Desert Wind

(See Cover)

The U.S. destroyer, her taut beauty leashed in Jidda Bay, had dressed for the King of Saudi Arabia.

The sight was something to belay an admiral. The King's rugs covered the steel deck. The King's gilded chairs gleamed against the grey turrets. On the forecastle deck, the King's tent stood in the somnolent heat. On the fantail, the King's sheep bleated in an improvised pen, making royal problems for the swabbers.

Royal Names, Royal Mutton. When all was prepared, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud (pronounced ib'n sa-ood) embarked with his brother, the Emir Abdullah; two of his sons, the Emirs Mansour and Mohamed; his deputy foreign minister, the Sheikh Yussuf Yassin; his finance minister, the Sheikh Abdullah Es-Suleiman; his courtiers, guards, cooks and other retainers to the number of 48. On this, his first journey outside his own country, the exigencies of space on a destroyer cramped the King's style. Traveling in his own deserts, he would be more likely to have 2,000 retainers.

The U.S. officers and sailors saluting their guest at the rail saw one of the few living rulers who looks the part. Looming over them was a robed, resplendent Arab, 6 ft. 4 in. tall--the absolute monarch of some 3,000,000 subjects, the overlord of 3,500,000 more, the master of a few oases and of many deserts and mountains whose combined area (700,000 sq. mi.) is about one-fourth that of the U.S., the dominant Arab of the Middle East's Arab heartland (see map).

Ibn Saud was a kingly guest. As the destroyer coursed northward through the livid heat of the Red Sea, he sat in his tent, scorning a cabin (and wisely avoiding the ship's low overhead). Mustachioed desert warriors, armed with daggers and clad in brilliant abbayat, roamed the deck. Arab servants squatted in every corner, butchered sheep and cooked them on glowing charcoal braziers. The destroyer's commander had declined the King's offer of enough live mutton for the whole ship's company. But the King had plenty for himself, his party, and for a banquet of spitted laham-mashwy and rice pilaff for the ship's officers. The royal servants continued to mistake the ship's Negro mess boys for slaves of the U.S. Navy. (Slave traders plying across the Red Sea have for centuries sold Negroes into slavery in Arabia.)

Journey's end, 800 miles and two days from Jidda, was a crossroad of empires--Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal. There, aboard a U.S. cruiser, the President of the U.S. awaited the King of Saudi Arabia.

The Squire & the King. What said the Squire of Hyde Park, schooled at Groton and Harvard, to the Lord of Arabia, schooled in the Koran, the desert, the raid, the running horse, the harem? The only direct news was official, and it was sparse:

"The President, seated on the forward gun deck of his ship, received the royal visitors as the crew manned the rails, bugle calls sounded and the shrill notes of the boatswain's pipe kept all hands standing rigidly at attention.

"The President and the King continued their talks long after the luncheon hour. The discussions were in line with the President's desire that heads of Governments should get together whenever possible to talk as friends. . . ."

But there was a reason for the meeting, a reason implicit in the origins, life and particularly the currently manifest destiny of the President's guest.

The Lion & the Scepter. Ibn Saud's paternal great-great-great-grandfather was a mighty Sheikh when George Washington was a planter's son in Virginia. But the Saud family, long powerful in a land where the family is the center of power, fell on evil days in Abdul Aziz' boyhood.

In the desert and in the fetid coastal town of Kuwait, the young giant grew up with one consuming ambition: to reconquer the lands lost by his embittered father and restore the family to its seat at Riyadh, the Sauds' ancestral city in central Arabia.

When he was 20, he began the restoration. With some 40 of his brothers, cousins and their servants, he stole into Riyadh by night, surprised the garrison, slew the Governor, and announced that a new Saud had come to power.

His rule has continued without a break for 45 years. He has combined the two ancient principalities of Hejd and Hejaz into the present kingdom of Saudi Arabia, subjected neighboring Yemen (pop. 3,500,000) to his rule but left it nominally autonomous, and imposed an astonishing degree of order upon a people to whom disorder has been the immemorial rule of life. Now, at 65, he is justly called Servant of the Almighty, strong as a lion, subtle as the Koran, straight as a scepter. He is, beyond cavil, the greatest of living Arab rulers.

The King & His Duty. Ibn Saud is a strict adherent of the fanatically strict Wahabi sect of Islam. He neither practices nor permits smoking, drinking, or dancing. His justice is swift and sure: thieves have their hands chopped off; murderers, their heads.

But he has his pleasures, the chief of which he considers a national duty. He once said: "In my youth and manhood, I made a nation. Now in my declining years, I make men for its population." Nobody knows just how many sons he has sired; the usual estimate is 40. In masculine Arabia, daughters are not counted.

