Big oil man from Arabia

306 Pages·1958·26.87 MB·English

by  Michael Sheldon Cheney

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Big oil man from Arabia*
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Big oil man from Arabia*
Ballantine Books [1958]
282p illus.
(15JDUBAI MARINEAREAS, LTD.
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PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENT (TRUCIAL COAST), LTD.
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PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENT (OMAN), LTD.
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DHOFAR CITIES SERVICE PETROLEUM CORP.
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PETROLEUMCONCESSIONSLTD.
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YEMEN DEVELOPMENT CORP.
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C. DEILMANNBERGBAU
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D'ARCY EXPLORATION CO.,LTD.
DATEDUE
BIG OIL MANFROMARABIA
Big
Man
Oil
from Arabia
MICHAEL SHELDON CHENEY
BALIANTINE BOOKS, New York
,1958,by
MichaelSheldonCheney
Library of Congress Catalog CardNo. 58-8568
Printedinthe United States of America
By American Book-Stratford Press, Inc.
Contents
1. Shiny Pants 1
2. "Whiskey Gulch 19
3. Etiquette for Infidels 29
4. Seekers of the Sign 41
5. The Pirate Coast 60
6. Edge ofNowhere 80
7. The Egg and Eye 89
8. The Sky Hook 105
9. Family Issue 117
A
10. Square in High Circles 127
11. The Christmas Trees of Arabia 137
12. Air-Conditioned Rock-Hounds 151
13. Pipeline to the Future 160
14. Hucksters of the Empty Quarter 173
15. Ships, Pearls and Vanished Empires 190
16. The Backward Yachtsman 206
17. Hazy New Horizons 215
18. Say It with Rocks 226
Road 240
19. King's
20. A Place in the Country 256
21. End of An Oil Imperialist 275

I: Shiny Pants
Ten years ago the course of my life was bent com-
pletely out of shape by a want-ad in a San Francisco
newspaper. The type of ad will be familiar to anyone
who is, from necessity or morbid curiosity, a reader of
"Help Wanted" columns. The same ads are still running
in the same papers. They are usually the biggest on the
page. They have to be, since their purpose is to lure
able-bodied men to such exotic foreign scenes as the
Pacific Islands, Sumatra, Korea, Morocco or, most regu-
larly, Saudi Arabia. In 1948, such an ad persuaded me to
exchange the life of a California suburb for that of an
oil camp set in the windswept wilderness of the Arabian
desert.
In that desolate world lit by a perpetual glare, ot
scorching sun by day, of gas flames by night, I joined
several thousand voluntary exiles from the United States
who
have, as a body, spent the past quarter-century in
a string of lonely camps, raising a monumental thirst
while making a determined effort to disprove Kipling's
thesis that the best is the same as the worst at any point
east of De Lesseps' strategic ditch.
Specifically, they have been trying to prove to a skep-
tical Arab audience that the best of present-day Amer-
icanprinciples andpractices are a far cryfrom the worst
methods of earlier Westerners who exploited that area,
and, by extension, that Western ways and motives are
better than those of the Soviets, who are competing
briskly for the favor of a distraught Arab world. That
beleaguered group of Americans have been finding it an
uphill struggle, in a country noted for its flatness. I
I