Florence of Arabia by Christopher Buckley Page B

this case with reason, as they had been carrying on separate negotiations with ( Wasabi king) Tallulah over the matter of saltwater ports. By the lime the conference convened.
    he was in no mood lo dither with the French foreign minister. Delavall-Poolriere. He had stayed up until five in the morning with Colonel Lawrence. Glandsbury and Tuff-Blidgel. as well as Jeremy Pitt, miserable from the heat and another attack of gout. The next morning, as everyone filed in. Bosquet and Gaston Tazie both noticed that Tuff-Blidget's lingers were green, blue, yellow and magenta and signaled frantically to the French delegates. Too late. By the lime the fifty participants had taken their places around the green felt table in the Great Hall of Sala-al-din at Majma Palace, the British had their maps drawn and ready. The ink. Chomondelev observed, was "quite dry."
    Siggot, Sykes's majordomo (who. two years later, would be killed during a freak tea-pouring accident at Kensington Palace with Queen Alexandra), described the sound of "Winnie unrolling his map over the conference table" as "like a suddenly unfurled topgallant sail snapping in a twenty-knot freshet of f Cowes." Vivid indeed. Realizing what was happening. Delavall-Pootriere tried to object on procedural grounds, but Churchill, pointing his cigar at the Frenchman "like a half eate n breakfast banger" threatened t o extend the Balfour Declaration, which provided for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, into Lebanon and Syria—that is, well into the French sphere of influence.
    The last thing the French wanted. Meg-Wright noted in his cable that morning to Arthur Glenwoodie, was "wave after wa ve of irrendendist kibbutzim mucking about the Levant." Such a move would also have the effect of pitting the British branch of the Rothschild family against the French branch, which for some time had been eyeing the western slopes of the Bekaa and Xoosh valleys as potential vineyards for experimental sauvignon noir grapes. Delavall -Pootriere could do nothing. H e had been outmaneuvered.
    King Tallulah, livid over seeing his promised coastline vanish with several strokes of the British cartographical pen, denounced the conference as a "gathering of jackals and toads" ("jamaa min etheeah w eddqfadeah"), stormed out of the hall and left Damascus with his bodygu ard of two hundred Bedou and He jazi. Picot observed to Gastin-Piquet, "Sa majeste est bien fromage e ("The king is well cheesed").
    For his part. Gazir Bin H az, the plump, pleasu re-loving minor sharif of the W azi-had—trailers and Fishermen along the Daiian littoral since the time of Alexander—now found himself emir of a territory that effectively blocked Wasabia from getting its oil to the sea. This had, of course, been Chur chill's plan all along. What bet ter way to repay King Tallulah for his obduracy ove r the proposed tariff on unpitted dat es, to say nothing of the endless arguments over who should enter Damascus first, and wearing what?
    That night over brandy and cigars in the billiard room at the British Legation, Churchill told Glandsbury that he could not decide which had given him more pleasure, thwarting Delavall-Pootriere or "forcing that royal ass Tallulah to drink his own oil."
    KING TALLULAH WAS LEF T with no choice but to cut a deal with the emir of Matar. Wasabia built it s first pipeline through Matar to the Gulf shortly after the signing of the treaty. Over the wars, a dozen more pipelines followed. Wasabia simply had no other means of getting it s oil to market.
    The E mirate of Matar prospered magnificently from this steady black income stream through its territory. The emirs never released official figures, but annual revenues from the so-called courtesy fees paid by Wasabia into successive Bin H az exchequers were, by the end of the century, estimated t o run annually to the tens of billions of dollars. The Bin H az dvnastv continued to maintain the official face-saving fiction that the