Skeletons On The Zahara (16 page)

At the bottom were slaves, mostly black Africans; craftsmen, mostly of Jewish descent; itinerant musicians; and the vassal tribes, known as zenaga or lakhme, “flesh without bones.” These groups were dominated by the chorfa— religious tribes that adopted the lineage of the Maqil and supposedly traced their roots to the Prophet Muhammad— and by the warrior tribes, or “sons of the gun.” In another twist of the Sahara, it was the warrior class that had the purest Maqil lineage and thus the strongest claim to descent from Muhammad, and the chorfa, whose lineal claims were largely trumped-up, who were among the most brutal and violent.

Animist traditions and the worship of holy men believed to possess supernatural powers remained strong on the desert, even among the chorfa. The Sahrawis did not look out on the same disheartening wasteland the sailors did but on a multifaceted realm of good and evil yenun, or spirits; of holy men with good magic, baraka; and enemies who could invoke the evil eye against them. Superstition pervaded everyday life. Good yenun in wells and trees deserved decorations and blood sacrifices of birds and small animals. Evil ones in the form of hyenas or sand tornadoes had to be vigilantly avoided. Shadows were to be dodged, and heed had to be paid to bad omens, such as being hailed at the beginning of a journey or seeing a crow on the path (seeing two crows was good). Newborn babies, especially attractive ones, were particularly vulnerable to the evil eye and so were hidden from strangers, kept dirty, and not addressed by their name.

When the yemma commenced, the tribesmen sat on the ground in circles of ten to twenty men, with their legs crossed under them, deliberating. Spoken in tranquillity, their elegant and fluid Arabic “thrills . . . like the breathings of soft wind-music,” Riley reported. But spoken in anger, it sounded “as hoarse as the roarings of irritated lions.” After intense discussion, one of the elders approached the tent where the sailors waited and spoke to them. Although neither Riley nor any of his men knew the language, Riley had an ear for foreign tongues, which he had honed in ports on both sides of the Atlantic and especially during his long stay on the Continent. The old man spoke distinctly, sounding to Riley like a Spaniard. With the help of signs, Riley was able to understand him. This was his first lesson in Arabic. As his and his men's lives were at stake, he would pick it up fast.

“What country do you come from?” the old man asked.

“Somos Ingleses,” Riley responded, experimenting with Spanish. He claimed to be English because he knew that the Sahrawis had never heard of America and had no concept at all of land across the Atlantic Ocean. He might as well try to explain that he was from the North Pole, where the hills were made of ice.

“O Fransah, O Spaniah,” the old man replied, indicating his familiarity with Europeans.

“Sí, Ingleses,” Riley repeated, drawing a compass in the air and showing that they were from the north.

“We have seen your boat,” he told Riley in a mixture of signs and Arabic, calling the boat zooerga. “Did you come all the way in that?”

Riley shook his head no. He elaborated by piling up sand to form a coastline and using sticks to indicate the size and shape of the brig. He showed that they had wrecked to the north at Cape Bojador by the force of a strong wind. Then he wiped out the image with his hand to signify that the ship was destroyed and a total loss.

A crowd of nomads had gathered around the two men. They listened intently to Riley and aided the old man in interpreting him. Sfenah, Riley noted, intent on grasping their vocabulary, was what they called the brig. At their prompting, he told them where the Commerce had been headed and what her cargo was. They gave him a bowl to show how many dollars he had had on board. Scooping up rocks, he filled and emptied the bowl three times.7

“They were much surprised at the quantity,” Riley later observed, “and seemed to be dissatisfied that they had not got a share of them.” When they asked whether others had seen it, he related how he and his crew had been treated by the inhabitants of that region, that their clothes, money, and provisions had been stolen and one of his men beaten and carried off.

The Arabs in turn informed Riley of the recent wreck of a Spanish ship up the coast. They asked him if he knew anything about “Marocksh,” which he interpreted correctly as the city of Morocco. He said yes, he knew it. They asked if he knew the “Sooltaan.” Riley clucked yes, in their manner.

“Soo mook,” they demanded, trying to get him to name the sultan, but he did not understand. When they named Moulay Sulayman, he assured them that he knew him, that he had seen him with his own eyes, that Moulay Sulayman was a personal friend as well as a friend of England. They asked Riley where Morocco was, and he pointed correctly to the northeast, adding to his credibility. If they would take him and his men there, he pleaded, he would pay them very generously.

