Modern War Passes Desert Dwellers By : Bedouins: Sand and solitude are a way of life for the Saudi wanderers. The conflict has affected them little.

There is the rumble of modern warfare in this country that is now home to one of the most technologically sophisticated fighting forces ever assembled, and there are also the ageless rhythms of the desert.

Amid the nerve-racking roar of F-15 fighter jets and the loud grumbling of tanks clawing through the sand, there is the coughing of camels and the tinkling of tea cups in finely woven tents.

The full moon rose over the date palms of Hofuf one night last week, and the Bedouins made their way the next morning to the camel market on the outskirts of town, repeating a ritual as old as the desert itself.

There is a kind of constancy in Saudi Arabia that is often missed by the hundreds of thousands of foreign military personnel who have set up tents in far-away outposts to battle back the wind and the sand and the wide-open solitude.

But wind, sand and solitude are the Saudi’s sustenance. That is why Saudi families go out from the cities at this time of year and pitch tents along lonely desert highways, passing a few weeks in isolation before going back to work or school.

It is why senior members of the royal family often leave their splendid palaces behind and entertain guests far into the night on woven silk carpets laid out upon some remote stretch of sand.

It is why when a group of Saudi and American journalists go into the desert together, the Americans will huddle near the car and the Saudis will eventually wander off and stretch out on some bitterly cold patch of sand to talk quietly.

It is why a Saudi, in a closed car on a long road trip, will wrap his headdress carefully around his face before settling down for a nap.

At the camel market last week, there was a good deal of earnest discussion and finger-pointing about the progress of the war a few hundred miles to the north, but such talk inevitably came to an abrupt halt whenever an interested buyer strolled by.

“Someone has offered 9,000 riyals for this camel,” Mohammed Marri told one prospective purchaser, “but I think it costs more.”

The buyer looked unconvinced.

“This is good, she has a baby and has milk,” Marri pointed out, removing the hand-woven bra from the camel’s teats and squirting a line of warm milk into the sand.

The buyer moved on.

“He will be back,” Marri predicted.

Four tribesmen who had come looking for new dromedaries to supplement their herds bent their heads together in earnest discussion and looked up, surprised and apparently pleased, when someone asked their opinion on the war.

“Scuds,” one of them scoffed when asked about the missiles whistling in almost nightly from Iraq. “We hear of the sirens, we hear of the bombing, but we are not afraid. Men, they are not afraid.”

“We don’t feel that we are in a war,” shrugged Abdul Hadi. “I am with my camels, and I have nothing to do with war. Where is the war?”

Hadi invited his visitors to join him at his residence for tea on their next trip to Hofuf, and someone asked where he lived.

“There,” he said, pointing to a bleak stretch of sand out to the west, and then moved his finger northward. “And there.”

Several miles southeast of Hofuf, Mohammed Harfi offered up a plate of sugar-sweet dates and a bowl of bubbly, salty camel milk to visitors at his tent and announced that the king had been right to go to war.

“There is no good after war. Never, never gain anything from wars. Fahd said to Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait and save the blood, but he would not,” he said.

(In a country where the monarch is respectfully referred to as “His Highness” or “King Fahd” or “The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” it is only the Bedouins, who look on the king as an equal serving at the pleasure of the tribesmen, who call him simply “Fahd.”)

Harfi served cardamom-flavored coffee and apologized for the condition of the household, which includes a wife, a son, a tent, 40 camels and 150 sheep.

“I am a bachelor today. The house is a mess,” he apologized, explaining that both his wife and the son had gone to town shopping. Both of them, he said, were starting to spend more and more time in town. He was growing both uneasy and resigned to the idea that eventually his son will leave the desert, although the Harfis have always been in the desert.

“While we are alive, we wish to see him here, and after our death, we wish to see him in the city. For us, this is a good life, but for him it will be different. The new generation, they are used to air conditioning, washers, television.”

Even his wife, he said, is changing:

“Before, she looked after the camels, took care of the house, brought the wood and quilted the wool by hand. Now, she wants an ordinary bed. Before, my wife was happy in the sand. Now, she must have blankets.”

His visitor for the morning, Habab Otaiby, sighed. “We are the old men. We don’t care. It won’t affect us. But it all changes--too much. Here, and in the city.”

Before, he said, he and Harfi used to go walking out into the desert at night, maybe 10 miles at a time, navigating by the stars. Now, they are too old to walk.

Before, they used to sit by the coffee pot in the tent and tell stories--”stories about the old people, and the latest news. About the generous people and the brave people. If somebody had a poem in his mind, he would tell it.”

Now, they’ve heard all the stories and recited all the poems.

That’s another reason, Harfi said, that he will be moving on in a few weeks, further east, that and the fact that the gray-green scrub has stopped pushing up between the rocks here and the camels are restless for fresh grazing.

“If the rain hits the land far away,” he said, “we will go there.”