Aramco Expats

To Work - Chapter 3

1. Pipeline
2. In Search Of Oil
3. Assignment Arabia

Author: Nestor J. Sander
Released 4 August 2002

See Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of Mr. Sander's autobiography, Assignment Arabia and Next Jobs.

So, Georgia remained in my mother's home when I left for Arabia, this time by air. In October 1946 the airport in Chicago was a primitive field with poorly heated wooden buildings. The trip to Cairo in a Constellation, one of my favorite airplanes thereafter, was marred by unscheduled interruptions involving long layovers. From Cairo our party flew a DC-3 to Dhahran during the night. Max and Dick were pleased to see me for rapid expansion of both exploration and development was planned or under way. At once I was sent to Abqaiq where five rigs were drilling. Two of them were ancient relics that during the last years of the war had been serviced for some months by camel caravan for most motor transport was under repair or broken down. I heard many stories about improvisations to keep some semblance of progress with no equipment obtainable, and the difficulties in obtaining food that were solved to a degree by cattle drives from Yemen, the cultivation of tomatoes in the effluent from the sewage system, and more intensive fishing.

Fred Waldron, who had stayed in Arabia throughout the war years drove a pickup that he had babied and kept running. He was reluctant to let me use it. Rightly so, for on my first independent trip to Abqaiq on an oiled road I threw a piston through the cylinder head. Fred never forgave me. The road was a great improvement. In 1939, when I had supervised the drilling of the structure holes that proved the existence of the Abqaiq structure, a trip to the area took three hours of hard driving, mostly in sand, with rows of dunes to be avoided or traversed. On the oiled road, graded and in some spots covered with clay mixed with crude oil, it took less than forty minutes.

I recalled the dot-dash transmitter powered by the car battery, its long antenna stretched between bamboo poles, that I had used to send messages to Dhahran at a specified time, usually at night when reception was better. Charlie Homewood once replied by voice to my inept sending: 'What do you mean, binch?,' I had omitted one dot from the 6 of six-inch. Now, in 1946, a powerful transceiver carried voice messages to Dhahran. When my wife arrived I bought a Hammerlund twenty one-tube professional receiver that had no difficulty in bringing in the BBC on several wave-lengths. On that set I heard a French tank driver talking to his commander and could pick up all of Europe and Russia. Two years later, installed in a teakwood cabinet it served as an amplifier for the new long-play records.

During the five months that I worked at Abqaiq I wrote Georgia long letters assuring her of my love, and commending her stoic acceptance of our separation. She told me that I should make every effort to obtain housing quickly, for the strain was affecting her health. At last, in February permission came through for her to come to Arabia. The travel office of Aramco in San Francisco told her that a trip was possible only after a delay of several weeks before embarkation, either on a freighter or on a President liner. She left the San Francisco office, went across the street to TWA and purchased a ticket to Cairo. The company travel representative had told her only boat travel was possible; that planes were fully booked.

The personnel office informed her that she would not be reimbursed for the air fare, but Max was in the Home Office and a word from him quashed that. She left, and arrived safely in Cairo after having had only breakfast in Geneva, Rome and Athens because of problems with the engines including the installation of a new one. Her trip was made more enjoyable by a chemist, also bound for Dhahran for the first time, who helped her throughout the flight. An Aramco representative put her on a chartered DC-3 along with twenty men. She arrived in Dhahran at about eleven o’clock one morning late in February 1947.

I had been told the time of her arrival, and was anxious to get to the airport. Dick Bramkamp was amused at my excitement and kept me talking. When I arrived at the field the plane had landed. Visitors were not allowed to go into the customs clearance building. Peering through a narrow high-up window I saw a cloche hat decorated with a long feather moving back and forth. I knew it was she, and after a few minutes we were together.

I felt some constraint after our long separation, but it dissipated during the forty-mile drive to Ras Tanura where the Exploration Department had been relocated temporarily. We were allotted an apartment, small, inconvenient and poorly equipped, but for a time none of that had any importance. Later we were assigned half of a duplex at the terminal. The other half was empty. This small gray cottage was a haven of happiness for us both, although I was away all too often, sometimes being called during the night to go to a rig. Later I was put in charge of all geologic work on wildcats with four men under me: Ev Richardson, Bob Holt, and later Walt Dell’Oro and Bob Wacker.

