International: 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. . . ."