There were two main difficulties, language and inexperience. As soon as the course was laid out and the work began, Arabs came to the work-sites from the big oases and even Mecca and the Red Sea ports in large numbers. But few of them spoke even a few words of English, and only a handful of Americans spoke any Arabic.

And so the work began under conditions reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, but patience and perseverance won out. Men who work side by side day after day are bound to find means of communication. At first sign language was all that was possible, and training had to be done entirely by showing how something was done, showing it over and over until the process was understood, practiced and perfected. But gradually words came to be exchanged and slowly but surely a language came into being along the pipe line. It isn't Arabic, and it certainly isn't English, but it's a workable combination of the two which both groups can understand.

The second difficulty was training, not merely the training of hands to do unaccustomed tasks but really the making over of the whole way of life of thousands of people. The Arabs' living conditions, hard and primitive, had changed little since the days of the Prophet. Now suddenly they were face to face with the mysterious ways of a technological civilization.

The Arabs proved surprisingly adaptable. They leaped at least a century forward when they voluntarily laid aside their loose anklelength thobes and abas, unsuitable and dangerous for working around machinery, in favor of western shirts and trousers. They also adopted western haircuts. But they have retained, sensibly for that land of sandstorms and burning sun, the gutra or head shawl, held in place by the agal, the coiled woolen ring which is the distinctive badge of Arab clothing.

Most of these Arabs had never seen even such simple tools as a screwdriver or a monkey wrench, and yet in time they became skilled workmen in a hundred different western trades. They have driven giant trucks, bulldozers, diggers and trenchers. They have blasted rock and welded pipe. They operated the self-propelled cars of the skyhook at