Skeletons On The Zahara (18 page)

Riley begged Sideullah to let them sleep in a corner of the tent, as his two black slaves, who attended the herd, did. The Bou Sbaa agreed, pointing to a place for them to lie down, but again the women objected and drove them off. Sideullah did not countermand the women, but in the night he and his sons brought Riley and Clark warm milk, a quart each, and after the women were asleep, Omar, the son who had foisted his gun on Riley, came to them and led them inside the tent to sleep on soft sand. He did so in such a manner that Riley decided he had misread Omar, that he had made him carry the gun not out of laziness or cruelty but to give Riley an excuse to lag behind so that he could walk in peace. Omar was, at least in part, kind.

The group stayed put the next day. In the morning, the women in the tent chided and jabbed at Riley and Clark, who played possum until the blows became too painful. Although Arab women hold authority inside the tent, Sideullah, who wanted the sailors to regain their strength, scolded them. Riley and Clark remained under the tent all day, sharing a pint of camel's milk in the morning and each having a pint of water at noon. By the afternoon, Riley could feel the swelling in his body subside, especially in his pulverized feet.

While the sailors lay in the tent, Sideullah's powerfully built black slave, Boireck, and two Arab boys had spent the day driving the camels off to find shrubs. In the evening, Boireck seated himself at the fire, stretching out his long, tired legs on either side of it. Seeing Riley and Clark inside the tent and resenting the fact that they had rested all day, he got up to run them out. When Sideullah stopped him, Boireck became even more riled.

That evening he amused the family and some visitors by taunting the Christians. He pointed at their slack genitals and laughingly compared them with his own. His sneering references to the gaunt Riley as “el rais” brought howls of laughter. He poked their wounds with a sharp stick and made fun of their skin, which died and turned foul beneath the very image of Allah, the sun. What further proof was needed that these miserable white heathens were worthy only of slavery and scorn?

Clark fumed. “It's bad enough to be stripped, skinned alive, and mangled,” he whispered to Riley, “without being obliged to bear the scoffs of a damned negro slave.”

“It's good to know you're still alive, Jim,” Riley responded with a nod. The milk and water they had consumed that day, the rest, the shade had boosted his spirits. He would not let Boireck's buffoonery beat him down just now. “You feel the need to revenge an insult, but let the poor negro laugh if he can take pleasure in it,” he told Clark. “God knows there's little enough here to provide that. He's only trying to gain favor with his masters and mistresses. I'm willing he should have it, even at our expense.”

Over the next three days they pushed southeast, deeper into the desert, at a rate of about thirty miles a day. The terrain became flatter, with shallower depressions and fewer thornbushes, mostly dead and dried up. The camels' powerful molars ground the wooden stalks with the strength of mill wheels, but still they could not fill their stomachs. The plants the nomads used to supplement their own diet also became scarcer. “In every valley we came to,” Riley wrote, “the natives would run about and search under every thorn bush, in hopes to find some herb, for they were nearly as hungry as ourselves.” A small plant resembling shepherd's purse Riley found disappointingly bitter and salty. The pleasant-tasting, onion-shaped root of a plant the Bou Sbaa called taloe was scant. Underneath its single grasslike blade, about a hand high, hid a walnut-size root, which they dug up with a stick; a good day produced no more than half a dozen, their benefit negligible. Riley and Clark continued to lose strength. Indeed, Riley had eaten so little that nothing solid had passed through his bowels since their capture.

Lack of food was not the only problem. The stores of water were nearly finished, and the milk had begun to fail. The sailors, naturally, were the first to suffer. Their ration was reduced to a cup of milk a day, with no water. Even the nomads seemed enervated, stopping earlier, pitching their tents for the night in the midafternoon, and paying little heed to the sailors as long as they gathered sticks for the fire. Riley and Clark spent afternoons and nights in a corner of the tent.

