Word: aden
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...incessant border squabbles along the bleak mountainous boundary between independent, isolated Yemen and the British Protectorate of Aden, on the southern tip of Arabia, are, as one British diplomat put it, part of the "burden of empire." Last spring, Aden's British Governor Sir Reginald Champion added another straw to his imperial burden. An Adenese chieftain, the Sharif of Beiham, had asked that a frontier customs post be set up to tap the rich stream of smuggled coffee, skins and qat (an Arabian drug) which kept flowing into his territory over an ancient traders' trail from Yemen. Governor...
...over an open clay oven and eat from a rough board supported by orange crates. Moshe's wife has found only occasional work picking oranges, and the 'family's stake is going for food. But Moshe, who spent three years in a British detention camp in Aden, plans to stay. He says: "The Arabs of Yemen hated us. There we had a three-story house made of stone. But this will be our home...
...been born. He had gone to the Middle East as a young man, made most of his money in hides, skins, coffee and the operation of a fleet of merchant ships. It was said he had been born a gypsy, that he owned half the city of Aden, the rocky British colony at the edge of the Red Sea. During the war he had been anti-Vichy, had donated ?10,000 to British war relief...
...knew a little more. In 1930, on a trip through Africa and the Middle East, Novelist Evelyn Waugh had dined with Besse on the roof of his home in Aden. Waugh had described him (under the pseudonym of M. Leblanc) in When the Going Was Good: "He talked of Abyssinia, where he had heavy business undertakings ... he expressed his contempt for the poetry of Rimbaud . . ." He thrived on risk and had made and lost more than one fortune. He liked shark-infested waters: it made swimming more interesting...
Last week Antonin Besse was in Aden and was not talking. Said an employee in his London branch office: "The old man won't like it that his name is out. For 50 years he has worked on the principle that the less people know about him, the less trouble he will have." Oxford authorities felt the same way. They did not have all the cash in hand yet, and as one undergraduate cracked: "They sure don't want to get the old man in a huff and have him take the money back. That would...