DAN JACOBSON
581
year ago was squatting and lying about amid the marble, concrete,
leather, tinted glass, and watery splendors of the Dubai airport
terminal building, with its hanging stairs and indoor fountains.
From the look of the tightly fitting, white cotton trousers on their
thin legs, and the white, pudding-bowl caps on their heads, I
would guess that the members of the group were Pakistanis; there
were about sixty of them, all male, needless to say, the youngest
about eighteen years old, the oldest perhaps forty. All of them
were subdued and patient, clutching bundles in plastic bags of
various shapes and sizes; all were given to glancing around\curi–
ously, but were unwilling to
be
seen doing so. Then there came an
announcement over the loudspeaker; they evidently did not un–
derstand it and did not realize that it was addressed to them; but
the uniformed policeman or official who had been detailed to
look after them, and who had been sitting
to
one side, consci–
entiously nursing his nose, got to his feet and gestured to them to
follow him. Together they trooped out of the building, out of the
air-conditioning, and into a Gulf Airways bus waiting on the
tarmac.
What they would do when they arrived at their destination,
wherever it was, could be seen from the 100kofDubai itself. At the
edge of a flat, waveless sea, on a treeless,waterless plain the colors
of the waste products of some industrial process (acidic yellow,
off-white, speckled grey) was a city of innumerable high-rise apart–
ments and motorways, interrupted at intervals by grandiose, no–
expense-spared public structures: ministries, palaces, hospitals,
broadcasting stations, a parliament or two, several Hiltons or
their equivalents, a stadium surrounding the only green patch in
the place. Firms in London or Dusseldorf or Houston undertook
to put up buildings like these and their accompanying installa–
tions all over the Gulf; such contracts led
to
other lesser contracts,
and so on, down the chain, until one of them had propelled this
particular group of laborers, like countless others before them,
into movement.
. And then? Some would doubtless go back to Pakistan; some
would stay on the Gulf; some, having got that far, would try to
move farther west, to London or Dusseldorf or Houston, or any
number of other such cities. Why should they not? What could
keep them out? Frontier guards and passport controls would cer–
tainly deter many, but would measures like those ultimately
be