During this time we were given a new-born gazelle, ‘Plume’. The Department then returned to Dhahran. We had another duplex (1235B) on a paved road across the street from the house shared by Bramkamp and a lawyer, Spike Spurlock. We saw visitors on occasion, for when the mess hall was closed Dick would bring his guests to us for food and entertainment. Among them were Lewis Weeks, Walter Link, and the specialist of ammonites, Professor Arkell of Cambridge, as well as old hands like Krug Henry who was one of the first two geologists to land in Arabia in 1933.

Georgia did her best to make our Dhahran house a home, but during our first contract the company furniture was inadequate and only marginally comfortable. On our first stateside leave we bought household goods in quantity, including a lounge chair for me, yards of cotton cloth patterned in shades of gray to hide the vista and walls, a dinner service, a rotary ironing machine, floor lamps, and other items to make the interior less forbidding. After a long time the shipment arrived in Ras Tanura. We waited weeks for it to be delivered. At last I wrote management asking the reason for the delay in its delivery and had no reply. Infuriated, I talked to everyone about the discourtesy and inefficiency of management. One day, the man charged with transporting drilling equipment to wildcat rigs, Skinny Daniels, told me that he had a truckload of pipe to dump in the yard at Ras Tanura. If I delivered the pipe I could use the truck to bring back our crates.

I had never before driven so large a truck, but managed to keep it on the road at a good pace. At Ras Tanura, I found the pipe yard and with some help rolled the pipe off the truck to the ground. I then drove to the warehouse where incoming shipments were stored before delivery. There they were, the two seven-foot nearly square boxes with all of our purchases. I asked two of the Indian clerks to help me, and, although they protested my lack of authorization for release, we shoved the crates onto the flat-bed truck. Arrival in Dhahran and parking in front of our house was a triumphant moment that Georgia shared to the full. Soon we were more comfortable, although the central air conditioning was never satisfactory.

Our annual Christmas party was attended by almost all of the Exploration Department. The buffet with turkey, ham, and goodies of many kinds along with alcohol in quantity became a fixture, like our previous Friday morning waffles and coffee parties at Ras Tanura. In December 1951, just two months before our departure from Arabia the flow of liquor ceased when the king forbade importation of alcohol. One of his sons had killed a British consular official while drunk. In 1954 when I returned to consult on paleontological problems, much ingenuity had been exercised in the construction of stills, and in research and experimentation on the best methods of inciting fermentation in fruits and grains.

The food supply improved with the years. Perhaps there was a new purchasing agent. In any event the rotten eggs and the New Zealand mutton with scraps of wool in it were no more. The pork liver was gone. Although we lacked some luxuries like lettuce, we ate well. One of the best items on our menu was baked ‘Hamoor,’ a large fish from the Gulf. I don’t remember having shrimp, although they must have existed in quantity. One exotic item that we saw fairly often because of a French banker’s visits to Iran was caviar, the real thing - big gray Beluga eggs in half-kilo tins. We had mangoes and thick-skinned lemons, and of course dates of several kinds. I believe that eventually dairy cows were imported, but not during our stay. Georgia gained a few pounds and I ballooned to 250. Part of this was caused by obligatory intake of salt tablets during hot weather when not in air-conditioned quarters. Often I found the back of my shirt stiff with salt after a day in the field.

Georgia made friends of some of the wives, and found the library helpful. Usually we had a houseboy to do heavy work. One was a young fellow just in from the desert. Another, Hassan, had served in the British navy. He insisted on washing the cement floor of the living room every day, in spite of the chore of removing area rugs and furniture each time. He also turned plates and glasses upside down when setting the table because of flies, a real plague outside in spite of DDT spraying camp-wide. Another was a Persian who was a thief but knew how to iron and to wait on table, and the last was an old man from Muscat who was the most trustworthy of them all. He seemed truly despondent when we left.

