Skeletons On The Zahara (12 page)

To reduce the weight and bulk they would have to carry, the men left everything else, including spare clothes, except for their jackets. They discarded the worst of the salt pork. Convinced that the silver had inflamed the Sahrawis' greed and cruelty, Riley also asked the men to leave behind any coins they had kept for themselves. It stood to reason that if a Sahrawi found one of them rich in coin, he might take the silver as his good fortune and murder or leave for dead the bearer; whereas if he found just a man, he would keep his new slave as his good fortune. The Americans buried the sack of dollars and flung away the rest as worse than useless. With reluctance, they also now abandoned the ship's colors; they could no longer afford the privilege to bear and the duty to protect their nation's flag.

Before setting off, they made a solemn pact to stick together and to help one another out. “It was not merely common danger that made us friends,” Robbins later reflected. “We had become attached to each other by previous sufferings and mutual favors.”

Porter and Robbins took the lead. The terrain to the east was even less promising than that to the west. The rise of the continent appeared either vertical or, worse, undercut by wind and surf and looming cavernously overhead at a dizzying height. Glacier-size hunks of the continent had ruptured and crashed to the sea, creating their path of boulders, rocks, gravel, and sand. They picked their way through tunnels formed by subsequent collapses and skirted impassable jumbles by traversing narrow strips of temporary beach or by wading. When there was no choice, they scaled ridges of scree, sometimes piled halfway to the summit. Hand over hand they climbed on slick, precarious ridges, knowing that one wrong move could send them tumbling into the breakers below.

At each summit they then dropped down toehold by toehold to the water's edge again. Where there was neither a strip to walk on nor a climbable outcropping, they waited for the surf to recede and then waded chest-deep along the wall to the next outcropping or pile of scree, which they mounted between waves, each man helping the next up.

“Surmounting one obstacle seemed only to open to our view another, and a more dangerous one,” Riley later recalled. Two places were nearly impassable. The first was a harrowing sight. A crest of rocks deposited the men at a sheer face about fifty feet high. The wall plunged to a deep churning sea, but a narrow ledge crossed it, which Robbins estimated was about thirty rods, or 165 yards, long. On the ledge and suspended over it in improbable crags, rocks, some as big as cannonballs, rested, only temporarily halted on their journey to the sea. Riley and his crew paused to take in the situation. Their shoes were shredded, their feet cut and bleeding. The sun now beat down on their overheated bodies. The only thing worse than pushing on— and risk falling into the sea— was not to push on, only to die of exposure on the rocks. Below was death in the sea. They had no choice but to cross the face.

Turning their satchels around to hang on their chests and stuffing things in front pockets, they placed their backs against the cliff and eased out along the ledge. Robbins, who was still in the lead with Porter, described it as “not much wider than a stone step.” Riley put the width at eight inches. In places, they had to creep along on their heels with their toes hanging over the precipice. The backs of their heads felt each tiny projection of the cliff. A horizon of sea and milky space swam before them while below, the waves crashed and washed away. But it was the heat that Riley would particularly remember. In strange juxtaposition to the heaving, foaming, spitting sea, the air was absolutely still, as if it had been smothered. “Not a breath . . . ,” Riley wrote, “to fan our almost boiling blood.”

Partway across the narrow ledge, Robbins and Porter found a recess in the wall. The crew filed into a space big enough for all of them to rest in. A depression in the rock in the shape of a cooking kettle contained a pool of warm water. Though it was too brackish to drink, the men bathed their heads in it and found it greatly refreshing.

As they crawled out of the crevice, Riley made a dire mistake. The passage was slim, and the men were forced to rub against the cliff. As he moved forward, he suddenly felt liquid wet his side. He knew without looking that he had broken his water bottle.

Riley was already exhibiting symptoms of McGee's fourth and penultimate stage of dehydration, in which saliva stops flowing altogether, the pulse slows, and breathing becomes labored. As mucous membranes dry out, the lips and gums tighten and the tongue “hardens into a senseless weight.” Eyelids and nostrils retract. Deprived of moisture, the eyes and nose burn with grit. Riley was not yet suffering from every symptom of the stage. He did not have pounding headaches and hallucinations. Though his tongue had become as “useless as a dry stick,” he managed to speak and be understood. But there could be no doubt: without his water, he was in deep trouble.

