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was thought unlikely to accept owing to h is lack of ^confidence in the Hejazi
tribesmen. Another tale is that the merchants of ’ Anaiza and Buraida are
owed sixty-thousand pounds and have little chance of payment, though eight
of them made their way to Mecca to ventilate their grievance, despite the
efforts of the Governor of Medina to prevent them from getting further than
that place. I cannot pronounce on the probability or otherwise of the
King having collected any substantial licpiid reserve at Riadh by the alleged £
exactions and other means, but Mr. Hope Gill, who has followed deveiop-
ments during my absence, especially Sheykh ’Abdullah Suleyman’s financial
policy, believes in it.
9. As regards the extent of the King’s military preparations, I can
again rely only on distorted rumours and a few items of fact. He has of
course his garrisons on the frontier and in certain places not far from it and
he could obtain men from Nejd for a definite enterprise promising warfare
and loot. Such troops as there were in Jedda would appear to have been
moved to Mecca almost in their entirety. I see in a report from the
Political Agent A mid-ranking political representative (equivalent to a Consul) from the diplomatic corps of the Government of India or one of its subordinate provincial governments, in charge of a Political Agency. at Bahrain dated November 23, that an informant newly
arrived from the main land had noted an unsual withdrawal of horsemen
towards Nejd and supposed that they might be intended for an attack on
Yemen. I quote with great reserve a report which has reached me here
that the Polish engineer employed in the Government workshop at Mecca
has been sent to recruit airmen in Poland. A good deal has been spent
during the last year or more on military supplies. It is now said that
twenty-four thousand rifles have been repaired in the Mecca workshops,
that there were recently four thousand in hand which the mechanics were
being pressed to repair without delay and that further rifles were expected to
be brought from the interior for the same purpose. It is also said that the
Soviet representative has been offering rifles with one thousand two
hundred cartridges each at two pounds ten shillings per rifle, c.i.f. Whether
this be true or not, my informant, the Indian Vice-Consul, says that a
friend of his who went some little time ago to the Soviet Legation to buy
sterling chanced on one of the A1 Fadhl family and other Nejdis engaged
in inspecting various kinds of rifle,
10. The third question need not be dealt with at length. My Russian
colleague here has always struck me as more interested in commerce than in
politics and I see nothing in his burst of activity last summer or its result
up to date to make me alter that opinion. I can see the Soviets selling
rifles or anything else to Ibn Sa’ud on cheap and easy terms but not at the
present time backing him in a foreign adventure otherwise than by perhaps
looking on generally at any attempt he might make to fish in trouled waters.
I discard as fantastic a further suggestion by my principal informant that
Russia might, in an endeavour to compass the destruction of the British
position in the Mid-East, draw Ibn Sa’ud into a general alliance comprising
Turkey and Persia. I feel that, if Ibn Sa’ud contemplates further adventure,
he would work as he has always done on his own expansive lines, a raider
in the grand condottiere manner. There may be more to be said for sugges
tions that he has sought to gain Islamic sympathy through agents in
countries like Trans-Jordan, the Yemen and Hadhramaut, perhaps even
further afield. i '
11. This is not intended to be an alarmist despatch. I am only too
conscious that the basis of ascertained fact on which; I have built is very
slender. In my attempt to produce a balanced superstructure I may have given
it too formidable an appearance. While writing I have had before me the
extremely interesting paper by Major Fowle enclosed in Mr. Walton’s letter
to Mr. Rendel of November 18. It will be seen that, though Major Fowle
pays me too great a compliment in suggesting that I know more about
Tbn Sa ud than anyone else, my mind has been working on the same general
lines as his. There is this difference that looking at the King in the light
of the most recent events, I suspect that the test of his success may come
before he disappears from the scene and I conceive tentatively the possibility
of Ibn Sa’ud himself, rather than his successor, being driven to the course
suggested in paragraph 10 (b) of Major Fowle’s memorandum, that of
launching ’Wahhabi attacks on the surrounding unbelievers.