The nomads frowned and shook their heads. “It is too great a distance,” they explained, “and at this time of year, there is no food or drink for the camels along the way.”

The discussion ended. The Arabs returned to their council, and Riley to his men, who had not been able to follow the conversation. Despite the Arabs' refusal to go north, Riley took heart in the fact that they had consulted with him. He told the men he entertained the hope that they would be ransomed. “Yet they all seemed to think I was deluding them with false expectations,” he acknowledged. He could not convince them otherwise.

Like his crewmates, Robbins could make little sense of the nomads. To him, the yemma was chaotic and confusing and appeared to be a forum for personal sparring rather than communal governing. He noted laconically that “Captain Riley seemed to feel some hopes that we might yet get released, and advised us all to keep up good spirits.” But Robbins could not shake his depression. When he departed with Ganus at— according to his calendar, which varied somewhat from Riley's— around three in the afternoon on the third day, he took “a painful leave,” of his shipmates, believing he would never see them again.

During the yemma, Riley had been awarded to a new master, a man called Bickri, who bade him lie down for the night in the dust outside his tent as if he were a camel. Alone, Riley lay shivering in the dark for several hours. At midnight, Bickri brought him a bowl of milk and water. After drinking it, Riley fell into a profound sleep.

Moulay Sulayman: Son of the Emperor

(from Sequel to Riley's Narrative, 1851)

He dreamed he was naked and a slave. Arabs with red-hot iron spears drove him through a firestorm raging up to his eyes and burning off his skin. Charred flesh hung from his bones, dropping to the ground in hunks. He looked up to heaven and prayed to God to take his spirit. He wanted nothing but to end his suffering. Yet the flames would not disappear. Then a bright spot opened in the clouds above him. Rays of light beamed down from the sky. It was an eye, and it directed him to go to the northeast. He turned, and the fire vanished. The Arabs trotted beside him with their spear tips poking him as they forced him over sand dunes and rocky wastes. His dried skin continued to drop in hunks. He raced down into a green valley. Trees appeared, flowering shrubs, grazing cows, horses, sheep, and donkeys, and ahead a babbling brook. He threw himself down on the stream's edge and drank in clear, cold water. He drank until his belly felt like bursting. He drank until his throat throbbed with cold. He drank for his mangled limbs, his scorched lungs, his burned hair. Then he rolled over and into the brook and extinguished his smoldering body.

He thanked God for his delivery.

But the Arabs were still there. They picked him up and forced him on. The all-seeing eye was still above them, pointing out the path. The path was no longer burning but crooked, thorny, and narrow. It rose over high mountains and plunged into deep valleys. He was exhausted, but there was no stopping. Armed men on foot and horseback lined the way. Imposing fortified towns waited to absorb him should he stop. At another brook, a tall, youthful man dressed in Western clothes and mounted on a noble horse waited for him. Seeing him, the man dismounted, rushed forward, wildly joyful, embraced him, and addressed him in his own tongue: “brother.”

Riley found himself in an opulent dining room, being pressed to partake of food and wine. “God has decreed that you shall again embrace your beloved wife and children,” the man told him. Then Riley heard another voice, Bickri's, and opened his eyes on the frigid hammada.

The Sons of the Father of Lions

In June 1785, when the Ste. Catherine wrecked on the Saharan coast, envoy Pierre de Brisson prayed that she had reached the environs of the French settlement of Saint-Louis, Senegal. He was familiar with the tribes there and believed he could gain their help. Though he could not tell from the featureless shore, he suspected that they had not made it far enough and warned his shipmates, “I dread our meeting with some horde of the tribes of Ouadelims and Labdesseba, a savage race, whose only food is the milk of their camels, and who are for ever wandering up and down the desert.”

When they did encounter the nomads, his shipmates, including the first and second mates, panicked and fled. Armed with scimitars and clubs, the Arabs “rushed on them with incredible ferocity,” Brisson wrote, “and I soon beheld some of them wounded, and others stripped naked, and stretched out almost breathless on the sand.”

Brisson calmly surrendered to a well-dressed, peaceful-looking man. He gave the man gifts of watches and gold that he had hidden in his pockets and asked him who he was. “Sidi Mahammet del Zouza,” came the reply. “My tribe is that of Labdesseba.”

