Word: messaoud
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Only one thing marred the luxury-liner atmosphere that hung last week over the self-contained little world called Hassi Messaoud (Blessed Well): the waves that billowed around it were of sand, not of water. Hassi Messaoud, the Dawson City of the great French oil rush of 1959, lies deep in the barren wastes of the Sahara, 400 miles (or three days by truck) south of Algiers...
Four years ago Hassi Messaoud was simply an abandoned water hole, a navigational reference point for voyagers across the vast sea of sand and stone that the Romans called leonum arida nutrix- the arid nurse of lions. Today it has 5,000 inhabitants, sprawls over nearly 60 square miles of desert. Hassi Messaoud still has no women, no children, no church, no mosque. But it does have three hotels (650 rooms in air-conditioned cottages), two movie theaters, two swimming pools, an airport big enough to handle Caravelle jets, and 124 private firms, including an automatic laundry and a lemonade...
...create this 20th century oasis has cost France dear; between them, two French oil firms-one 80% government-owned, the other 30% government-owned -have spent an estimated $300 million on Hassi Messaoud and its 40 producing oil wells. Similar sums are being spent at the Sahara's other major field-Edjelé -and 900 miles of Saharan pipeline will cost at least another $60 million...
...January, burly Jacques Soustelle, 47, has made the most of the Ministry of the Sahara. Last week, in the oasis town of Ouargla, he briskly inspected a 2O-acre terminal servicing the 25-ton trucks that haul pipe to the huge (500 million tons) oil strike at Hassi Messaoud. He checked over plans for a loo-room, air-conditioned hotel, invested the new mayor with a tricolor sash. As he went through these ceremonies, he was not only the minister in charge of two new French dèpartements (states) that together are three times the size of Texas...
Algiers, Bōne, Oran and the villages on the oil route to Hassi Messaoud are booming. From Algiers to Bordj-bou-Arréridj (a town in an area where the rebels are still active), the highway thunders with big trucks carrying pipeline equipment. A year ago, from Palestro onward-the rebel zone-the same road was almost deserted. The astonishing thing now is that mingling with the steady stream of trucks are families, both European and Moslem, in private cars, ignoring the charred remains of a car by the roadside and taking in stride the signs warning motorists...