Lands of Sand

...Should the worst occur and the oil stop flowing, economic chaos on a global scale would result...

...We are not exactly sure who we are...

...When the guerrillas themselves could not be caught and shot, others were punished in their place...

...Life was cheap in Morocco...

...Porch relies almost exclusively on European sources—he makes little effort to get inside the natives' heads or fill in their history as would a modern anthropologist—with the consequence that the Moroccans seem at best like piteous, unruly children...

...His position as chairman of the department of medicine and private physician to members of the royal family gave him entree into areas of Saudi life normally closed off to Westerners...

...I couldn't put it down...

...And a Saudi princess who had spent her childhood in the U.S...

...The book has a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" quality to it...

...Everyone is cracking up...

...Gray has his own premonitions of an "eventual head-on confrontation between the past and the present...

...The two mix in unpredictable and outlandish ways, creating tensions between the traditional and the modern not easily resolved...

...Sartre's Nausea was a mere four years away...

...It is a sort of schizophrenia...

...For the fact is that the real action was in Europe...

...There is a certain quaintness as well...

...Best of all, he is a terrific storyteller...

...Diplomats at the Quai d'Orsay might preach about the need to win "hearts and minds" to the annoyance of the generals in the field, but whenever the crunch came, the generals had their way...

...The campaigns in the countryside, a Conradian world devoid of restraint, were even bloodier...

...World War I was delayed—and the North African nation's fate sealed— after the Algeciras Conference of 1906 and the Agadir Crisis of 1911 gave France a free hand in return for concessions to Germany elsewhere...

...Another was an elderly Saudi prince, a founder of the Kingdom, worth $32 billion...

...How they accomplished this, however, marks off the difference between then and now (for the West, certainly, and to a large extent, even for the Soviet Union...

...The opening section, with its colorful description of what the author terms "an almost perfectly preserved medieval world," is unquestionably the most fascinating in the book for the nonspecialist, yet not wholly to be trusted...

...There probably will never be another study that describes in such detail the actual confrontations, big and small, between Frenchman and Moroccan...

...To assuage the squeamish in Paris, Lyautey said he was bringing civilization to the savages...

...A more contemporary (in every sense) picture of the Near East is provided by Seymour Gray in Beyond the Veil: The Adventures of an American Doctor in Saudi Arabia (Harper & Row, 353 pp., $17.95...

...A vacuum was waiting to be filled, and the French, rather than the British or the Germans, succeeded in filling it...

...A young woman who had attempted suicide because of the restrictions on women told him: "There is a growing interest among Saudi women of my generation for equal rights...

...Frankly, neither could I. No more perfect guide into the hidden recesses of Saudi Arabia can be imagined...

...French rule came in Morocco as the result of the 1904 Entente between France and Britain, and not before the European powers twice almost went to war over the supine land...

...Toss in the hypocrisy of a ruling elite that professes a puritanical religion at home while indulging in wild orgies abroad, and what may be brewing in Saudi Arabia is a highly volatile mix...

...Complexities abound...

...Apart from the merely anecdotal, Gray has a great deal to relate about the impact of modernization on the country...

...declared: "It is difficult to be a Saudi Arabian right now...

...Historians of North Africa, students of European colonialism, and French Foreign Legion enthusiasts may avidly gobble up all of the information Porch, a specialist on the French military, has to offer...

...We are in the middle of a cultural revolution "An Arab medical colleague estimated that more change had taken place in the past 25 years than in the previous 200...

...slavery, after all, had only been abolished in 1962...

...Those not carried off by disease might die senselessly at the hands of others...

...His testimony is especially valuable because of the personal relationships he was able to establish...

...Practically all who were willing to confide in him, it seems, were troubled by the contradictions in their society, and in themselves...

...Primitivism is depicted here, and civilization, too, though not in simple opposition...

...There are professional Saudi watchers ready to offer even money that the royal family will someday be overthrown by a band of Islamic fundamentalists...

...Armies had it easier in those days...

...Few others will care to remember whether it was Thami el Glaoui or Madani el Glaoui who in 1908 replaced the irresponsible Sultan Abd el-Aziz with the no less ineffectual Moulai Hafid...

