Only his silk-vested and sombreroed courtiers realized how sick a man was King Feisal of Irak last month when, after his soldiers and some fierce border Kurds had massacred 600 Assyrians, he awaited, "in spite of my broken health," the arrival of a British investigator (TIME, Aug. 28). His impatience to leave for a "vacation" in Switzerland sounded, especially in view of his holiday in England only a few weeks prior, like an effort to gloss over the massacre. Last week came proof it was no such thing. The Assyrian trouble was quieted, but not a disturbance in lean, seamy-faced Feisal's heart. One afternoon in Berne, having consulted with his Foreign Minister General Nuri Pasha and his brother Prince Ali on the prospect of the League of Nations investigating the Assyrian deaths, Feisal became seriously ill with a heart attack. The 50-year-old monarch, 37th direct descendant of Mohammed, refrained from eating any dinner, retired early, felt worse. At midnight Death, searching among the cool Alps for a desert chief, found King Feisal in his hotel bedroom.
It was "Electricity Week" in Berne and the town was brilliantly illuminated. At Feisal's hotel most of the lights were respectfully and suddenly extinguished. That, accompanied by the cries of Feisal's nurse and his entourage, created such a disturbance that one of the hotel's elderly directors, a M. Eggimann, collapsed and died from shock.
A prudent Oriental, Feisal habitually employed a Court Taster except when in England, lest an enemy poison him. The royal corpse was not cold before some of the more excitable members of his staff demanded an autopsy to determine whether or not their sovereign's sudden death was due to foul play. Promptly surgeons at the University of Berne set their minds at rest. They found that King Feisal, "The Sword Flashing Down at the Stroke," had succumbed to an advanced stage of arteriosclerosis of the aorta and coronary arteries. The King's cardiac condition had not been improved by his insistence on smoking 100 cigarets a day.