30THE OIL AGE ARRIVESAmericans erect fences and bulldoze the landscape, working shirtless in
the blazing heat:
Within days everything in the wadi changed— men, animals and
nature— for no sooner had the American, his friends and their com-
panions been settled in than a large number of other people arrived.
No one had ever dreamed such people existed: one was short and obese
with red hair and another was tall enough to pick dates from the trees.
Yet another was as black as night, and there were more— blond and red-
headed. They had blue eyes and bodies as fat as slaughtered sheep, and
their faces inspired curiosity and fear.^2Worried residents brought their complaints to the emir, who tells them
to embrace the new age:
“You have been patient and endured much. God is your witness but you
will be living as if in a dream.... You will be among the richest and
happiest of all mankind, as if God saw none but you.... Under our
feet... there are oceans of oil, oceans of gold. Our friends have come
to extract the oil and the gold,” the emir says. “By the end of the new
year, God willing, you’ll have money up to your ears.”^3Munif ’s fictionalized wildcatters were based on prospectors from
Standard Oil of California, known as Socal, now Chevron. Socal was a
splinter company of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly, bro-
ken up by the US Supreme Court in 1911. Rockefeller’s unsavory busi-
ness practices turned American public opinion against him. The breakup
of Standard Oil was initially a setback for American competition for
global supply. But, as the court intended, the surviving splinter compa-
nies soon asserted themselves.
In 1932, the San Francisco– based Socal began drilling its first well in
Bahrain. The aptly named Oil Well Number 1 sat at the foot of Bahrain’s
highest point, a rocky salt dome known as Jebel Dukhan— the Smoky
Mountain. After 220 days grinding downward, Socal’s drill broke
through a layer of blue shale 1,250 feet below the surface. The crew heard