مجموعة ٦/ ٩ "تقارير جدة يناير ١٩٣١ -" [ظ‎‎٧‎٣] (٨٠٢/١٤٧)

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Yanbu. It will be remembered that the country between these two towns, which
marks the Holy Places, is excluded from their concession. Both parties arrived,
the Lith party with great difficulty. The manager complains of the size and cost
of the escort which the Saudi authorities compel each party to take with it,
usually seven men, an n.c.o. and two guides. The company have to give each man
eight rials a month and his food, and to pay the Government in respect of each
guide five gold pounds a month and each other man three gold pounds. It is
believed that the men see little of the payments made to the Government, which
are perhaps credited to the Treasury as overhead charges.
404. 1 he California Arabian Standard Oil Company are working under a
concession granted by the Saudi Arabian Government to the Standard Oil
Company of California, which confers exclusive rights in an area bounded on the
south by a line which it would be difficult to place exactlv on the map. The
western boundary, viz., the western edge of the Dahna, is' clear, but as to the
southern boundary article 2 of the concession says “ from the southern end of
the westerly edge of the Dahna, such boundary shall continue in a straight line
south 30 degiees east to the southern boundary of Saudi Arabia. According to
one view this leaves almost none of the Ruba-al-Khali to the south of ^the
concession aiea, but the Legation has suggested that this interpretation is perhaps
unnecessarily favourable to C alifornia Arabian Standard Oil Company. From
Mr Philby’s The Empty Quarter, p. 344 and the first of the two end maps, it
would appeal* that the Dahna proper ends somewhere—perhaps a considerable
distance to the north of his 1934 route. It is true that the Rumailah, through
which Mr. Philby passed, is described by him at p. 344 as “generally regarded
as a southerly continuation of the Dahna ” and on the map as “ sand tract similar
to Dahna,” but it is clear from his words that it is not called Dahna, and both
the statement at p. 344 and the map indicate that there is a gap between the
Dahna and the Rumailah. If this view is correct, there is an area in the south
eastern portion of Saudi Arabia which is not included in the California Arabian
Standard Oil Company's concession, though the extent of that area depends upon
the result of the frontier negotiations between Saudi Arabia and His Majesty’^
Hoc eminent. Ihe extent of the area might be of importance to oil companies.
405. Colonels Etherton and Micklem failed to secure the mining concession
for which they were applying, and they left on the 6 th December. Colonel
Micklem professed to be rather relieved that their offer had not been accepted, on
the gi ound that the transport difficulties involved in working the concession would
have been immense, there being 200 miles or more of desert between the coast
and the eastern boundary of the concession area.
406. It is presumably because the Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate’s
present concession marches with the area now up to offer that the syndicate was
able to upset the plans of Colonel Etherton. Later, Mr. Twitched visited Riyadh
with a geologist and a transport expert to treat for the new concession, which is
believed to include the promising Jebel Hilit district and possibly the legendary
Najadeh gold mine. According to a reliable informant he offered, as part of the
pi ice, to consti uct a first-class motor road from Riyadh to the Hejaz with road
making machinery which the syndicate already have in the country. Work on
the syndicate’s jetty at Jedda has been begun, and a Decauville railway has been
constructed to carry stone from the “ bluffs ” near by.
407. What was believed to have been an advance made to the Saudi Govern
ment by the Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate (paragraph 300) was, in fact, a
loan. The authorities are finding some difficulty in collecting the money for the
monthly instalments by which the loan has to be refunded. It is noticed that most
of the rials are old and, as these have a much larger silver content than the new,
it is assumed that there was no foundation for the belief which was held that
the Saudi Government had in hand a large stock of new rials to be released at the
height of the pilgrim season.
408. The engineer, Muhammad Bey Hasan, selected by the Egyptian
Government at the request of the Saudi Government to report on the roads in
this country, has arrived and begun work. The Egyptian Government
(paragraph 427) is said to regard the macadamisation of the roads from Jedda
to Mecca and Medina as the most worthy object of Waqf expenditure after the
repair of the two mosques. A passage from a Najaf paper is quoted in the
Umm-al-Qura saying that the Iraq authorities are busy repairing the pilgrim
road from Najaf to Rahba, and that many more pilgrims, especially Indians? are