In the late afternoon, they waded around another precipitous rock. The sight of dead locusts on some rocks gave them hope that if they made it to the top, they would find vegetation to eat.4 In reality, the surface above was so barren that the Sahrawis considered the arrival of a cloud of locusts— one of the biblical plagues— a gift from Allah: they harvested the bugs for food. But even if the sailors had been inclined to do the same, they would not have been able to— these bugs, Riley observed, “crumbled to dust on the slightest touch.”

By nightfall, they had covered only about four miles and saw no break in the bluffs. “A harder day's travel was never made by man,” Robbins wrote, though the next day's would rival it, producing an impediment that would stop them in their tracks.

With great relief, according to Riley, they found a stretch of beach to spend the night on. In the shelter of the cliffs about a hundred feet from the surf, they greased their mouths with salt pork fat and ate small pieces of it. Everyone but Riley washed this down with drops from their bottles. With the end approaching for all, he had no right to ask anyone to share, nor could he rightfully expect them to. Nonetheless, two of the men offered him their bottles. Riley gratefully wet his mouth.

They prayed together and then lay down in their wet clothes and slept. As the cold, moist sea air settled over them, Riley meditated on Horace's suffering. He had assured the boy's mother that he would take care of him, and he now vowed to himself to adopt him if they made it back home, to “watch over his ripening years” and share with him any fortune he and his family might be favored with. His mind wandered to his own children, to whom Horace would be a fine brother. Before dozing off, Riley wrapped his arms around the boy in a reassuring embrace.

On September 9, the sailors woke up stiff and numb, trembling from the cold in their sweaty clothes, which had not dried in the damp ocean air. They had no way to make a fire and only salt pork to eat, but the second night of sleep on land had helped them recover from the lack of it at sea. The wounds on their feet had healed enough so that they could walk again. Continuing along the coast would at least encourage blood flow.

They had not gone far when they caught a distant glimpse of a wide beach beneath a sloping bluff. As the crow flies, it was not far, but they had to stick to the contours of the coast, and here it was very rough, the cliff top having collapsed into the surf. As they picked their way forward, Riley studied the beach, searching for a spot near the bluffs where they might be able to dig a well, and recollecting one he had once dug successfully on a Bahaman key. It had produced drinkable water that he mistakenly believed was seawater filtered fresh by the sand.

The broken rocks reopened the wounds in the sailors' feet, and they moved slowly. Before long, they encountered a massive promontory undercut by the sea and looming over a half mile of surf thundering on boulders fallen from above. To reach the beach, they would have to somehow cross this chasm without being washed into the turbulence beneath the cliff. It was a deflating sight. Riley sized up their situation: “To advance by what appeared to be the only possible way seemed like seeking instant death; to remain in our present situation was merely to die a lingering one; and to return was still worse.”

The sailors searched desperately for a solution. Then one of them spotted a large boulder about midway across the chasm, a boulder that revealed itself only momentarily as the surf washed out. It gave them a chance, anyway.

It was about nine in the morning, and Riley figured it was the depth of low tide. He told the men he would try to reach the boulder. A wave broke. The sea inhaled a giant's breath, and Riley plunged through the water. He reached the slick rock and grabbed onto its rilled surface. The next wave buried him and churned in the teeth of the cave, but the captain hung on. As soon as he could, Riley rose up again and dived in on the other side. He reached the far embankment just as the next breaker caught him. He desperately clung onto the steep rock face. When the wave receded, he scrambled up the face, exhausted but safe.

The rest of the crew followed. Riley had thought the tide was all the way out, but it continued to recede for another half hour, making each successive wave a little less violent. As the men reached the far side, they helped hoist up their soaked and battered shipmates.

