Word: shakhbut
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Meantime, Yemen's Royalist forces are just as determined. They recruit retired officers from France, Belgium, Britain, Pakistan, Iran and Jordan, receive arms and financial help from Saudi Arabia, Britain and Iran. Even the tiny Persian Gulf sheikdoms are unstinting. Recently, a Royalist Yemen emissary visited Sheik Shakhbut, ruler of Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf, and asked for a contribution of 5,000 pounds sterling. He walked away with ?100,000. "You are all astonished?" the sheik shrugged to his advisers. "Do you know how many cases of ammunition ?100,000 will buy, and how long they...
...that Lebanon has one of the world's freest capital markets and a Swiss-like secrecy law so rigid that any loose-tongued banker can be jailed for two years. Beirut's safety has also impressed some of the usually suspicious sheiks of the Persian Gulf. Sheik Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi, who earns $1,000,000 a week from his oil, insisted on burying his bank notes in his mud-brick palace-until silverfish began drilling through the bundles...
...unprofitable when the Japanese cleverly introduced cultured pearls to the world. There was nothing left to Abu Dhabi but intrigue: of the twelve predecessors of the present sheik, only three died peacefully in their palace beds. The rest were either murdered or violently deposed, usually by close relatives. Sheik Shakhbut took over in 1928 when his uncle was assassinated, after having earlier killed Shakhbut's father who, in turn, had come to power by killing his older brother. Shakhbut is said to have ruled so long and safely only because his own two brothers swore a solemn oath...
Bugs in the Treasury. In his long years of oil-less rule, Sheik Shakhbut ran his country on customs duties of $140,000 a year, fought some desultory wars with his neighbors in Sharja and Dubai, and lived quietly in his mud-walled palace on an offshore island. He installed an air conditioner in his bedroom but seldom used it because he disliked the noise. He also put in a flush toilet and a pump to supply it with water; sewage disposal was simply a pipe jutting out from the palace wall. Nearly every day, the sheik sat cross-legged...
What delights Shakhbut is the traditional life of his people. "The thing that pleases me most," he says, "is hunting for bustards with our falcons. It's tremendous to see the falcon fighting the bustard and killing it. Each falcon has its own special owner and refuses to hunt for anyone else." The sheik is also a connoisseur of camel's milk-his only drink-and can tell by the milk's taste what the camel has been eating and where it was in the desert. For the best milk, he explains, "we feed camels...