A Chapter from "State of Excitement"

Revelator

Note: What you are about to read is a chapter from the only unpublished book by Ian Fleming. In late 1960 Fleming was invited by the Kuwait Oil Company to write a book about the Gulf emirate, which had recently become independent. Fleming eventually agreed: the money was good and after the problems with Thunderball he was looking forward to writing a non-fiction book.

Kuwait did not live up to Fleming's romantic expectations ("This is a most ghastly place" he wrote to his wife, "sand drives in your eyes and there is a smell of oil everywhere"). Though he wrote positively about the oil company and the Kuwaiti royal family, his disappointment and an occasional note of disparagement shone through. During the editing process he was “fed up and overstuffed with the subject."

Fleming submitted his manuscript, titled State of Excitement, to the Kuwait Oil Company, but it chose not to proceed any further. The only manuscript outside Kuwait is at the University of Indiana. The Kuwait Oil Company is now owned by the Kuwait government and still refuses to publish the book.

Nevertheless, part of it was made public. Before leaving Kuwait Fleming discussed doing a radio program about it with the BBC, which he recorded on December 13, 1960. The script was really just two lengthy excerpts from chapters 13 and 15. I have combined these with additional material to reproduce all of chapter 13. I wish to thank the kind fellow researcher who shared the BBC transcript and photos with me. Enjoy!

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Tuesday Talk

State of Excitement: Kuwait by Ian Fleming

Recording/Transmission: Tuesday, 13th December, 9:45-10:00pm, BBC Home Service.

Ian Fleming has just come back from Kuwait on what was essentially a fact-finding visit. Tonight he recalls two of the more unusual incidents of his stay there.

The hawks on their perches ruffled their feathers and preened themselves, some of the bearers and drivers knelt and said their prayers while others selected a clump of camel thorn on the perimeter of our camp for partial privacy and attended to their morning duties while a giant orange sun climbed out of the East and began to warm the desert of Kuwait, cold from the November night wind. The four of us on the hawking expedition, Ian the lepidopterist, John the public relations officer and Khalid the Kuwaiti, and myself grouchily emerged from our camp beds and, in desert tradition, banged our shoes on the ground to see if any scorpions had sought out their fragrant darkness during the night. None had.

George, the Pakistani cook—we had six nationalities in our twelve-man team—brought fried eggs on cold plates, and placed them among the bottles and dirty glasses of the night before. The forks were grimy with the servants’ curry. We picked the eggs off the plates and put them between slices of bread. After two or three munches I gave the rest of my breakfast to Penelope, the baby hedgehog we had caught the night before in the lights of the car and, after some suspicious grunting and bristling, she sat down on the sandwich and nibbled away quite enthusiastically. Then I wandered off into the desert towards the single waist-high clump of camel thorn I had genteelly noted the night before. This small clump was in fact the only landmark over an area of around twenty square miles. There was certainly no terrestrial feature and all the other clumps, so far as I could see, were of the standard knee-high model.

Of course, the Kuwaiti desert isn’t really flat. There are gentle modulations in the flatness, soft rises and falls that are as obvious to the bedu as mountains and valleys are to us, and are named just as precisely. There is even one small hillock in Kuwait. It sticks up out of the desert near the Burgan oilfield and the appearance of this little hundred-foot-high mound is quite startling on the horizon. But the rest of Kuwait, until the long range of sand hills that form most of the western frontier with Iraq, is what I would describe as flat as a pancake. It is also what I would describe as empty.

After two full days in the desert I saw many ants, one rabbit, one eagle, a few desert larks, one large black beetle and a pale cockroach and two ticks off a dead fox collected by Ian, the insect man. As for vegetation, there was nothing but camel thorn that dotted the desert in small clumps about ten feet apart and one small gnarled cedar tree with a bad local reputation for djins. To be fair, after a day, I got to distinguish between the grey spiny true camel thorn and two very similar bushes, one pinkish that is the favorite fare of the hubarra, of which more later, and one yellowish, at which camels have a munch, regularly once a week, as a dog will eat grass. Without this medicine the camel loses his appetite for the grey variety.

There are, of course, many other species of wildlife in the desert, as you will see in Colonel Meinertzhagen’s compendious Birds of Arabia, and of vegetation, of which Mrs. Dickson enumerates more than two hundred varieties in her Wild Flowers of Kuwait, but these authorities spent many years compiling their lists and, to return to my original train of thought, I shall stick to my proposition that the desert of Kuwait is both flat and empty.

