RAWDAT KHURAIM, Saudi Arabia — There’s nothing like having tea served by men with guns dangling on their shoulders.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday got the royal treatment, literally, when King Abdullah invited her and her entourage to visit him at his winter retreat, about an hour’s drive north of Riyadh. Few visitors are invited to the king’s desert sanctuary, and reporters are almost never permitted.
The royal surroundings are both spectacular and surprisingly banal. The tent, which from a distance looks like a six-top black circus tent, is actually a mini-palace with a tented top. It sits on concrete, with one grand sitting room and one equally large banquet room. It is surrounded on all sides by semi-trailers, recreational vehicles and dozens of other, real tents. A helicopter landing zone is just steps away, as is a zoo stocked with deer, falcons and other beasts.
Clinton traveled here on the king’s own bus, a massive vehicle with 11 seats arranged in a circle in the Saudi fashion. The king greeted her in the sitting room, which features five chandeliers and a single carpet stretching 82 feet long. Along one wall was a 60-inch television, surrounded by 32 smaller televisions.
As dozens of servants, including the gun-toting tea servers, bustled about, the king, through an interpreter, and Clinton (along with each country’s ambassadors) engaged in light-hearted banter about camels for about a quarter of an hour.
Then the 86-year-old monarch led the way to the banquet room. At least four dozen types of meat, fish and chicken dishes, including huge platters of lobster, awaited the guests.
The king and Clinton sat down with their food, facing a huge television, and he turned it on, at high volume, to a news and sports channel. But the king and Clinton seemed to be chatting during the meal, so the TV might have been intended to keep their conversation private.
