DEERFIELD IN THE DESERT.

At Deerfield Academy, an elite boarding school in the hills of western Massachusetts, sneaking out of a dormitory at night is considered a relatively mild form of malfeasance. It doesn't carry the dishonor or the opprobrium of cheating or vandalism, or require sex, alcohol, or drugs, although, of course, it precludes none of the above. In the days when Deerfield was a boys' school (it went coed in 1989), one late-night destination was a girls' boarding school down the road, whose name--Stoneleigh-Burnham--seemed a happy parody not only of preppiness but also of the mischief that can occasionally accompany it. Regardless, midnight rambles can be magical--giant elms casting strange shadows, the night playing tricks as you prowl the grounds or slip into the woods. There is nothing quite like being a teen-ager outside at night in a forbidden place. Your mere presence is transgressive: an exaltation of adolescence.

One night, twenty-seven years ago, four Deerfield boys bolted from their dormitory and gathered on a green in the middle of the campus. They had an old Army flare. One of them, George Faux, known as Gig (pronounced "Jidge"), was the son of a National Guard pilot, and had occasional access to ordnance, as well as to fireworks. None of them had handled a flare before, and it was too dark to read the instructions. "What if we just pull this thing?" another boy said, indicating a cap on the flare. He was Abdullah, the eldest son of King Hussein of Jordan; Faux and the two other boys, Perry Vella and Chip Smith, called him Ab. His bodyguards, who usually accompanied him everywhere, were likely asleep in their quarters, in the basement of his dorm; they also had a house off campus. Without waiting for an answer, Abdullah pulled the cap, and the flare shot skyward in a blaze of sparks, bathing the campus in spectral pink light. The boys' presence was suddenly very conspicuous. They scattered. But then the flare, held aloft by a parachute, began to drift toward the gymnasium, and the boys ran after it, their fear of getting caught trumped by their fear of burning down the school--a gallant ordering of priorities. The flare floated past the gym, over an expanse of playing fields, in the direction of a stretch of woods. They followed the flare past a copse of trees and into another field. Finally, it dropped onto the grass and sputtered out. The boys retreated in darkness to their dorm rooms. No one got caught.

Abdullah and Faux had met as sophomores, after being assigned to the same table in the dining hall. (Vella had noticed Abdullah earlier, on the soccer field, playing in tennis shoes.) Ab and Gig quickly discovered that they had similar interests: sports, airplanes, hunting, guns. As seniors, they served together as proctors of their dormitory. "We ruled the dorm with collegiality but certainly with a lot of fear, too," Faux recalled recently. "Kids that age can be evil geniuses." Abdullah's friends came from a range of backgrounds: in addition to Faux, who was from southeastern Massachusetts, there was Vella, a Maltese hockey goalie from Queens, and Smith, from Darien, Connecticut--"kind of the quintessential prep-school guy," Faux said. Vella referred to them as the Fearsome Foursome.

Abdullah loved Deerfield. He has often said that his years there were the happiest of his life. It was his third boarding school. At the age of seven, he was sent to St. Edmund's, in Hindhead, En-gland; then, to Eaglebrook, a school just up the hill from Deerfield, where, as the first Arab student (and a small one) in the school's history, he was chum in the treacherous waters of dormitory life. During five years at Eaglebrook, he got into a fight almost every day, until he became captain of the wrestling team. By comparison, Deerfield was a placid and dignified place. He arrived in 1977, for tenth grade. In Abdullah's eyes, Deerfield was the opposite of posh, its code of Yankee selfreliance a signal not of entitlement but of its renunciation. Whoever you are, you sleep in the same quarters, eat the same mystery meat, and run the same wind sprints. No one has a car (even if your bodyguards do). The longtime head of the dining hall, Jim Smith, used to tell a story about Abdullah's genial complaint that bussing tables, a chore for all Deerfield students, was beneath him. Smith replied, "Your father may be the King of Jordan, but I'm the king of the dining hall."

After graduation, Abdullah enrolled, as his father had, at Sandhurst, the British military college. (Hussein had attended boarding school at Victoria College in Egypt.) He studied at Oxford and in the foreign-service program at Georgetown, and entered the Jordanian military. Although he was Hussein's eldest son (by the second of his four wives, a British officer's daughter named Toni Gardiner, who took the name Princess Muna), he was not the crown prince; his uncle Hassan, Hussein's brother, was next in line. This arrangement enabled Abdullah to pursue a military career, as well as a princely life style, free of undue scrutiny or the burdens of statecraft. He became a pilot and a major general in the Jordanian Special Forces, and developed a repu-tation as something of a playboy, before marrying Rania Al-Yassin, a Palestinian from Kuwait, in 1993. Still, he was able to indulge plebeian inclinations--he had a cameo, for example, in a 1995 episode of "Star Trek: Voyager"--until Hussein abruptly named him his heir, in 1999, two weeks before dying.

When Abdullah attended commencement at Deerfield, on the occasion of his twentieth reunion, in 2000, he had been king for sixteen months. He arrived by helicopter, and his classmates veered between calling him Ab and Your Majesty. He bunked in the headmaster's house, with his security detail, and for the banquet requested his favorite dish: cheeseburgers. The next morning, the head-master and some other administrators asked whether Deerfield could help him in any way. "Interesting you should ask," he replied. "I'm thinking of replicating Deerfield in Jordan. What do you think?"

"Prep school": the phrase, taking its place next to "country club" and "trust fund," curdles in the egalitarian mind. New England boarding schools are often considered fortresses of ex-clusion, perpetuators of stratification and snobbery. In Abdullah's view, however, Deerfield was a diverse place. "It's that atmosphere that he wants to duplicate," Vella said. "Where race, color, and financial status don't matter." That's a funny thing to say about a prep school, but Abdullah felt that Deerfield's secular curriculum; its emphasis on critical thinking, camaraderie, tolerance, and sacrifice; and its commitment to the well-rounded boy (and, later, girl) were key elements in the creation of leaders--especially those comfortable with the ways of the West, not least its college-admissions offices and its network of business and government grandees. Leaders, and therefore Deer-fields, were what he felt his country and region needed.