Marriage suits him; he has never kept concubines. He stays strictly within the Moslem maximum of four wives at a time, divorces frequently and usually keeps one place in his harem open for any comely virgin who may catch his sickly brown eyes. So far, the only evidence of his age is his growing fondness for talking about the prowess of his youth. A favorite campfire story is about the time when he was wounded in the groin during a desert raid. To spike any calumnies against his manhood, he selected a maiden, married her on the spot, consummated the marriage that night.

He is also fond of automobiles, telephones and radios, all of which he has put to good use in unifying the scattered tribes in the wastes of his domain. When Ibn Saud introduced the telephone, some of Saudi Arabia's more fanatical isolationists cried that it was a work of the devil. Replied Ibn Saud: "Of a certainty if it is the work of the devil, the holy words of the Koran will not pass over it." Holy words passed over the new line in Riyadh to Mecca; the objectors subsided. The money for these innovations comes largely from two sources: 1) the income derived from pilgrims to Islam's.Holy City, Mecca (where Mohammed was born); 2) his revenues from a great oil concession granted twelve years ago to the principal U.S. agency in his country, the Arabian-American Oil Co. (owned fifty-fifty by Texas Co. and Standard Oil Co. of California). The company is just getting substantial production (57,000 bbl. daily) and should do very well with or without the projected U.S. oil line across Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean.

The King's liking for motorcars is one of his bonds with his remarkable British mentor, Harry St. John B. Philby, an unsung "Lawrence of Arabia" who joined Ibn Saud during World War I, turned Moslem afterward, got the Arabian agency for Fords, and has supplied the King with counsel and motorcars ever since. St. John (rhymes with Injun) Philby, quietly unobtrusive amid the splendors of the palace and court at Riyadh, has had much to do with Ibn Saud's rise in the Arab world.

World of Dynamite. That world is more important because of where it is than because of what it has. A look at the Big Three maps will show that its strategic position is as great now as it ever has been --Teheran lies to the northeast, Yalta to the northwest, Great Bitter Lake in the southwest.

Within it lie the eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea, parts of Britain's essential passages to the old treasure house of India and to the new, possibly greater treasure house of Africa. The Arabian Sea (northern part of the Indian Ocean) and the Persian Gulf flank India, reach into some of the world's richest oil areas, and may yet be Russian outlets to the south --as, until recently, they were Russia's inlet for Lend-Lease. And adjoining the Arab heartland lie Turkey and Iran -- both Mos em but non-Arab --looking out on the Black Sea and the Caspian, which wash at Russia's outward gates.

The Occident also is concerned with the Arab world because in the Levant (Syria and Lebanon), France clings to shreds of empire, and will not give them up without a struggle which may well endanger world cooperation for the peace.

And millions of people in the Occident cannot forget the Arab world because it includes Palestine. Ibn Saud personifies and constantly bespeaks the Arab case for an all-Arab Palestine. The U.S. and British Governments are committed to a Jewish Palestine--not necessarily all-Jewish, but with too many Jews to suit the Arabs, who, having inhabited it for centuries, regard it as one of their lands.

The results of the Yalta conference may intensify these explosive problems. The Crimea declaration, laying out the areas of Big Three cooperation in Europe, did not deal with the Middle East and its Arab core. The world took due note that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, proceeding from Yalta to Egypt, conferred separately with Ibn Saud, King Farouk and Emperor Haile Selassie.

Pan-Arabia. In this explosive area last week a new force was rising, and Ibn Saud was at its crest. That force was Pan-Arabism, an old and often thwarted dream, now coming to real life in Cairo.

Five Arab States--Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Trans-Jordan --had already signed a protocol for a federation of Arab states. Ibn Saud, holding out to the last while Britain and Egypt's King Farouk laid the groundwork, had accepted only when assured that he would be the federation's kingpin (TIME, Feb. 5). Now his and other representatives in Cairo were drafting a constitution.

The looming federation did not herald a militant Pan-Arabia, overrunning south ern Europe as the hordes of Allah did in Islam's great past. Exhausted by that past and outrun by the present, Arab Islam could hope only to federate its weaknesses, find in loose political and economic union the strength to exact a better deal from the Great Powers who dominate its world.

From the start, Britain's mark was on the federation: the project began to breathe only when Anthony Eden gave it his backslap in 1943. Russia, rapidly expanding its consulates, ministries and other agencies in the Middle East, had its eye on the Arab doings, but had yet to show its hand.

The U.S. State Department, oscillating wildly between passive support for Britain's general position and covert opposition to some of Britain's imperial acts, was for the federation--sort of. Franklin Roosevelt's first duty in the Middle East was to clarify and assert a definite U.S. position, then to make it known not only to his ruling friends but to his people at home.

Wily old Ibn Saud, having got what clarification he could from Messrs. Roosevelt and Churchill, exemplified hi, (and Pan-Arabia's) position: having sailed up the Red Sea on a U.S. destroyer, he sailed down it aboard the British cruiser H.M.S. Aurora.

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