For amusement we read and listened to the radio and records. There were movies in the theater and some amateur theatricals. I was in one of them, a kind of operetta written by a petroleum engineer and his wife based on the tunes from Kiss Me Kate. It was a put-down on life in camp. The star was an Arab sheikh who, ‘had a toilet on every floor and was writing to Sears for more.’ After 1949 I was busy every evening working on my thesis for the Sorbonne. Usually I waited until Georgia was in bed before writing in the living room where for a few months our gazelle kept me company. One year I played in public with a string quartet: Ein Kleine Nachtmusik. I was the second violin. Our guests were for the most part worthwhile conversationalists, although on many evenings the topics were entirely geological. Georgia gave lessons in French to a group of wives, most of whom made no progress at all. She stopped when the group dwindled.

On short leaves we went to Beirut where life was that of a modern town. Once we visited Damascus in a taxi and bought a huge copper tray and green glassware blown from old bottles. The vendor who sold us the glassware washed it and put it in a paper bag. When we returned to Beirut and lifted the sack the bottom fell out along with a good part of the contents. The rest bit the dust at the airport in Dhahran when Burt Beverley, helping us with the luggage, dropped the box. We kept three goblets for years, but the last one disappeared not long ago.

During one of these visits (or was it a special trip?) I served as Best Man for George Blakslee when he married Kathy. We plied the newlyweds with liquor and finally sent them upstairs from the reception room in the hotel, both somewhat exhilarated. I believe he had met her in Dhahran where she was helping the group of Arabists.

We made the obligatory trips to the Cedars of Lebanon, the Krak castle and the Beka’a valley where I spent the day at Baalbek photographing frantically the temples of Jupiter and Bacchus and the other less well-preserved monuments, including the small round ‘Temple of Venus’. I suppose no one can go there now because Syrian forces occupy the area.

Life In Camp

In the years (June 1941 to October 1946) of my absence the camp at Dhahran had grown, but rapid expansion in housing and amenities began only at war’s end. When I first arrived in 1938 six wives and their children had occupied married quarters, a few portable houses built not far from the unpaved streets of the old camp. Before my departure we had a commissary, a new mess hall, a small geological laboratory and the beginning of a chemical analysis service, along with a large garage and a warehouse with rig maintenance facilities. When I returned new houses were being constructed in a large addition to the old camp, with streets and sidewalks installed as the number of families rose. Most of the houses were stucco duplexes provided with fences and paved walkways. As the pressure for expansion continued, wooden portables were brought in from Sweden and placed on low piling with concrete underpinning resting on bull-dozed sand. By 1950, the camp resembled a small town in America with a library, a new and larger dining room for bachelors (Steineke Hall) a recreation center with a small movie theater, a hospital, a swimming pool, a baseball diamond and a high perimeter fence with an entrance gate guarded by both company security men and Arab soldiers.

Many of the company security people, I don’t know how many there were, had retired from the New York City Police Department. They were all burly, large men. The ones I encountered spoke Brooklynese. One of their most advertised exploits concerned a driller who had married a Lebanese girl. The couple was installed in a cinder-block apartment near the one in which George and Kathy Blakslee lived with their new-born son. We were visiting them one evening when we heard a voice, amplified by a bull-horn, saying, “Come on out or we’ll come in and get you!” Apparently, the woman had complained of abuse, and the man had locked himself in. The spotlight on the door of the apartment, the red lights on the patrol car and the bull-horn were the closest approach in Dhahran to the world since depicted usque ad nauseam on the TV.

Because of the vast increase in the number of employees the sense of family and unity of purpose that had eased our relationships in the early days was gone by the end of 1947. But we geologists kept a sense of belonging to a select category and maintained a certain solidarity, particularly against the petroleum engineers whose assumption of the leading role in exploitation was natural but annoying to us who had found the fields. Groups with divergent interests proliferated and off-duty and recreational activities reflected a variety of pursuits, ranging from deep-sea fishing to collection of shards of ancient pottery.

I was writing a thesis. I had little time for other interests but maintained a defensive attitude against incursions on my personal liberty and that of my wife. I resented management when it attempted to regulate certain aspects of camp life. One of the rules promulgated was that wives could not visit camps in the desert.

