Desert Encounter
- Pipeline
- In Search Of Oil
- Assignment Arabia
Author: Nestor J. Sander
Released 31 May 2003
Nestor John Sander
May 1940
Eastern Saudi Arabia, al Hasa, was baking under the harassing heat of late summer. The searing sun blazed pitilessly in a pale, whitish sky, cloudless and windless. The mirage, a shimmering blue lake, danced far off marking the distant horizon of a barren plain. I was on my knees pounding a wooden stake into the hard-pan with my geological hammer. Sweat dripped from my face to form dark spots on the pebbly silt. Behind me the burbling groan of a camel resounded in the quiet that had been broken only by the thump of the hammer. Startled, I got to my feet and turned, lifting the dark glasses from my peeling nose burned by months of exposure to wind and sun.
A lone rider was close by. Astride behind the hump of a trotting dromedary, he would have taken me unawares had his beast not decided to give voice. But he rode by me and stopped his camel a short distance away near the low stone coping of an ancient well, Ain Haradh. He ordered his mount to couch, then hobbled it by folding back and tying a foreleg of the mildly complaining Dhalul.
The rider was young, slender and short, but obviously fit. He wore a red and-white-checked head-cloth, the badge of the king’s followers. It was held in place by the black wool circlet of the agal, its two cords falling below the ends of four heavy black plaits dangling halfway to his waist. He wore a once-white, long-sleeved, shirt-like robe that fell to his ankles. Encircling his waist a scuffed leather belt held the scabbard of a long, thin dagger. His feet were bare.
He offered me his right hand formally, saying, “Salaam alaikum.” I took it, and replied as custom demanded, “Wa alaikum es salaam.” — And upon thee be peace. His palm was cool, the grip firm, but brief. He smelled of smoke, probably from burning dried camel dung, the usual fuel in the high desert.
“Shizmik?” I questioned.
He answered, (r’s rolled like a Scot) “Ana Murra.” Not his own name, but that of the tribe.
Although a newcomer to the desert I has heard of the Murra, the only tribe among the many in Arabia to spend most of the year in the Rub’ al Khali — the Empty Quarter — a barren desiccated waste invaded by monumental dunes; a land where a few deep, hand-dug wells, their brackish water polluted by camel stalings, made nomadic existence possible. There, living was truly arduous and life itself precarious. Of the same descent as the king, these hardy folk were proud of their lineage, although for more than a decade the monarch had prohibited Ghazzu, the time-honored raids on their cousins to the north, and had forbidden also, on pain of beheading, molestation of Ferenghi, among them, me.
Ain Haradh was an ancient well, certainly pre-Islamic because its dressed-stone coping and lining betokened a culture far different from that of the nomads of today and yesterday. Now it is near a station on the railroad from Dammam to Riyadh. Then it was one hundred-fifty difficult and partly trackless miles south of the base at Dhahran but still a good fifty miles north of the great dunes of ‘ar ramla’ — the sands — as tribesmen called the forbidding tract.
That torrid October day of 1940 was close to the end of my second twelve month in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia opened only seven years earlier to exploration for oil. Much of my work had been carrying out geological duties related to mapping the contours of marker beds that might define the existence of an oil-bearing structure.
I had planted the stake to mark the place where a small drilling rig would begin the week-long task of penetrating about a thousand feet of rock on the east flank of a broad, flat-topped fold. As geological supervisor of a program of near-surface studies I had traced the fold, an ‘anticline,’ for more than 175 miles from north to south without finding a downturn in the southward-rising strata that would show this huge linear feature to be a potential trap for oil, and hence a valid site for deep exploratory drilling, a ‘wildcat.’
I wanted to make friends with my unexpected visitor, for we Americans had been instructed to attempt to foster good-will in our hosts.
“Kef halek?” I inquired.
He replied, “Tayib, zain, wa enta?” — OK, Good, And you?
Not the traditional language of his first ritual phrase, but the jargon used to converse with us infidels.
I was not fluent in Arabic and was at a loss to continue the conversation. Too, my mouth was dry after working in the heat of the searing air. I wanted a drink from the thermos in the station wagon. Perhaps he too was thirsty, maybe hungry?
