignoring the basic rule of
taking more than one vehicle on such a trek, but Dick had spent
enough time in Qassim to know the landmarks; the camps were
linked by radios so that someone always knew which way we were
headed and how long it should take us, and ultimately, we had
faith in the care of desert dwellers for the alien traveler.
Whichever rationale prevailed I can't say, but it was a
wonderful problem free trip.
Heading
up the coast from Jeddah, we followed the shore line until
turning inland to Medina and a volcanic landscape of black
basalt mountains and valleys.
We passed ancient lava flows that looked as though a
giant asphalt machine had already done the work that our
contractors were just starting out to do and had paved the
desert with a layer forty feet thick.
Our first stop would be outside Medina, near the remains
of the old Hejaz railroad at the westernmost of the construction
projects.
It
was a good day's drive on established roads, and we had yet to
tackle the intricacies of cross country travel, but the luxuries
of a hot shower and comfortable bed had already become very
appealing. The crews, isolated as they were, welcomed visitors, and the
cooks dished up their best meals, which one felt obligated to
consume in vast amounts before an evening of Scrabble, bridge
or, in the event that we had arrived on the right night, a
movie. Films
traveled from camp to camp once a week via the Beechcraft and
next to the mail were the cargo most eagerly awaited.
If there was a town nearby, the audience was augmented by
men and boys who might well be seeing the first movie of their
lives. Years later
at a party in Riyadh, I was introduced to a young Saudi Army
officer who, upon hearing my name, told me that he not only
remembered Dick, but the first movie he had ever seen was as a
child at our camp in Ar Rass.
It
was one way of reciprocating the hospitality offered to all of
us by the people of the area.
Although it couldn't match their scale of entertainment,
it was at least a quid pro quo and served to enhance the
relationship between the towns and the camps.
From
Medina, our next leg would be north to Khaybar and the ruins of
centuries old settlements whose agriculture had been sustained
by the construction of massive earth dams to provide irrigation.
One of the conditions of the company's contract with the
Ministry of Communications was to register the discovery of
either archeological or historical sites and relocate the
highway in order to avoid the destruction of clearly visible
remains of organized communities.
It added another dimension to the work to realize that
some of these finds had gone unrecorded before we arrived on the
scene.
On
one occasion, I watched, horrified, as a group of Bedouin pulled
down the remains of a Roman arch and threw the ancient bricks
into the bed of their Toyota pickup.
But, my reaction was that of the uninitiated to the
fundamentals of life in the desert; every useful object is
hostage to human survival, and there is no room for the
preservation of past glories in the struggle to live in the
present.
Northeastward from
Medina, the landscape became the familiar hard pan that
characterizes so much of the northwestern region alternating
with sabka, salt deposits, that might or might not conceal a soft and
deadly substructure that could immobilize a vehicle. Now, the differences in terrain were less a matter of
interest than survival.
An
expanse of flat desert that encouraged fast driving would
abruptly turn into a landscape of boulders too small and too
thickly clustered to dodge and too big to drive through.
This was a test of the skill of the driver, who could
only negotiate them by finding space for one wheel on the ground
while the opposite one took the ride up and over -- not unlike
attempting to iron out a thousand and one speed bumps.
No
matter what the topography or the condition of the ground,
driving was always a matter of decision-making.
The number of tracks that have crisscrossed the desert
over the years has created a labyrinth of choice, and, like
Alice in Looking Glass Land, you could be traveling towards a
visible landmark and suddenly find yourself driving away from
it. The trick was
in the choosing of the track, and there were no rules as we
discovered. Gut
feeling in the absence of intimate knowledge of the desert was
the best we could hope for, and most of the time it seemed to
work, keeping us out of the soft spots in the sand and
maintaining our heading in the direction we wanted to go.
Upon
leaving each camp, we would radio ahead to our next stop and
give them our time of departure so they could estimate our
approximate driving time and know when to start searching if we
didn't show up. But,
we usually tried to factor in a little sightseeing time because
there were so many attractions to lure us into side trips.
A
lonely watch tower glimpsed on the horizon would lead us to the
remains of a deserted village and speculation on what had
happened to it and when. Flooding
from a hundred-year rain? Disease?
Warfare? Just
to be in a place where such alternatives were not only possible
but probable was an immense satisfaction to one of a romantic
turn of mind. Pinch me, I'm really here -- that sort of thing.
And,
what a lot of pinching it took when we came across the caravans,
some of them so long that it took most of a day to pass a given
point. There could
be a thousand animals -- donkeys, sheep, goat -- but it was the
camels that characterized the caravans, hundreds of them in slow
dignified procession, some with curtained riding litters for the
women and some laden with the paraphernalia of desert life as
well as the milk herds with their young, all on the trek to
renewed pastures, southward in the winter and back north with
the coming of summer.
This
was the Arabia of history, and aside from the rifles carried by
some of the men, it was the same picture in every detail as it
might have been centuries before.
I was convinced that I was witness to the permanence of
desert ways not realizing how imminent was the change sweeping
across the measureless sands that would displace this scene
forever.
