Word: trucial
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...inland from the Persian Gulf, the oasis of Buraimi has slumbered for centuries. Its 8,000 inhabitants subsist on dates, camel meat and milk, and live in eight, mud-walled villages scorched by the gusts of the shamal. No one knows for certain to whom Buraimi belongs. Northward lies Trucial Oman, "protected" by the British; westward lies Saudi Arabia; all around is uncharted waste, so desolate that even the Arabs call it Rub al Khali, the Empty Quarter...
Over the centuries many marauders have come-the rulers of Oman, of Abu Dhabi, the Unitarians of Nejd (ancestors of modern Saudi Arabia)-briefly planted flags, then vanished. In 1869 the Trucial sheiks drove off the last of the Saudi tax collectors. Most conscientious modern geographers simply label Buraimi "undefined." It is a land of shifting sands, shifting tribes and shifting allegiances...
Last August a camel caravan lumbered into Buraimi bearing 40 Saudi officials, clerks and armed men headed by a doughty Arabian named Emir Turki Ibn Utaishan. They started wooing the bewildered inhabitants and chiefs with lavish feasts, silver riyals and sweet talk. Immediately, the Trucial Sheik of Abu Dhabi and the Sultan of Muscat appealed to their "protector" Great Britain to repel the "invaders...
Four hundred miles down the coast live the seven Trucial Sheiks. There are fishtail Cadillacs for them, but no free schools for their 80,000 people. The sheikdoms-6,000 square miles of low, arid barrens fringing the southern approach to the Persian Gulf-look as though God here carried out a great scorched-earth policy. They typify the Persian Gulf without oil -nothing but sand, rock-bottom Arabs and hard-living sheiks...
...Trucial Sheiks (socalled because they signed truces with the British to stop piracy) are hopeful. A subsidiary of Iraq Petroleum (which is American, British, French and Dutch owned) is prospecting the area for oil, meanwhile paying the Sheiks a small subsidy. So far the wells have been dry, but the drillers-a hardbitten, windburned American crew who live in primitive tent camps, drinking distilled water, eating out of cans-are convinced that next year fortune will strike the sheikdoms...