Word: mecca
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Sikorsky was just 19 when he set out, in 1909, on a pilgrimage from Kiev to Paris, then the mecca of aviation. The early aeronauts who had hived there were mostly grease-stained motorcycle or automobile racers who flew?or tried to fly?out of the sheer love of risking their necks in public. Sikorsky was a young gentleman and an embryo intellectual; his father, a physician, was famed in Russia as a psychologist, and Igor had put in three years at the Imperial Naval College in St. Petersburg, and two more at the Institute of Technology at Kiev...
...slashing night ride, he and a handful of followers recaptured the ancestral capital and palace of Riyadh. Soon after World War I, he had united all the tribes of the Nejd under his rule; next, he overthrew the Saud enemy, Sherif Hussein of Mecca, and blended the Hejaz into his domain...
...kingdom provided riches out of the Arabian nights, some from the duties leveled on the annual torrent of Mohammedan pilgrims to Holy Mecca, but mostly from the vast oil deposits which the King leased to U.S. oil companies on a 50-50 basis. His present share: $200 million a year. A strict Moslem, who forbade smoking, drinking and even non-Moslem churches among the foreigners who came to draw his oil, he nevertheless took to modern inventions like a child let loose in Toyland, eventually had his palaces festooned with telephones and radios, his courtyards teeming with fleets of automobiles...
...Saud, as his heir, instead of settling the succession-as he had-"by the sword." Recently, half blind, racked by arthritis and heart disease, the old King handed over many of his duties to Crown Prince Saud and retreated into one of his fabulous palaces at Taif, near Mecca. There, last week, at 72, a fragile shadow of the giant who once rode at the head of the Wahabi, Ibn Saud the King of the Desert died. As he had decreed, the new King is Saud al Saud...
...they got past a guarded barrier ten miles out of Mecca, no one knew, but once inside the holy city, they escaped detection for a while in the dense throngs of pilgrims. When they tried to find their way out to Jidda, they were overheard speaking English, and Saudi soldiers pounced. The trespassers were taken to Jidda and thrown into a fly-infested jail. There they still languished last week. They had been fined about $1,200 each and sentenced to six months...