Skeletons On The Zahara (17 page)

At daylight on September 12, the Bou Sbaa moved on. Bickri ordered Riley to drive the camels forward. Separated from his crew and even missing Mohammed, his original captor, whose ways he was familiar with, Riley felt especially low. Bickri showed no signs of warmth, and Riley derived no hope from him. The captain shuffled forward in a wary crouch, ready to shift his weight whenever he felt another jab coming to the underside of his mutilated feet.

Riley never explained how Bickri gained possession of him, probably because he did not know. Something had happened at the meeting. Mohammed, who had retained Deslisle, had been forced to hand over the captain or had decided to sell him to Bickri. Now Mohammed saw Riley shuffling across the plain. He rode up on his camel and haggled with Bickri. After a while, he pulled the blanket off his back and handed it to Bickri, then drew up beside Riley, told him to stop walking, and made his camel kneel. Mohammed placed a skin on the camel's back behind the saddle and secured it under the girths, helped Riley mount it, and steadied him while the camel rose. Bickri rode on at a fast trot in the company of a handful of other heavily armed men. Riley had been bought for a blanket.

It was impossible for him to enjoy this bit of luck, however. The blood pulsed through his swollen legs in dull thuds, while the sun flogged his upper body and head until it was “racking and cracking with excruciating pain.” To escape his anguish, Riley recalled his dream of the night before. Unlike most seamen, he had never put much stock in omens, visions, or dreams, but this one clung to him, or he to it. As he turned it over in his mind, he felt certain there was a message, that the “all-seeing eye” was guiding him north. If he could find his way to Morocco, someone would save them. The narrow escapes he and his crew had experienced, he assured himself, had happened for a reason. God was watching over them.

This belief kept him going over the many miles that ensued, until in the early afternoon they rode into the middle of a friq, six tents in a depression with scattered shrubs. Mohammed made the camel kneel and was mobbed by his joyful children. Riley needed shade and staggered toward a tent. The women and girls, their animosity sudden and stunningly palpable, threatened him with sticks and stones. Though Mohammed had directed Riley toward the tent, he did not come to his rescue, and the captain was prevented from entering. For Riley, there would be no refuge from the intense afternoon rays, and certainly no sympathy for his travails.

In the evening, Deslisle returned to Mohammed's camp with the camels he had taken out for grazing. Mohammed had put him straight to work as a camel driver. Deslisle had mastered the job quickly and was rewarded with a large serving of milk daily and a corner of the tent in which to sleep. Riley attributed the cook's good health to this and to the fact that, because he was also a domestic slave, he had managed to filch water and some sour milk.

Ultimately, Deslisle could expect more or less the same treatment as the Arabs' black African slaves as long as he performed his tasks willingly and converted to Islam. This could mean a substantial degree of freedom around the camp and nourishment on a par with the family. He might eventually, after long servitude or a signal service to his master, be liberated, admitted to the tribe, and allowed to marry and to own camels.

Adopting their faith, however, was not as simple as making a vow and participating in their prayer; a man had to be circumcised to be a Muslim, and this procedure marked one forever as a Christian apostate. Representatives of Western states shunned such men. Arabs fought to keep them.

Mohammed had also bought Hogan, who joined them that night and told Riley that Horace was in the camp as well. The captain went in search of the boy and soon found Horace's master, whom he described as an “ill-looking old villain.” The Arab addressed Riley as Rais, or Captain. “What is the boy's name, Rais?” he asked.

“Horace,” responded the captain.

“Hoh-Rais,” the Bou Sbaa mimicked, pleased with his pronunciation, which to him proved the boy's kinship to the white chief. He took to shouting the boy's name frequently. When Riley tried to speak to Horace, however, the foul-tempered nomad chased him away, threatening to beat them both with a stick.

Riley, who was not wholly above the racial prejudices typical of his era, had higher hopes for Mohammed, in part based on his light complexion. On the Sahara, many of Riley's preconceptions would be put to the test. Any illusions he had of Mohammed's benevolence were shattered that night. Even though a patch of sand lay not fifty yards from the tents, their captor forced Riley and Hogan to sleep on the hammada. Struggling to remove the stones beneath them, they scraped up their fingertips until they bled. Approaching his master, Riley pointed to the sores on his body and held out his bloody hands. He indicated that they would like to sleep on the sand, but Mohammed turned steely. “Stay here,” he warned, “or no milk tonight.”

