King Oil
SYRIAN HARVEST. By Edwyn Hole. (Robert Hale, 18s.) CHRYSLER replaces camel, and the badu dance before the shaikhly society of Kuwait in the secondhand coats of American hotel commissionaires. Alas, poor Valentino. Such are the trappings of an oilfield which in eight years has become third on the list of oil-exporting countries in the world. Mrs. Freeth, however, in her sensible and spontaneous book Kuwait Was My Home, refuses to be nostalgic. She goes hawking with badawin friends of her childhood, surveys the mushroom growth of western-style schools, and sits down at Shaikh Abdullah's banquet to a menu including historical whole sheep, with the same equanimity : she offers a concise historical and topographical background for personal impressions. Perhaps the significant question that emerges from her book is the Political one : how long, in Kuwait's headlong and somewhat !Irotesque race towards Western civilisation, will it maintain its traditional friendship with Britain? At the moment, we depend on this rich cockpit of Arabia for 57.8 per cent. of all our oil imports. Kuwait Mr. Hole covers a far wider area of the Arab world than kuwait in his collection of essays, Syrian Harvest. Many years as a civil servant, and an inquiring mind, have made him some- thing of a magpie. He can tell you about early Damascene pil- grimages and about the complicated Arabic musical scale. His of information is too heavy for a book of this length, and provokes him to lighten it with laboured facetim, partly, perhaps, happiest unlike Mrs. Freeth he writes as a visitor. He is indeed Fl--
„ iest unearthing fellow visitors of the past, such as the
Reverend Vere Monro, a prim nineteenth-century traveller to Damascus, who has some fine florid comment on the beguiling
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