“Ma?” I asked, accompanying the word with the gesture, palm upward and out from under the chin, universal among the Bedu when asking for water. “Aynam!” he exclaimed, beaming. But thirsty or not, he but sipped the water in the cap of my gallon thermos, protesting its coolness with, “Barid!” However, he was ecstatic over the halves of canned peaches that I kept for an emergency — a car breakdown or a sandstorm. After the first one he grabbed them from the can, licking the syrup from his fingers. I brushed the flies from my face and fanned them away from the peaches, but my guest ignored the pests although they clustered around his eyes seeking moisture.
After finishing the peaches, I suppose as a gesture of thanks, he went to his she camel and with emphatic beckoning gestures urged me to approach. As I came near her, he removed the hobble from the doubled foreleg and repeated “Umaniya!” several times
(I learned later that this word was the name of a renowned breed of riding camels, famous for speed and endurance.)
“R-R-RGH!” he commanded and the animal rose clumsily like all camels. But she was not one of the heavy, plodding, fawn- or reddish-colored beasts of burden I had seen carrying bales of dates, but was dark-brown, long-legged and lean, with a small head. She did not seem to have the bad temper reputed in all camels.
My visitor pulled a date from a small sack attached to his U-shaped, padded-cloth saddle and offered it to the large-eyed creature who, turning her head toward him, took it gently with prehensile lips. I was pleased at this evidence of an understanding.
In an effort to establish a closer relation between us humans I again asked his name and that of his family: “Shizmik? Enta minain?” He was Abdullah ibn Khalid, but the names of his grandfather and great-grandfather, or perhaps of his sept, I have forgotten. He was intent on showing me what must have been a cherished possession — an ancient Enfield rifle, still in fair condition and carefully wrapped in leather — goat? — with a tassel at the muzzle end. I gave the required exclamation of envy of his property, and he then asked me if I would like to ride his Dhalul. Was she even more precious than his rifle?
Would I like a ride? No, thank you! I remembered the swaying motion, the aching muscles, the chafed thighs — painful results of a two-hour jaunt. Perhaps on this paragon the equivalent of a gallop would be bearable, maybe even pleasant, but at a walk and seated on that inadequate cushion, (although it looked more comfortable than the padded wooden frame spanning the hump that had tortured me): “La, Memnoon.”
It was time to part. “Fi aman illáh” exchanged. No handshake. ‘Go in the peace of God,’ a fitting goodbye, for neither of us knew what was in store. He was up and away in a flash. My last view of him was a silhouette of the camel, its head and neck horizontal as he rode flat out into the loom of the mirage.
How had he learned of my presence? I had found that a five-minute stop almost anywhere in al Hasa produced a caller, usually a ragged child-shepherd, but occasionally an old man who asked for ‘tittin.’ (tobacco) None of my other visitors had been mounted. Perhaps Abdullah had seen the column of dust raised by my car, or perhaps the desert telegraph was functioning, lightning-fast as usual. Had he a motive other than curiosity? Probably not.
Pondering thus, I gathered up and threw into the station wagon the heavy, burning-hot, forty-foot chain I had towed as a spoor for Ali, the driver of the D-7 caterpillar tractor. The ‘cat’ pulled a V-shaped frame of steel I-beams, the trail-making drag. Its 8-foot trace would remain until blowing sand obliterated it long after the hole-drilling rig had come and gone. As I was scorching my fingers on the metal handle of the Ford door, my eyes fell on the dressed stone granite coping of the well . Dressed stone was anomalous in a country where only important wells were protected by sun-dried brick, the others marked only by rope-cut grooves in the rocks edging their lips. How deep was it? My pebble fell for more than two seconds before the faint sound of the splash — about a hundred feet to water. How had the ancients been able to work so far down in a hand-dug well not six feet in diameter?
Thinking about that I almost blistered my rump on the leatherette seat as I started back to camp, some thirty miles north. The flies would leave soon, and the spine-rattling bumps would be fewer when I found Ali and the drag, for the first users of the smoothed path could cruise at twenty miles an hour. There was still work to do: check and collate the findings of the day by my fellow geologists, record the results in an approved format, and transmit important findings in voice code to Dhahran.
Recollections of that routine — the occasional pleasure from a job well done or the confirmation of a prediction; the daily discomfort of unwashed sweat, heat, sand and flies; the real danger of working in an environment implacably punitive to error — now arouse only melancholy for lost youth, but the unusual visitor of that day has remained undimmed in my memory for more than sixty-two years.