On returning to camp I found all a bustle of activity. What was afoot? This well-used phrase would have been out of place where our particular camp was concerned. Lethargic disorder, leading in die course to rather indecisive action, was the keynote, and what was afoot when I got back from my clump of camel thorn was Ian shooting at a beer can with a .22 pistol, Khalid helping a driver who didn’t know about chokes to get his humber pickup to start, John haranguing the cook, and our fine body of well-trained hunters squatting around the fire having a second breakfast. However, in due course we were off, behawked and armed to the teeth with snake-bite and scorpion-sting cure, and led by the finest hawk-handler and tracker in the whole of Kuwait off into the virgin desert. Well, more of less virgin. In fact , as I soon noticed, not only was the desert crisscrossed with well-used sand roads, but every inch of it appeared to have been ploughed by the jeeps and Land Rovers of other intrepid hunters. However, we been told that the hubarra—crane-like birds—were plentiful and I looked forward to an exciting day’s sport of a kind I had never witnessed before, followed by a romantic evening under the brilliant stars (plus Discoverer II!) listening to the stirring tales of old Kuwait while the hubarras, turning on their spits over the camel dung fire, were taken off one by one and devoured with bare hands, myself as the stranger being given the best bits.

The odds were certainly on our side against the hubarra. Seif (meaning sword), a splendidly handsome man with crossed cartridge-bolts and an ancient Mauser automatic, had been loaned to us by Shaikh Jabir, the Minister of Finance, together with two of his best hawks and, for good measure, a third hawk, a trainee, who would be given his chance when the other two had exhausted themselves after, say, ten hubarra apiece. He travelled with me and Khalid in one pickup with the senor hawk, aged eight, and the three-year-old apprentice. The senior hawk was called “Select” in Arabic and was said to be almost as deadly a killer as “Petrol,” the favourite hawk of the late ruler Shaikh Ahmad, and renowned throughout Arabia. Our armament included a Remington six-shot repeating 12 bore, a .22 with telescopic sights and Khalid’s fine Holland and Holland 12 bore with his initials in gold on it. Our pickup was a Humber Snipe with sand tyres and specially strengthened springs and an upholstered bench perched high up in the rear to help pick out the hubarras at a greater distance. Ian and John, cruising parallel with us a quarter of mile away, were similarly equipped and I thought of the stories I had heard of dastardly sheikhs hunting from open Cadillacs and felt rather ashamed.

About a mile from the camp we stopped and I observed the famous ritual with keen interest. Saif, a majestic figure, rose to his feet in the back of the pickup, caressed Select and removed his leather mask, then, holding the hawk aloft, called “Oho-Oho-Oho” or words to that effect in a loud, commanding voice. Slowly the hawk swivelled its head round while large black and seemingly incurious eyes searched the ground near and far. It stopped its search once or twice to focus its dull gaze on something that looked promising, and once it bowed up and down several times, so I was sure it had picked up a hubarra, but for all Saif’s Ohos and mine enthusiastically added, nothing stirred in the whole clumpy expanse and after five minutes we drove on another mile and repeated the performance, again without success.

What should have happened is thus. The hubarra is a large brownish bustard (McQueen’s Bustard) with white on its wings. It is shy and canny and is so perfectly camouflaged in the desert that Saif said he had once seen a hawk actually perch on the back of a hubarra without knowing it was there—possibly a tall story. The only way to make it betray its presence is to shout the Ohos that are the cry of the camel driver collecting his flock. Apparently, the hubarra likes camel ticks and this cry makes him raise his head to see where the camels are. At once the hawk catches the tiny movement and planes off low over the ground to fall upon the bustard und kill it with pecks at the back of the neck. The handler comes up, takes the bustard from the hawk, rewards the hawk with a bit of raw meat carried in the pocket, hood it and goes after the next one. The famous “Petrol” had been known to kill eleven hubarras in a day and this is thought to be a record. I must say the Oho routine sounds most unlikely but most of the hawks are trapped in Persia, and Persians and Arabs have been catching hubarras like that for centuries so there must be something in it.

The most interesting—in fact the only interesting thing about the hubarra is its method of defence against the hawk. When the hawk makes its first lunge, the hubarra bows down, up-ends its rear discharges a powerful jet of liquid at its attacker—maximum recorded range one yard. This liquid is not what you might think, but a special mixture secreted somewhere near the anal canal for this single purpose. The mixture is viscous, caustic, and—should the hubarra’s aim be true—the hawk is temporarily blinded and its feathers gummed together so that it is put out of action for the rest of the day.

This fascinating defensive mechanism, similar to the ink ejections of octopus and squid and the poisonous spit of some snakes and lizards, is surely a remarkable instance of natural selection and I was agog to witness this truly miraculous example of the Almighty’s handiwork.