“We were fallen into the hands of the most ferocious among the inhabitants of the Deserts of Arabia,” lamented the Frenchman, who had been correct in foreseeing only “hardships and trouble.” During his year-long captivity, he would be beaten, starved, and nearly killed in a tribal raid. He would witness the brutal deaths of two shipmates and see a third, caught sucking milk from a camel, strangled.

It was this same wide-ranging tribe, better known today by the French transliteration of its name, Oulad Bou Sbaa, that had captured the men of the Commerce.1

One of the chorfa tribes, the Oulad Bou Sbaa traced their roots to a fifteenth-century sharif of the Anti-Atlas Mountains named Ahmer Ould Hamel. One night when Ahmer, who was a descendant of Idris, founder of the Moroccan state, sensed that his flock was about to be stolen in a ghazu, or tribal raid, he prayed to Allah to turn his sheep into lions. His request was granted, and the lions scared away the raiders. From then on, Sidi Ahmer was known as “the Father of Lions,” and was revered as a man awarded baraka, magic powers, for his piety. “Oulad Bou Sbaa” means “sons of the father of lions” and refers to Ahmer's three sons, Amar, Amran, and Numer, patrons of the tribe's many branches, based around the city of Morocco. Early in the eighteenth century, the tribe rebelled against the sultan, Ismail. Fearing retaliation at the hands of Ismail's formidable army of French-trained black Africans, the Oulad el-Hadj branch of the Oulad Bou Sbaa fled northeast to Oran. They were eventually pardoned and returned to the Morocco area.

The Oulad Brahim, the branch that now held Riley and his men, fled to the desert, where they grew in number and eventually sprawled from the Saguia el-Hamra wadi, near Cape Bojador, over the vast expanse of desert to southern Mauritania. The various factions came to consider themselves independent tribes, though they all used the name Oulad Bou Sbaa. Having never been pardoned by the sultan, they roamed for a century. They shared a fierce, austere nature, prospered and perished by the ghazu, and measured their wealth in terms of camels and slaves.

To the men of the Commerce, the Bou Sbaa's desert transhumance that they were now a part of was as inscrutable as a merchant fleet's sailing maneuvers would have been to the nomads. The tribe was broken down into friqs, groups of half a dozen or fewer families, units large enough for mutual protection but small enough for effective grazing of the animals. Within the friq, families with no slaves traveled with their camels, sometimes banding together with another family and combining their droves, which they could separate again with an ease the sailors found uncanny. Those families with many camels and slaves to drive them sometimes roamed more freely away from their beasts. The friqs moved together but apart in a sort of chaotic harmony. To the Commerces, who were distributed among these small groups, however, the arrangement felt harum-scarum. They never knew which of their shipmates they might see that night or ever again.

They could discover little purpose in wandering from one thicket of thornbushes to the next, stopping along the way at smaller patches of thornbush to graze the camels. It seemed like the farther they went, the worse off they were. In fact, as they moved east with the nomads, they appeared to travel solely to find ever-diminishing shrubs to feed the camels, which produced ever-diminishing milk, the nomads' lifeblood. Instead of living off the land, the land seemed to be living off them, consuming their bodies and minds.

The nomads owed much to the Arabian camel. By the time their Sanhaja ancestors had acquired the peculiar humped beasts from the east— between the first and fourth centuries A.D.— desertification had long since intensified, clustering people around oases, where they could grow food. As the land grew more arid and infertile, the black tribes migrated south, while the Sanhaja adapted to nomadic life with the camels, living like bedouins long before the first wave of bedouins arrived. Though not considered ruminants, camels, with their complex, three-compartmented stomachs, regurgitate and rechew their forage, turning poor vegetation into protein and energy even better than ruminants do. It was the camel, which could convert scrub brush into nutrient-rich milk, that allowed the Sanhaja to stay on the desert.

Oddly enough, camelids originated not in Africa but in North America. During the Pleistocene epoch, the ancestors of the llama, alpaca, vicuña, and guanaco migrated south to South America, while the ancestors of the camel crossed an erstwhile land bridge at what is now the Bering Strait to Asia. As the camelids were dying out in North America, camels migrated across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. By 3000 B.C., however, wild camels had become extinct in North Africa too. They were reintroduced on the Sahara as desertification increased their utility there, and they quickly became the most important thing a man could own. He who mastered the camel mastered the land.