Two oil tankers registered in Almaria Vella lay at anchor yesterday in the approaches to the Strait of Kethara, awaiting the safe passage that a declaration of contested waters has for the moment suspended. The Almarian Merchant Fleet Association confirmed the vessels' position after an emergency session convened at the Cordoba Chamber of Commerce, where shipping executives, underwriters, and two representatives of the Ministry of Trade spent most of the morning behind closed doors.

The Strait, narrow at its neck and indifferent to the political weather on either shore, carries a significant share of the Kingdom's imported petroleum. Its closure, even in the partial and contingent form declared yesterday, arrives at an inconvenient hour: the Chamber returns Monday to the sealed Fuel Stabilisation Reserve, and the maritime insurance briefing long scheduled for Commerce Hall has now been joined to the northern tariff session. Underwriters have indicated surcharges of twelve to eighteen per cent on southern corridor hulls. Those surcharges, in the ordinary course, feed through to forecourt diesel within the fortnight.

The Ministry of Trade issued a statement of the kind ministries issue on such occasions, urging calm and noting that diplomatic contacts with allied naval powers were ongoing. No Almarian naval vessel has yet been dispatched to the approaches, though the question will surely be raised when the Chamber reconvenes.

For the merchants of the Vella — whose grandfathers kept their ledgers in the same counting-houses, and whose margins have never recovered the comfort they enjoyed before the last rearrangement of the world — the arithmetic is plain enough. A summer of raised premiums, a tourism season already anxious, and a reserve still sealed against the day it was built for. The day, some in the room yesterday remarked quietly, would appear to have arrived.

Don Emilio Cordoba, who hosted the session at the Chamber he has chaired these fifteen years, declined to address the press on leaving the building. A figure close to the proceedings described his posture as one of attentive patience — the posture, one might add, of a man who has seen the Strait closed before and seen it reopened, and who knows which of the two takes longer.