One day during the cool months I challenged this rule. I told Georgia to scrunch down in the seat as we passed the gate. Once clear, I headed for a structure-drill camp on the far side of the En Nala anticline, some three hours out. When we arrived, I told the drillers that they had not seen us. Georgia enjoyed the change from the confinement of a house to the clean, cold dry air of the desert with the stars so much brighter than those of France and California. She watched the cook as he prepared dinner on the kerosene stove for the drillers and mechanic. That night we were inadvertently entertained by the discordant wails from the string of a rubaba, constructed of a five gallon gasoline can, a piece of wood from a packing box, and a cord. The bow was made of ithyl wood and, I suppose, horse hair, although it may have been almost any fiber. It was Ramadan, and the workmen and soldiers slept little during the night. Music was not favored by the tenets of Wahhabism, but most of the drill hands were Somalis whose religion did not sit heavily on them, and the four soldiers were Bedu, also not strongly bound by some of the stricter conventions of their faith.

Early the next day we started south to Ain Haradh, a trip of about a hundred miles. A camp had been installed there in preparation for testing the south end of the anticline that I had followed with the structure drill from late 1939 to the end of 1940. After the Italian bombing raid exploration stopped, and little or nothing had been done during the remaining years of the war. A gravity map of the anticline completed in 1948 showed that a high in the basement was bounded by a series of faults that paralleled its whole length of more than 180 miles. It also showed that cross-faults divided the structure into a series of separate closures, each of which might be discrete, that is a separate oil field. Hence the necessity of testing each closure.

We started, heading southeast in order to cross the anticline, for on its east flank a trail had been made by trucks going to the rig site. The track was several miles west of Hofuf where I dare not bring Georgia, because inevitably word of her presence there would have reached management.

We were making good time when a patch of soft sand stalled the red Ford sedan I was driving. We had the low-pressure (five pound) tires that had been fitted to all vehicles going into the desert, but this patch was softer than most. I lowered the tire pressure even more, but after a brief effort to back out that started to bury the back wheels, I recognized the inevitable - that I must use the sand belts. So I got out the shovel and removed the hillocks of sand at the back wheels. Then I laid the heavy six-foot belts of tough, rubberized, heavy-woven material under the car as close as possible to the back tires, climbed in and engaged the clutch. The belts spun out back of the car, but forward progress had been slight. I realized that here something more was necessary. So I reinstalled the belts and told Georgia to take the wheel. ’Let in the clutch slowly’, I told her, ‘And not too much gas.’

This time I pushed hard, my boots sinking into the soft sand. The car moved forward several feet before the wheels began to dig in again. I repeated the process twice more and at last the car rolled on, free of the trap. The rest of the trip to Haradh was uneventful. After a night there we returned to Dhahran. Georgia never forgot her role of driver when we were stuck. She had been fearful of the outcome and was pleased at its successful conclusion.

On another occasion we visited a small Bedu family in their decrepit black tent not far from Qatif. Daily life at home was generally tranquil. Our half of the duplex had a small garden in front of the screened porch. Flowers never grew well, for neither of us had a green thumb, and the soil was poor. A small tamarisk tree remained alive, but grew very slowly. Only the oleander with its pink blossoms thrived, its nourishment from us a little water. Houseboys succeeded each other. I have already mentioned Hassan, the ex-sailor, but do not remember the name of the Iranian thief or the old man from Muscat who was the best of the lot as regards serving our interests. And there was Ali whom we left in charge of Plume during our local leave. He disappeared before we returned and found her dying.

In summer our house was too hot because the central air-conditioning system (cold water circulated throughout the camp in underground insulated pipes that cooled air circulated by a system of ducts and fans) was overloaded. In summer, our house never cooled below 86^o F. We adjusted to it, and perhaps were more healthy than some others who caught cold often, but were more comfortable.

One traumatic incident comes to mind. One day I noticed that a corner of the door leading to the laundry room had been gnawed. The commissary storehouse was not far away and rumor had it that rats had multiplied owing to the supply of food stored there. I learned that they used traps to catch the invaders and borrowed one. It was a steel trap with jaws that snapped together when a trigger was disturbed. I put it under the refrigerator baited by a piece of bacon. Several nights later I heard the rattle of the chain that held the trap in place. Without waking Georgia I slid out of bed in my bare feet and located my geologist’s pick. (I have it still.) I went to the kitchen and turned on the light. There, just in front of the refrigerator was a large brown rat, one front paw held between the jaws of the trap. He had been gnawing on it, and in a short time would have been free. I advanced, pick raised. The rat hissed and struggled to free itself. I pierced the body with the pick and it died, not without struggling for a time. I cleaned up the mess, and went back to bed, but was obliged to tell Georgia about it when she saw a bloodstain that I missed in my clean-up. She was horrified, and insisted that the kitchen door be replaced.

