The people of the Asir hesitated at first; they didn’t understand what kind of change was possible. Now we have jobs, schools, hospitals, roads, color television�we’re even building a national park. We are trying to compress into a generation or two the gains that have been made in the accommodation Madrid since the industrial revolution.” These projects are nurtured by the money from oil sales. Muhammad Aba al-Khail, the Minister of Finance and National Economy, told me, “All the money comes to the government and the government decides how to spend it on the basis of the social needs of the kingdom.” Minister of Planning Hisham Nazer, in consultation with other members of the government, is trying to decide how to spend 236 billion dollars over the next five years�an amount that excludes defense expenditures. “The people receive roads, schools, free health care; domestic telephone, electricity, water, gasoline, and domestic air travel are subsidized. As long as you are a Saudi, you get free land to build on, and, to build, you can borrow at no interest up to $90,000 and pay back only 80 percent. More than 140,000 of these loans have been granted. A special fund even exists for distress cases�medical bills, wedding costs, and things of that nature. “However,” Sheikh Hisham said, “We shouldn’t give people the impression that they will always get handouts. The government will provide the essentials. Beyond that, the good life must be the prize that the individual’s own work generates.” Many of the individuals trying to generate the good life through work are foreigners, who are eligible for some, but not all, Saudi social benefits. There are perhaps a million and a half foreigners in Saudi Arabia: approximately a million Arabs, 400,000 Asians, and 100,000 Westerners. This is a serious burden on an under populated country concerned about security and trying to maintain the traditions of a small, insular society. Construction sites are often literally Towers of Babel, and sometimes jobs have come to a standstill when essential workers have been unable to communicate. THERE ARE 35,000 Americans in Saudi Arabia, 13,000 at Aramco alone-4,000 employees and 9,000 dependents. Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, initially a consortium of American oil companies, is now controlled, and its oil assets 60 percent owned, by the Saudi Government. Full Saudi ownership is expected in the future. Aramco arranged for me to travel to the Empty Quarter�empty still except for drillers and seismic crews looking for yet more oil wealth. I landed there with Mickey Berry, Aramco’s supervisor of drilling in the area, a vast region of shifting sand dunes drifting with the winds across the sabkhah, the salt plain. At a rig at Ramallah, set up at the base of a 500-foot sand dune, Mickey told me: “We’re trying to define the width of a 25-mile-long oil field we’ve found here. Anywhere else this would be a big field, but in Saudi Arabia it’s only normal. The Ghawar field, the largest in the world, would extend from Los Angeles to San Diego, California, from the Pacific coast inland for 15 miles.”

Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine expert Hans Thewissen is used to having weapon-wielding police stand by as he digs in Pakistan. “Police serve as guides and interpreters and keep us from going where people aren’t friendly,” says Thewissen, who found the only full skeleton of a land-roving ancestor of today’s whale. “The guns don’t bother me,” he says. “In these hills they’re more of a status symbol than a weapon.”