Once recovered, they explored the beach. The continental wall looked more irregular here and the slope less severe, but first they would search for water. With their bare hands, they dug a well, eventually filling their hats and tossing the sand up. They found water, but it was salty. They moved back toward the cliff but had the same result. This disheartening process was repeated at several spots until near the cliff they dug down to solid stone.

Riley chose one more site for digging and set the men to work, but he had no hope for water now. “I will go and see if I can get up the bank,” he told them. He promised to return soon with news.

Searching the bluff, Riley found a fault line. Though it was a long way up, the wall sloped enough to give him a chance. He used all his strength and clawed his way up. Though he had seen the tabletop horizon from the boat and feared that they were headed back to the desert, he was not prepared for what he discovered at the top. Then he had only had time to worry about getting the boat to shore. Now he gazed out on “a barren plain, extending as far as the eye could reach each way, without a tree, shrub, or spear of grass that might give the smallest relief to expiring nature.” The tableau of emptiness rocked his soul: it was the earth before Eden; it was bones without flesh; it was nature that had gone mad and devoured itself. Riley dropped to the ground in shock and grief.

After a while— he did not know how long— he rose again, confused and nearly delirious. He cupped his hands, caught his urine, and soothed his burning throat with it. He felt an impulse to jump to his death in the sea, but it vanished as the faces of his men and of his wife and children flashed in his mind. He recalled what he had already survived and tried to find strength in it. He wandered east along the ledge, on a tightwire between the flashing waves and the sand. When a descent to the sea offered itself, he took it. At the bottom between two rocks he found a clear pool. He stripped off his salty clothes and bathed in the sun-heated seawater for half an hour, scrubbing at his defiled skin, but the desert ghost that had slipped inside could not be washed away.

When Riley finally returned to his men, he sat down on the sand. “We can go another two miles on the beach before we come to a wall,” he told them. “On the way, you will find a pool for bathing and an easier route to the top than this one.” He quickly changed the subject to avoid talking about what lay above: “Did you find any fresh water where you were digging?” he asked. But he already knew the answer.

The crew gathered up their bottles and satchels and headed down the beach, arriving around noon at the rise Riley intended to ascend. He now warned the men of the desolation at the top. Tired, hot, and discouraged, they decided to rest on a patch of sand in the shade under a ledge. The tide was out, and the air so still and humid that they had trouble catching their breath. They sank into a comalike sleep for two hours.

Robbins opened his eyes to deep despondency. “I had become so inured to misery that she had adopted me as her child,” he later reflected, “and I felt no dispositions to avoid her embrace.” He felt they had run out of options, and he sensed this to be the general belief among the rest. Nevertheless, they crawled up the craggy slope, pulling themselves up with anything they could grab. Robbins described the climb as “next to dragging ourselves to the scaffold— it was becoming our own executioner.”

When they reached the top, they gazed out slack-jawed on the dead landscape that Riley had warned them of. The ghost too slipped inside them, as tenacious as nausea. Like their captain, they experienced panic, confusion, and visceral, uncontrollable grief. Some collapsed on the hardpan, crying for the loss of hope, for their families, for the indignity of death so far from home. They always knew that something like this might occur. Now they wondered why they had not prepared for it better. They caught their tears with their fingers and guided them to their leathery tongues. “ 'Tis enough,” one man muttered in disgust. “Here we must breathe our last.” Another groaned, “We have no hope of finding either water or provisions, or human beings, or even wild beasts. Nothing can live here.”

What they looked out on, in 1815, had never been scientifically explored and was almost too mind-boggling to imagine. They faced the western edge of the world's largest desert. Occupying a third of Africa, it stretches more than three thousand miles east to the Red Sea and twelve hundred miles from the Sahel— the fringe of savanna in the south— to the Atlas Mountains in the north, mountains that snare almost all the moisture traveling down on the northeast winds. Relative-humidity levels, rarely above an abrasive 30 percent, are often as low as a lethal 5 percent, dry enough to kill bacteria and mummify corpses. On the coast, the heat of the Sahara clashes with the cold waters of the Atlantic, often creating heavy fogbanks that envelop the shore, and on many days the irifi, a powerful, searing wind, shrouds the region in a melancholy ocher veil of dust.