We had a telephone, rare in the home of a subordinate employee, but for a time I was charged with going to the wildcats when a core was to be pulled, to make sure that it was removed correctly from the core-barrel, and to determine its geologic significance or, on occasion, to make a preliminary determination of its potential as a reservoir. The core sometimes reached the surface at night. I was allowed, for a time, to keep my car in front of the door while after work, others had to put their vehicle in a car pool at some distance from their residences. This management’s mismanagement meant that geologists, whose life might be endangered if their car failed, were unable to determine in advance the state of the vehicle they drew from the pool. It took a long time for Max to convince them that geologists must have assigned transportation that could be inspected and tested before going into the field. ‘Economies’ of this kind came into existence as sidewalks were installed and people unfamiliar with the desert came to hold responsible positions.

We came to know well the head carpenter who on his off time made me a teakwood desk and a radio-phonograph cabinet. He refurbished the Kuwait chest we had found in Bahrain, also teak, but studded with brass round-headed nails and covered in part with thin copper sheets intricately embossed and incised. He was of Finnish origin, but both Mr. Finander and his wife spoke English without accent. A daughter, about seventeen, was a blonde of surpassing loveliness. Her beauty led to a strange incident, and to our getting to know a Lebanese Christian, Sarkis, who had a shop in the ‘atrium’ of the St George hotel. On one of our stays in Beirut, Sarkis introduced us to his mother, an elderly lady with one diamond ring of at least four carats and other smaller rings ornamented with large precious stones. She spoke French well and Georgia visited the estate. For some reason I never saw it.

Sarkis gave us a letter to hand to Mr. Finander. Later, the family revealed its content. It was a proposal of marriage. Sarkis offered the daughter a large monthly allowance, an annual stay in Paris of three months, a house of her own in an exclusive neighborhood in Beirut and the right to bring up the children in any Christian faith she selected. It included a dowry that would have made the girl financially independent. She didn’t even consider the offer but went to study in the states. I still have the paper knife that Sarkis gave me much later when I passed through Beirut, surely en route to I don’t remember where, probably Jeddah. The knife has an ebony handle ornamented with a stylized duck. Its brass wings and ebony back are ornamented with tiny round cabochons of opal, sapphire and ruby. His new shop was not as grand as the one in the St. George. What happened to him and the family during the years of internal conflict in Lebanon?

Other friends, particularly for Georgia, were Mr. Gildea, his wife Annette, and their long-haired dachshund Bingo. Annette was a voluble Frenchwoman who, during most of her life, had been accustomed to luxury. Mr. Gildea supervised the construction of the fifty-million dollar railroad linking Dammam and Riyadh that the king had insisted on having. His house was no better than those of the rest of us. Annette’s English was not fluent, although copious, and she enjoyed being able to pour out her troubles to Georgia.

Friends we saw later in France were Mr. and Mrs. Georges Théry. He was manager of the branch of the Banque de l'Indochine in Dammam. During the war they had been imprisoned by the Japanese, Evelyn in a camp near Singapore, and he elsewhere. He had held high positions in the foreign service of the bank before the war and recounted to us the amenities provided by the bank for its managers in the Far East. They included a fully staffed and furnished house and funds for entertainment. In eastern Arabia they lived on the airport base in an air-conditioned small house for which the bank paid an exorbitant rent. He went frequently to Iran and returned with half-kilo tins of caviar that we too sampled from time to time. We went on a picnic to Half-Moon Bay and the photo shows Georgia and Evelyn together.

The Exploration Department required many ancillary services. Among them was the drafting group under Charlie Phillips, who with Bob Fleharty ran a tight ship that produced final versions of the maps and sections that geologists in the field had created from their observations. Fleharty became the company’s aerial photographer and prints of his negatives made it possible for the mapping parties to choose the sites best suited for their work. Professional aerial mapping services were contracted too, and as a result regional maps became more precise and detailed.