After the first hour or so, when my Ohos were getting rather hoarser, and the hawk’s eyes even duller than before, I suggested to Khalid that if the hubarras were so clever as to recognize the camel drivers’ call, with so much hunting being done by car, did they not also by now perhaps recognize the sound of a car and say to themselves “Here comes one of those damn fools trying to pretend he’s a camel driver. Better sit tight!” But Khalid pooh-poohed my theory and we went on careering over the desert of northwestern Kuwait almost to the frontier with Iraq. Suffice to say that after five hours driving over perhaps a hundred square miles neither we nor the other car had even seen the droppings of a hubarra, though Ian and John had, between them and shame on them, shot a fox.

At this stage of the proceedings I must admit that my spirits were low. Ranging over the hideous desert from seven until twelve without seeing a living thing except the aforementioned eagle and black beetle is no way to spend a morning, particularly beneath a sky almost as leaden as the desert. I reflected, and still reflect, that of all the empty hours of my life—in hospital, on watch at sea, listening to bad opera, fishing Scottish lochs in the rain—those five hours were the most barren of all. And, after lunch, there were to be four more of them, without even an eagle or beetle to break the searing monotony. Only the total farce of the proceedings and a search for the nearest thing to a circular pebble at each of our fruitless stops saved me from total despair.

It surprised me how much shingle there was in the desert of Kuwait, and rather handsome shingle at that. The fact that bedus come with their lorries and pick it up pebble by pebble for the meagre wage of 15/- per hundred cubic feet from builders suggests that there is, at any rate, one form of livelihood in the country that is poorly paid.

The truth of the matter is, of course, that there are no hubarra left in the whole of Kuwait. They, and practically every other living thing in the state, have been slaughtered. The locally connected Mrs. Dickson told me that even the seabirds on the islands have been mown down for target practice and, as for the migratory birds which I had expected to see in their thousands, they now seem to have heard of the region’s bad name, for I never saw a single one. With the flow of wealth, every man has his own car and gun, and hawking, once the province of the shaikhs, is now within reach of all. This is one of the unhappiest features of the boom state, and one must hope that the Ruler will take note of what is happening to the wildlife of his country and make sanctuary and protection laws before it is too late.

[Continued in the next post]

Revelator

[Continued from the previous post]

The day was partially redeemed by a rather tipsy evening round the campfire—a vast blaze of camel thorn—in which we roasted potatoes. My companions regaled me with tales of high life in Beirut, which laughably describes itself as “the Paris of the Middle East”. It is in fact a ramshackle township with hideous suburbs of vastly expensive steel and concrete apartment houses, few of them inhabited and most of them only half built, the largest and most garish casino east of Monte Carlo, a brothel quarter of monumental squalor and a fine harbor which is the greatest smuggling entrepot of the world. However, its geographically well situated to provide the Arab states with what the oil-rush needed—a wide-open town providing every refinement in physical delight, down to cinema bleu in colour and with sound, a combination which, I am told, spoils the masculine palate forever for the real thing.

There have been two recent scandals that had shaken even Beirut and my companions gave me the details.

The first upset the Lebanese not because of its criminal aspects but because it showed the depth to which jerry-building had sunk. In the capital, underground warfare broke out between the two richest gangs of white slavers. Going to bed one night in the luxurious top apartment of one of the largest blocks of flats, the head of one of the gangs touched off, by contact with the springs, a bomb that had been put under his bed by the rival gang. The bomb was so powerful that it blew the white slaver straight through the ceiling, leaving a neat silhouette of his outflung arms and legs in the flimsy concrete as in a Walt Disney cartoon. No one minded about the white slaver or the bomb and police investigations were cursory. The whole weight of the subsequent enquiry was directed against the builder and contractor for building a ceiling so thin that a body could be blown through it.

Almost concurrently the most famous Madame in Beirut had a bit of bad luck. This monster, whose name was “Chastity” in Arabic, was wont to freshen up her stable by recruits obtained by waiting outside the gates of the local girls’ school on graduation day. She would choose the least well dressed and not necessarily the prettiest, invite them to tea and dazzle them into a softer way of life than working in a shop.

Unfortunately a senior official, visiting her establishment, was offered his sixteen year old niece. Horrified, and courageously facing the scandal, the official at once informed his brother. The girl was rescued and Chastity went to jail for five years.

Having shamelessly desecrated the romantic desert night with these and less printable tales we retired to the austere comforts of our tents.

***

I was received by His Highness the Ruler of Kuwait, Shaikh Sir Abdullah al Salim al Sabah, K.C.M.G., who is 65 years of age. He has always been a man of simple tastes and today lives in modest quarters in his seaside palace at Sharf, and governs the country from an austere office in the oldest palace in Kuwait, Dasman, built in an uninteresting turn-of-the-century style, on the waterfront in the town. Since he became ruler in 1950, in succession to Shaikh Ahmad, and even since the coming of oil, he has changed his modest way of living in no way at all, except for the acquisition of a sober Cadillac.

