Word: trucial
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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...
...TRUCIAL SHEIKS...
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...