FRANCE: The Visionary

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It was a scene to gladden even the most jaded cruise director. The open-air movie was filled to capacity with a bronzed, relaxed audience. In the swimming pool near by, energetic types were splashing away at water polo. From the "Bikini" bar came the clink of glasses and the hum of bar babble, and in the soft glow cast by indirect neon lighting, palm leaves fluttered.

Only one thing marred the luxury-liner atmosphere that hung last week over the self-contained little world called Hassi Messaoud (Blessed Well): the waves that billowed around it were of sand, not of water. Hassi Messaoud, the Dawson City of the great French oil rush of 1959, lies deep in the barren wastes of the Sahara, 400 miles (or three days by truck) south of Algiers.

Four years ago Hassi Messaoud was simply an abandoned water hole, a navigational reference point for voyagers across the vast sea of sand and stone that the Romans called leonum arida nutrix— the arid nurse of lions. Today it has 5,000 inhabitants, sprawls over nearly 60 square miles of desert. Hassi Messaoud still has no women, no children, no church, no mosque. But it does have three hotels (650 rooms in air-conditioned cottages), two movie theaters, two swimming pools, an airport big enough to handle Caravelle jets, and 124 private firms, including an automatic laundry and a lemonade factory. Between the buildings green lawns grow in topsoil trucked in from Algiers. In its three staff dining rooms white-jacketed waiters serve meals worthy of a three-star Paris restaurant, from pate to four kinds of cheese.

To create this 20th century oasis has cost France dear; between them, two French oil firms—one 80% government-owned, the other 30% government-owned —have spent an estimated $300 million on Hassi Messaoud and its 40 producing oil wells. Similar sums are being spent at the Sahara's other major field—Edjelé —and 900 miles of Saharan pipeline will cost at least another $60 million.

So far the payoff has been slight: a scant 480,000 tons of oil last year (compared to Kuwait's 70 million tons). But the promise is enough to give some substance to Charles de Gaulle's dreams of the grandeur of France. For if the Sahara's already proven oil reserves—conservatively estimated at 700 million tons—can be successfully tapped and marketed, France will no longer have to lay out some $300 million a year in hard-won foreign exchange to pay for the oil needed to keep French industry and transport running. More important yet, France will no longer be so dependent on the whims of Arab rulers in the Middle East.

"Our California." The Sahara has captured the imagination of all France. At least a million French families have invested in Saharan oil stocks, and every month thousands of young Frenchmen apply for jobs in the Sahara fields. French newspapers refer to the Sahara as "our California," and the man most responsible for the Sahara agrees. Says France's Minister Delegate Jacques Soustelle: "This desert should come to mean to France what the Far West meant at a certain period to the American states on the Atlantic coast."