Grandfather was seventy-one years old when he met King Faisal. Saudi Arabia was the first foreign land he ever lived in. It happened that when grandad came to visit us in Saudi Arabia eleven years ago, Faisal had just ousted his senile brother from the throne. Grandfather managed to have himself invited to a diplomatic function honoring the new king—and there he shook the Arab monarch's hand. A world apart, no two men could have been more different, yet in some basic manner both were bred in the old, less mechanized world. Both men, the crusty and pious desert king and the retired Oregon lumberjack, had fought a harsh and unyielding land, and both carried the visible scars of their hard lives.