Riley and Hogan tried to sleep on the hardpan, but the stones poked into their wounds, and the cold, damp night air—“as salt as the ocean,” Riley said— made them burn. They shivered and shifted until midnight, when Mohammed brought them each a pint of milk and then retired to his tent. After drinking the milk, which Riley averred was “pure and warm from the camels,” he and Hogan crept over to the sand and slept soundly.

From dawn to dark, Robbins had ridden on the back of his master's camel. Because he had chosen to ease the pounding by sitting on his animal skin rather than wearing it, the tropical sun had ravaged his torso. After traveling sixty miles to the east, even the nomads were too exhausted to bother pitching the tent. Instead, they loafed and visited other campfires nearby. When Ganus's sister Muckwoola returned to the tent and told Robbins that she knew where two of his shipmates were, he rose again. Babbling incomprehensibly to him all the way, she led him to a campsite by a patch of dry thornbushes.

There he found Williams and Barrett squatting by a low fire, cooking the remnants of a piece of salt pork that their master had retrieved from the beach where the longboat crashed. They rose and shook hands with Robbins, whose joy quickly turned to disgust as he got a close look at his comrades. “Did you see the long-legged deer they call gazelles today?” he asked, making conversation to cover his shock. “They came right up to us, as tame as sheep, but my master would not shoot any. He said it's not the season to take their skins.” In the crimson firelight, Williams looked like a leprous demon, both gaunt and bloated. The sun, starvation, thirst, and the pounding of the camels had produced in him a look of dissipation. His dead skin hung in sheets, the new layer beneath already covered in red blisters. His face was pinched.

Focused on what he was doing, Williams did not speak at first. He knew he looked hideous, and he seemed resigned to his own death. At forty-eight, he had already lost his parents and several siblings. When he had signed on to the Commerce, he had left behind in Wethersfield not only his wife but two orphaned nieces, Almira, age twelve, and Elizabeth, six, the daughters of his younger brother Richard and his wife, Hannah, who had both died during the recent war. Williams spoke lovingly of the two girls and with great concern for their future. By the flickering campfire, he rambled on until grief stopped him.

At daybreak on September 13, Riley and Hogan gingerly brushed the sand from their wounds and set off in a southeasterly direction behind Deslisle and the camels. They were so stiff from dehydration and the hard night that they could barely keep from wailing with every step. As the morning advanced, the blistering Saharan sun lashed their backs.

Three hours after they set out, Riley spotted one of his men in the distance, mounted on a large camel so that he floated queerly above the drove and the dust. Riley veered in his direction. Something was not right, he realized as he hobbled nearer on his bruised feet. The rider moved without purpose, like the boom of a drifting boat. Head and arms flopped about in response to the camel. Riley limped faster, catching up when the camel stopped to chew on a bush. The rider sat propped on the beast like a swollen corpse. His skin had burned off, and the sun glistened bizarrely from his body as if he were lit from within. Aghast, Riley examined an unrecognizable face. The man, entirely naked, muttered in a barely audible voice about his woes. It was Williams. That morning his master's wife had greased his body with animal fat to try to save him, but now it cooked his skin. “I cannot live another day,” he gasped to Riley, who gently held his trembling hand. “Should you ever get clear from this dreadful place and return to our country, tell my dear wife that with my last breath I prayed for her happiness.” He began to sob.

Riley searched for words to console his first mate, but before he could produce any, inadequate though they necessarily would have been, Williams's master suddenly appeared, scolded them vehemently, and lashed the camel. As it wheeled around, Riley saw ruby streaks on its coat where the inside of Williams's leg “hung in strings of torn and chafed flesh.”

“God Almighty bless you,” he called to the dying man. In an instant, the first mate was gone. Riley was left alone to contemplate the gruesome sight and his inability to help.