...What little government existed in the country was corrupt and ineffective, the Sultan being a childish incompetent whose consuming passions were bicycles and women's fashions...

...For the first 60 pages or so, Porch paints in the backdrop of his history, creating a panorama of superstition, filth, butchery and barbarism...

...They did not have to depend on unreliable native intermediaries...

...As Porch explains, Morocco was not coveted for its wealth or resources...

...Like many parts of the present Third World, it was simply territory the major powers battled over as they maneuvered for strategic advantage...

...At that point, all predictions would be off, the wheel of history would make a full turn, and straightforward imperialism could once again become an option...

...In Saudi Arabia, Gray treated women who felt no shame at removing their clothes as long as they did not have to uncover their faces...

...Despite assurances that the tumor was not contagious, her husband promptly divorced her (by saying "I divorce you" three times in succession), forcing the heartbroken woman to abandon her three-year-old son in Saudi Arabia and return to her parents in Egypt...

...This recalls 19th-century perspectives (Kipling's "fluttered folk and wild—your new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child"), and after so lurid a scene has been set, one is practically relieved when the French arrive to bestow the blessings of "civilization...

...General Hubert Lyau-tey, the homosexual misfit who masterminded the conquest and later ruled the country, relied on indiscriminate reprisals to terrorize the populace into submission...

...The French established their protectorate over Morocco only 71 years ago, in 1912.Thecoun-try was not genuinely subdued until resistance south of the Atlas Mountains was wiped out in 1934, the same year Americans were giving a ringing endorsement to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Adolf Hitler was becoming undisputed ruler of Germany...

...A few days later, Foreign Legionnaires, the scum of the Armed Forces, entered thecity and ran riot, looting, pillaging and killing...

...Ages overlap...

...After the massacre of nine Europeans in July 1907 provided the military with the pretext it was looking for to establish a foothold in the country, the French navy stormed into Casablanca, shooting or bayonetting anyone in its path, primarily women and children...

...He possesses an astounding memory, and, somehow, in his years devoted to medicine and the publication of over 100 technical articles, has acquired an easy, fluid writing style...

...In more private moments he told the truth: "In this country force alone imposes respect...

...the world would be plunged into deep depression...

...Cholera and smallpox were rampant, and as much as 75 per cent of the population was said to suffer from syphilis...

...His hospital, with its "state-of-the-art" facilities that he calls "easily the best I had ever encountered," was not far from Bedouin camps where the leading remedies for illness were branding and drinking camel urine (the latter, Gray observes, not so outrageous from a medical point of view as it sounds...

...One of his patients married the son of an Arab entrepreneur who had made millions drilling for water, and lost money whenever he struck oil instead...

...Gasoline could skyrocket to $6 a gallon...

...In the United States, apparently, he is friendly with a number of the rich and famous, among them Katharine Hepburn, who in a blurb for his book wrote:" I found it riveting...

...The tales begin even before Gray arrived in Riyadh, with a story from the early '60s in Boston when he examined the wife of a Saudi prince and found a harmless growth in her arm...

...The incident foreshadowed much that Gray would later see firsthand—the power of the royal family, the subordinate position of women, the odd juxtaposition of the very old and the very new...

...These events, of paramount significance in European history, seem like distant rumblings from the vantage point of The Conquest of Morocco, with its focus on desert ambushes and feudal disputes...

...A blow-by-gruesome-blow account of France's last colonial acquisition, The Conquest of Morocco concentrates on the years from 1903-14, narrating a tale of bandit raids on Saharan outposts, court intrigues and usurpations, bloody battles between tribal armies and colonial mercenaries, high-level negotiations and royal capitulations...

...The bottom line of foreign policy v/as force majeure, its foundation a confident racism...

...And with reason...

...Gray is a 71-year-old Harvard Medical School professor and researcher in biophysics and nutrition who spent three years during the '70s working at the King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh...

...Gray is sensitive, thoughtful, fair, with a keen eye for the psychologically and sociologically significant...

...Several of the influences that pushed Western nations outward at the end of the last century remain potent today...

...Had they been readers, the soldiers fighting in the desert to extend the French empire could have packed Malraux's Man's Fate or Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover into their knapsacks...