Early in 1948 I was given geological supervision of all Exploration Department exploratory drilling operations. At the time this meant four structure-drill parties, one working north near the pipeline, soon to be under construction, the others in the broad area east of the Dahana. Eventually three wildcats were running too. I used company planes to go to the rigs, and thus was able in one day to consult with and advise the geologist stationed at the well and to return to Dhahran.

One of those flights was particularly memorable. The Navion was a small, low-wing metal monoplane in which the two occupants, one the pilot, were seated side-by-side. I was told that it had a gliding angle like a rock. One morning we flew to Haradh where drilling of well No. 1 was under way. The pilot buzzed the camp, diving and pulling up sharply. I blanked out for a moment. But my discussion with the well-site man, Walter Dell’Oro, helped him do better work thereafter. In the afternoon we taxied to the end of the short dirt landing strip that had been bulldozed on the flat terrain and took off. Less than a thousand feet off the ground, the motor cut out. The young pilot jerked a knob on a sliding rod repeatedly, but no roar of the engine came. He banked and turned sharply. The wheels touched the ground at the very end of the landing strip. Discretion suggested I abandon this mode of transport for the moment. I returned to Dhahran by car, a four-hour trip, so I was very late for dinner that night, and Georgia was worried until a call reassured her that I was on the way home.

I made the flight many times thereafter and began to observe the topography below. Some ten miles east of the long En Nala anticline and about forty miles south of Hofuf I noted a curvature in the trend of outcrops that suggested a dome. I reported it to Mr. O. A. Seager who was then Exploration Manager, but nothing was done at the time. Much later a wildcat drilled on it, found production, modest by Arabian standards, but a major field had it been in the United States.

I visited the structure drill parties less often, for the men assigned were familiar with the rock and fossil sequence, and the introduction of a simple mechanical sample catcher made for more accuracy. Too, all parties had trailers equipped as laboratories and a kind of electric logging device promised to make correlation between wells easier.

My job was difficult at times. One day Mr. Seager told me to fire Roger Mahoney who was in the field with one of the structure drill parties. Roger was an ex-All American football player whose degree in geology was earned in the stadium. I recall seeing him at the bunkhouse in Ras Tanura picking up a drunk by the scruff of the neck and holding him over the railing of the porch, saying, ‘What shall I do with him?’ His fingers were like sausages and his neck and head were of the same diameter. He had broken his leg at the swimming pool and had been off work for several months, but was now recovered.

I drove to the structure drill camp. There was Roger in the lab trailer. Alongside the door was an enormous pile of filled sample sacks. It was clear that they had not been worked, for all of the sacks showed mud at the draw-string. I entered the trailer and said, ‘Roger, I have bad news for you.’ He replied, ‘I was expecting somebody to say that. I just can’t do the work. Don’t know how and don’t want to.’

I was relieved. He didn’t hold the firing against me, although I was partly responsible for the decision. In six hours, I completed examination of the samples and the next day he drove back to Dhahran in his pickup, and I in mine. I have often wondered where he ended up after leaving the temporary work given him in Arabia.

One of the department geologists, Bill Brown, was assigned to a gravity meter party as an observer. It was not a demanding job, so he looked into the stratigraphy and attitude of the beds of Eocene limestone exposed in the area east of the Dahana sands where the party was working. The regional dip was only 18' east, so to measure even a few meters of section required long walks. In one area he found that the same bed covered a wider area than he anticipated, even given the low dip, and brought out a plane table and alidade to confirm his impression. He found that indeed the dip was flat or even a little to the west.

On his next trip to Dhahran he told me about his discovery and I agreed to go back with him. Together we ran a series of traverses using a surveyor’s rod and confirmed his findings. I returned to Dhahran and beat the drum for a closer look at this phenomenon, but for a time nothing was done. Later a structure drill party worked the region. It too found a reversal and further work delineated a structure that became the Khurais oil field.