This is not entirely true. Recently the Sultan of Morocco paid him a visit and brought with him a retinue so large that they could not be accommodated or even feasted at the same time in the Ruler’s home. This was considered by the Sabah family as severe loss of face and breach of manners, and the Public Works Department are now adding an extension to the public rooms of the seaside palace which will prevent future embarrassments of this nature.

The Ruler is a calm and even phlegmatic man, with soft and extremely intelligent eyes and a presence of considerable authority. Before I left Kuwait he gave me an audience, which remains in my mind chiefly on account of an exchange which thoroughly deflated my ego.

Before the audience I was carefully reminded that I must enquire after His Highness’ health. He suffers from gout, which takes now his right foot, and now his left, despite the latest treatment. The affliction is surely unfair, since he drinks nothing, does not smoke and is modest and abstemious in all things. I duly made polite enquiry and we talked briefly about gout. I suggested that the cause might be overwork and that he should have plenty of rest from his labours.

I then told him briefly of my abortive desert hunting trip and of my grief that the wildlife of Kuwait was so rapidly being despoiled. Would it not be possible to establish sanctuaries, or at least some form of protection by instituting a closed season, and could there not be hunting licences that would be checked at the police posts in the hinterland? Shaikh Abdullah said it was indeed a sad business. The trouble, of course, was hunting from motor cars, but this was impossible to control. As for hunting permits, that would be an interference with the freedom of his people, who did not like permits of any sort or description and regarded them as an interference with their freedom, in which he concurred with them. At least he was planting many trees, which would provide a haven for the smaller birds. In this I warmly agreed and sincerely congratulated him, for it is true that—although as one Shaikh put it to me, bringing up trees is as expensive as bringing up children—thousands upon thousands have been planted on both sides and down the centre of all the main roads of Kuwait, and a vast nursery in the model state farm is planning a program for increasing the greenery of the desert.

Commenting on the miracle of Kuwait, I said that in trying to gather facts for my book, I had found that the people had already forgotten what it had been like even ten years ago, and only a few remembered details from the early days of affluence. Was His Highness writing his memoirs? Or keeping notes on how it all had happened? The Ruler said he had no intention whatsoever of writing his memoirs. They would be written in the sands of time, and it was not for him to say what of this or that he had done was right or wrong. Posterity would judge. So I switched to the naïve question of whether, if His Highness had to go back ten years and start all over again, he would do anything differently. No, said the Ruler, he would not. On the whole he was satisfied with what had been achieved, and anyway if did not make the same mistakes he would probably make a lot of different ones. At this moment a cheque book was brought in and the Ruler excused himself while he carefully filled in two or three counterfoils and then the cheques, writing figures which from the motion of his pen seemed to contain quite an astonishing number of noughts.

I was greatly impressed by the Ruler. He is a firm, wise man and the country is fortunate that, when the golden avalanche came—today the revenue of this tiny sheikhdom, no bigger than Wales and with a population smaller than Cardiff, is at least £150,000,000 a year, thanks to it being the fourth largest oil production country in the world—this wise Ruler was there to act as the father of a family that might otherwise have been seized by chaos and intoxication.

To end our talk I produced what I considered an extremely neat slice of Arabism that I had chiselled away at the night before, on the basis of a motto I had heard in a bazaar. “I believe, Your Highness,” I said, “that there is an Arabic motto which says, ‘You cannot carry two watermelons in one hand.’ It seems to me that Your Highness has been trying to carry a hundred watermelons in one hand for the past ten years.” Satisfied with having got my little speech right, I sat back while the interpreter interpreted it. After a pause, and without the pleasant smile I had expected, the Shaikh, or rather Shaiookh, for he is a plurality of Shaikhs, uttered a curt sentence, and the interpreter turned towards me. “His Highness says it isn’t watermelons. It’s pomegranates.”

Barbel

A big thanks to you, @Revelator, for this. I've been wanting to read the book for decades, ever since reading about it in Pearson's biography, and this is as close as possible. I appreciate the hard work you have done bringing us this and many other Fleming curios, interviews, etc.

Revelator

You're very welcome! I've also been wanting to read State of Excitement for a long time. Andrew Lycett wrote that the book "did little justice to Ian" but I quite enjoyed the chapter and a half reproduced above. Being half-Lebanese I was amused by Fleming's remarks on Beirut.

I also have relatives in Kuwait, but none with any influence in the Kuwaiti government! However, the book's copyright will probably end within a couple decades, so I hope it will finally be printed, whether the Kuwaitis like it or not. Fleming's copy is in Indiana, waiting for a future publisher.