His reflections were brought up short by his own trouble. The encounter had lasted no more than a quarter of an hour, but during that time the desert had swallowed his master's drove without a trace. In his sudden isolation, he hit a wall of hopelessness. “My God,” he cried, looking around, “suffer us not to live longer in such tortures!”

Lurching forward, he ran, grimacing, in the direction in which his master's camels had been heading. With each strike of his feet on the stones, he shouted in anguish, but he did not slow down. Having witnessed the agony of the first mate, he was almost indifferent to his own physical pain. Mohammed saw him coming and stopped the drove. As Riley neared, staggering like a madman, the Arab raised his cane to strike him. Then, almost as if it were not worth the effort, he changed his mind. Instead, he lit into him for thinking he could do whatever he pleased. He ordered Riley and Hogan to drive the camels on as fast as they could, and he rode off in a huff.

When Mohammed returned about an hour later, he was accompanied by a tall, fearsome-looking old man, whom Riley described as being as “black as a negro.” The old man was with his two sons and a number of heavily armed men on foot. The dark Arab, who was Clark's master and whose features Riley thought “showed every sign of the deepest rooted malignity,” looked him over and made an offer to Mohammed. The two quickly came to terms. Riley never mentioned what he was traded for, but Mohammed probably recouped his investment— a blanket— and was satisfied at being rid of a nuisance. He still had Hogan and Deslisle.

Riley's new master, whose name was Sideullah, and his entourage walked even faster than the camels, and Riley could not keep up.2 Sideullah snarled at him to move faster and struck his back with a cane. Riley staggered, but his animal instinct for survival kicked in, and he kept pace until one of Sideullah's sons saddled him with his musket and powder horn. Beneath the weight, exaggerated by his fatigue, he lagged again, hating the young man and waiting for Sideullah to come beat him once more. The old man, however, was preoccupied with other matters. He strode on, leaving the others to make their own way to camp.

Haunted by the lingering image of the dying Williams but compelled by it too, Riley kept his feet moving. How could he pity himself with the chief mate in such a state? He could see the far-off horizon in every direction, broken only by camels, which rose above the skyline like distant ships. All around him, they were hull up or hull down. To keep his bearings, he needed only to follow them. He had to keep his feet moving. He prayed for Williams, willing him on and himself too.

It was late afternoon when he reached Sideullah's camp. The nomads relieved him of his burden and told him to lie down in the shade in the tent. He begged for water, to no avail. Sideullah and his son prayed and then left to visit other tents. “I tried to soften the hearts of the women to get me a little water,” he said, “but they only laughed and spit at me.” Mercilessly, they drove him away from the tent. Riley sat on the smoldering hardpan, absorbing the last rays of the sun. He could think of nothing but his thirst.

At sunset, Riley's new master returned with his sons and two dozen men and led them in prayer. He seemed to be their spiritual leader. For all their piety— they prayed regularly and devoutly, as their religion required— Riley wondered how the Arabs could ignore the fact that under their care he and his men lacked the most basic necessities of life and suffered inhumanly.

Riley was distracted from his brooding when James Clark arrived with Sideullah's camels. These meetings had become what the men looked forward to and what kept them going, but here was another shipmate whose condition was not just deplorable but heartbreaking. Clark had two youngsters at home. “He was nearly without a skin,” Riley later recalled. “Every part of his body exposed; his flesh excessively mangled, burnt and inflamed.” He looked almost as bad as Williams. “I am glad to see you, sir,” Clark told Riley, “for I am afraid I cannot live through this night. If you get to our country again, please tell my wife, my brothers and sisters how I perished.”

“You're not going to die now,” the captain assured him matter-of-factly. “The food we have, though meager, is enough to keep us alive, and the desert, while it is roasting us, is preserving us at the same time. Look at our wounds. To be sure, they hurt like the dickens, but even in the worst of them there are no signs of putrefaction. We are being saved for some other fate.”

Clark looked scared. Riley searched for other encouraging words, words that he himself did not believe, anything to convince Clark to hang on for another day. He told him truthfully that one old man had said that when it rained, they would all go northeast to sell the sailors. “I assured him,” Riley told Clark, “that a great ransom would reward them for delivering the entire crew to the land of the Moors.”