'A ruler of the desert' [‎110r] (7/8)

Hasa, wider resources^ greater wealth and a larger settled
population than the Rashid f and their dominion rests therefore
on a more solid foundation, hut the ultimate source of power,,
here as in the whole course of Arab history, is the personality
of the commander. Through him, whether he be an ^bbasid Khalif
or an Amir of Najd, the political entity holds, and with his
disappearance it breaks.
If the salient feature of the Kuwait durbar A public or private audience held by a high-ranking British colonial representative (e.g. Viceroy, Governor-General, or member of the British royal family). was the recog
nition by the assembled Arab chiefs of the good will of Great
Britain towards their race, it was the presence of an unchanging
type of desert sovereignty, among conditions so modern that they
had scarcely grown familiar to those who created them, which
gave Ibn Sa’ud's visit to Basrah its distinctive colour. In the
course of a few hours the latest machinery of offence and
defence was paraded before him. He watched the firing of high
explosives at an improvised trench and the bursting of anti-air
craft shells in the clear heaven above. He travelled by a
railway not six months old, and sped across the desert in a
motor car to the battle field of Sha'aibah, where he inspected
British infantry and Indian cavalry, and witnessed a battery of
artillery come into action. In one of the base hospitals,housed
in a palace of our good friend the Shaikh of Muhammarah, he was
shown the bones of his own hand under the RBntgen ray. He walked
along the great wharfs on the Shatt al Arab, through the heaped
stores from which an army is clothed and fed, and saw an
aeroplane climb up the empty sky. He looked at all these things
with wonder, but the interest which he displayed in the
mechanism of warfare was that of a man who seeks to learn, not
of one who stands confused, and unconsciously he justified to
the officers who were his hosts the reputation he has gained in
Arabia for sound sense and distinguished bearing.
"It is good for us" said the Shaikh of Muhammarah, as the
two chiefs took their leave, "to see your might.® Those who
heard him may well have found their thoughts reverting to a
might greater and more constant than that of the War Lord, and
looked forward to the day when we shall expound the science of
peace instead of the science of destruction.