However,
there was another vista that has and will always remain as a
testament to the past. Near
Hanakiyah, a red sandstone butte stood alone rising from the
desert floor, seemingly unremarkable until we drove around to
the far side and came into a small canyon.
Here upon the rock face was a magnificent collection of
petroglyphs dating, we later learned, from pre-Nabatean times.
Tall, stylized figures remarkably similar in posture and
ornament to those found in the American southwest, stood above
us carved into the rock. With
them were their herds of cattle with long gracefully curved
horns and even a lean dog with a curled tail, much like a modern
day saluki. In places the rock face had fallen, and we were able to
examine the figures in detail.
It was a discovery that our crew had reported to the
Ministry, and subsequent studies have been made and published.
To me, it was a testimony to the ageless relationship of
man and desert that is impervious to change.
But,
the towns of Qassim were not to survive in the same way.
They would change dramatically and become the modern
cities that they are today, but I didn't know that then and
naively believed that these too would withstand the incursions
of the developing world that would be expedited by the new roads
and the ease of contact with the commercial centers of Jeddah
and Riyadh.
The
agriculture of Unaizah took the form of simple strip-farming to
produce local cash crops to fill the needs of the inhabitants
and their herds. Some
vegetables reached the cities, but the more perishable and
fragile types like tomatoes and grapes were easily damaged
during the long and bone-rattling trip to market. When the highway system was completed, and the technology of
pivot farming was introduced, this area became one of the
kingdom's food baskets.
*****ADD PICTURE
But,
I saw Unaizah as a picturesque town of softly rounded mud houses
with intricately carved plaster interiors testifying to the
artistry and originality of its craftsmen.
The very restrictions of Islam on graphic representation
seem to bring out the creativity of designers in their invention
of endless permutations of geometric patterns.
One can see the same result in the genius of the
calligrapher brought to bear on that distinctively Arab art
form.
The
green setting of Unaizah was truly an oasis to us, and we
happily picnicked in the tamarisk groves that surrounded it and
browsed through its souk. The
souk was a particularly attractive one in a mud-columned arcade
in the center of town. There were a number of female vendors of much the same kind
of merchandise that was to be found in the harim
souk in Riyadh, but I didn't know enough to buy more of the
Nejdi jewelry that was on display -- I was still under the
impression that it would always be around, and I regret the lost
opportunities to preserve more of it.
The same good humor and warmth prevailed among the women,
and I thoroughly enjoyed the market of Unaizah.
Buraidah,
the nearest neighboring town, was very different both in
appearance and atmosphere.
The strictest observance of Islamic law and tradition
discouraged the presence of foreigners and precluded the ease of
entering into public life that we had grown used to.
But, driving through the central market area, we
discovered that we had been lucky enough to arrive on the day of
the camel auction and spent some time watching the colorful
proceedings from the Land Rover.
A bull camel is not easily displayed for sale if he is not so
inclined, and there was a Saudi version of the running of the
bulls in Pamplona before sufficient numbers of very brave and
determined men convinced this particular camel that he was not
in a position to choose whether or not he was on the auction
block.
Of
all the camps, the one in Ar Rass had my vote as the absolute
best. In a nearby
oasis, the contractor had found an old Turkish fort, and its
barracks and had turned it into a mini resort complete with a
minimal, but usable, swimming pool and lights placed among the
palm trees to enhance night time barbecues.
This
was also the area where Dick had spent most of his time in the
desert when he first arrived in Arabia, so familiarity played a
significant part in its charm for us.
My original welcome never suffered from repetition, and
both of us felt very much at home in Ar Rass.
The
easternmost camp at the tiny village of Riyadh Al Khabra faced
the most challenging project.
Their section of the highway, which would cross an area
of dunes on the edge of the Nafud desert, presented the problem
of dealing with the shifting sands, which drift and ultimately
cover whatever is in their way.
A unique design solution was devised by the American
resident engineer, a veteran of the Indian Service in New
Mexico. Rather than
cut through, the road would ride the top of the dunes and help
to stabilize the sands while the prevailing winds would sweep it
clean. It was a
fascinating concept and one which proved itself when the
construction was complete.
This
was our last stop, and we left the area through one of the most
dramatically situated towns I have ever seen.
Zilfi crouched at the foot of the high dunes, a graphic
metaphor for the endless struggle that humans wage against an
encroaching desert. Looking
back as we headed toward Riyadh, this picture was a fitting
fadeout to a journey that I will always remember as one of the
most meaningful in my time in Saudi Arabia.
Has
the desert changed? Our
use of it most certainly has, and today's desert dwellers enjoy
a style of life equal to that of the cities.
The ease with which we travel tempts us to dismiss it as
just another landscape glimpsed through the window of a car at
high speed. But,
there is an immutable quality to the desert, an exotic mixture
of beauty and danger, unforgiving and cruel to the unwary.
Only the ignorant believe that it has been shaped and
tamed. Those of us
who respect the desert know better.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Frances
Meade is an American who has lived in Saudi Arabia
since 1965.
Born in New York, she and her family moved to
Arizona in the '50s and still call it home.
She has a degree from Mount Holyoke College and
has written and edited educational texts as well as a
monthly magazine column.