My paleontologic knowledge made it necessary for me sometimes to visit the field parties when Bramkamp was away in the states or on leave. On more than one occasion he asked me, much to Georgia’s dismay, to accompany him for a week or ten days on a fossil collecting trip. As a bachelor, he had little regard for the problems created in a family by long absence. On one of these trips we took Professor Arkell of Cambridge, known as the preëminent specialist of ammonites in the world, to the Jurassic strata exposed on the western slopes of the Tuwaiq mountains. After a day’s rest, (he had only one lung) we spent four days collecting ammonites, fairly common in the marly limestones of the whole of the Jurassic sequence. As a result, I am immortalized by Hildaites sanderi Arkell. Later I took to Cambridge ammonite impressions from the black shale cores that represented a portion of the lower Jurassic in one of the wildcat wells, Fadhili, if I remember correctly. We did not see him then, but I recall vividly the difficulty I had getting the fossils, wrapped in toilet paper and in sample sacks, through Italian customs.

I explained in my primitive Italian, aided by Georgia’s greater fluency, that the small cloth sacks contained rocks. ‘What kind of rocks?’ he asked and I replied, ‘Mudstone with fossils.’

What are fossils?’ he asked.

I answered, ‘Impressions of very old seashells.’

’What kind of seashells?’

’Clams and snails.’

’Fish, then?’

’Yes, fish.’

’Duty on fish is ten per cent ad valorem. How much did they cost?’

’Nothing. They are 120 million years old.’

He opened one sack, and saw the impression of a small ammonite. ‘No duty!’

As part of my job I followed the deep test in Bahrain, Jebel Dukhan No. 52. At the bottom was gas-bearing limestone of Permian age that included a diagnostic snail, Bellerophon, and a tetracoral. Later, another deep test, Jebel Dukhan No 88, was drilled in an effort to define the limits of the gas-bearing structure. It ran 250 feet lower than No.52 until (in Triassic red and green shales and sandstone) I found indications that large chunks of section had been faulted out, so that lower beds were at approximately the same level as in No. 52. Although my correlation was disbelieved by management, a later electric log confirmed my finding. This well bottomed in slightly metamorphosed sandstones, probably Carboniferous, although I found no fossils in them.

This work gave Georgia the opportunity to accompany me to Bahrain where the shops were in general larger and better furnished than at Dammam on the mainland. The store run by the Al Gosaibi family was particularly well-stocked. Trikamdas, managed by an Indian family, offered competition to the Al Gosaibis who were Ibn Saud’s agents. Georgia bought raw silk that was made up into a suit for me and that she used for a suit coat and slacks for herself. My suit was ready in twenty-four hours.

We slept in the new guest house which was so cold that the extra-hot curry served was bearable. On one visit we bought a large Kuwait chest, the sea-going trunk of the sailors going to Zanzibar and Karachi. Its teak frame and interior were in good condition, but the filigree of copper sheeting and the red paint under it were in a bad way. Mr. Finander put it back in shape.

We also looked at buckets of pearls, unsorted and of all sizes. The gem quality ones, relatively few in number, were bought by a Frenchman who visited Bahrain and Kuwait every year for Cartier. We learned what constitutes a good pearl but never bought a string, although I smuggled several yellow strings into Arabia for others. We came close once, when we found a necklace, pink, well graduated in size, smooth, round, lustrous, with only one bad pearl in the lot. It was just not smooth enough, but could have been changed. I still regret our not having bought it. Today it would be worth many thousands, in spite of the cultured pearl competition. Georgia had a cultured string in New York that was removed, or less politely, stolen, from her neck on 70th street. The one that replaced it from insurance money was not so nice. Its ashes mingle with hers.

Thinking back about our stay in Arabia causes mixed emotions, in general more related to contentment than to anger and frustration. I was pleased with the job and well-regarded by the geologists and most of the ancillary staff in the Exploration Department. The work was interesting and rewarding both intellectually and financially. Salary rose sharply with each additional responsibility. The principal fly in the ointment was higher management stationed in Arabia. For a long time, cost-saving ideas like having a pool for all motor vehicles and requiring that they be checked out each day caused much resentment. I, unlike most employees, was subject to call at any hour. It required much negotiation by O. A. Seager (Exploration Manager) and Dick Bramkamp for me to keep a car parked at the house, so that I could start at once for a well if called at 3 A.M.

The notifications of new rules governing housing and camp policy sent to married employees were couched in less than courteous terms. One was so Napoleonic that I wrote back saying that I was a gentleman and expected to be addressed as one. But someone in the ivory tower had his fill of my responses.