THE MODERNISATION OF ARABIA

In anticipation, presumably, of the 54th anniversary of the founding of modern Saudi Arabia - which fell on 23 September - the recent newscasts' of the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) have been filled with items about the country's material progress in recent years and listing the present facilities enjoyed by or available to its citizens. A great deal of the material put out by SPA has been statistical in nature - the thousands of kilometres of new roads, the millions of cubic metres of desalinated water, the hundreds of thousands of new houses, the storage capacity of the grain silos, the geographical spread of electricity, and the reach of public transport.