After the conferences in Dhahran, it was decided that the reconnaissance party, which was to include Max Steineke, should proceed overland by automobile to the Duwaid air strip, indicated on Map No. 1, taking along 40 drums of gasoline, The party was to be joined by one of the Aramco geological parties, which was headed by Ernest Berg and was at that time based at a point near Uguba at the border of the Iraq neutral zone. The intention was then to pick the augmented reconnaissance party up in the C-47 airplane which Aramco, already had under charter, and with Dawaid as a base, to explore the country as far as Aqaba and along the northern border of the Nefud. There would have been enough gasoline to circumnavigate the Nefud, but the exact plans were left to be established in the field.

Following this reconnaissance it was intended to transfer the base of operations to Egypt and to explore the various routes both from the air and on the ground.

Owing to contingencies that could not be foreseen nor controlled, the program outlined was not completely carried out. Much of the intended information was finally obtained but there was a great deal of lost time which - together with the fact that the Aqaba route was quite obviously undesirable from a construction standpoint - caused the proposed reconnaissance from Cairo to be curtailed.

GROUND RECONNAISSANCE FROM DHAHRAN TO DUWAID

The ground reconnaissance started on Monday, April 29, substantially as planned, except that R.A. Bramkamp accompanied the party instead of Max Steineke who had-been taken ill a day or two before.

The party left Dhahran on the 30th of April along the route indicated by the solid line on the attached trip Map No. 2, proceeding, not along the pipe line route (which in this area goes over known ground but where there is no present road) but by the road through Jubail and Abu Hadriah. The road traverses much typical dikaka country, like that shown in Fig. No.2.

Fig. 2 Typical Dikaka West of Abu Hadriah