One such fortress figures in my first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), a part of which is about the discovery of oil in a fictional emirate called al-Ghazira: “out of the sand, there suddenly arose the barbed-wire fence of the Oiltown. From the other side of the fence, faces stared silently out—Filipino faces, Indian faces, Egyptian faces, Pakistani faces, even a few Ghaziri faces, a whole world of faces.”