Ironically, the lack of sustenance made walking easier in one way: they could endure the stones better as they became lighter. But as chronic dehydration intensified, their joints stiffened, and they found it exceedingly difficult to stand. Riley observed that he was literally shriveling up. Every day that he had been on the desert, he had relieved his thirst in part by continuing to catch and drink his own urine. “But that resource,” he wrote, “now failed me for the want of moisture.”

Robbins's situation was no better. Ganus's water supply was also running out, and his slave's begging now elicited only harsh rebukes. Each step, Robbins was convinced, was another away from civilization. He had encountered none of his shipmates for days, and he had decided he never would again.

When Savage suddenly appeared behind him in the company of two Arabs, Robbins was incredulous. He had not seen the second mate since the well; he lagged behind his master's drove to speak to him. Savage was skeletal. He said that he had eaten nothing solid since being captured. Robbins regretted that he had no means of helping him. “I'd share the small remains of my pork with you,” Robbins said, “but my master never lets me carry it myself.” They could talk no more. Robbins had to catch up to Ganus again.

Two days later, Ganus scouted ahead, leaving Robbins waiting near a bush. For the previous four nights, the nomads had not bothered to pitch a tent, and exposure had taken its toll. Each morning, Robbins had woken up wet from dew and stiff in his joints. The cold, moisture, and sand irritated his blistered body. He now collapsed in unconsciousness.

Midway through the afternoon, he was awakened— not by the threatening command of an Arab but by Savage. Robbins was glad to see the second mate again and to have the opportunity to spend some time together and talk. Savage was in a better frame of mind now, but he told Robbins bluntly that he was nearing “absolute starvation” and bitterly cursed his cruel master. The two wandered off in search of the snails that nestled their round, trumpet-mouthed shells in the dome-shaped euphorbia plants and thornbushes. These shells— about an inch in diameter, thick to keep the elements out, and bleached white by the sun— each yielded a chewy, coiled morsel that tasted like dirt. Savage gobbled down a few, but neither of the sailors had the stamina to continue the hunt. They were quickly exhausted, and the heat drove them in search of shade, where they sat with little to do but disparage the nomads. Before returning to their tents, they offered up a terse prayer to God.

Neither group moved the following day. Robbins visited Savage's tent, where the two stole some water from a goatskin. Savage told Robbins that his master had removed a wen from a camel that morning, and he knew where it was. They went and found it lying on the sand, already in two pieces, looking, according to Robbins, “not unlike a shad-spawn.” They started to cook it furtively in the sand under coals from the fire, but when they saw Savage's mistress approaching, they dug it up and gobbled it down.

On the night of September 18, the Bou Sbaa assembled for another yemma. As a full moon illuminated the sand around them, they decided to return full circle to the well by the sea. Riley was devastated by this news, which confirmed that the nomads could not find water where they were. By his estimation, it was three hundred miles back, seven and a half days' hard traveling. “As the camels were almost dry,” he reasoned, “I much feared that myself and my companions must perish before we could reach it.”

In the morning before they turned back, Sideullah watered the four mares. Every other day, a family in the tribe, each in its turn, gave them as much water as they could drink. Sideullah emptied his last goatskin into a bowl. When they finished, Riley, who had not drunk water for days, begged his master to allow him to lap up what was left, but Sideullah refused. Instead, he sprinkled this dross on the ground as a sacrifice to Allah while the Arabs prayed for rain.

Over the next few days, they walked and foraged. Riley could not understand how the Arabs kept up such a pace on what little the desert yielded for them to consume. He and Clark had even less. In one sandy depression overlooked by the camels, they found snails on squat thornbushes. Most came off with a crisp snap, indicating they were long dead, dry, inedible, but then came a clinger and another. They hid the live snails in their clothing until dark, when they discreetly roasted them in the fire, but they found they could barely eat them. The body needs fluid to digest food, and they had drunk no more than a gill of milk that day. Burning with thirst, Riley and Clark sought out a staling camel, caught its amber stream in their hands, and drank. “Its taste was bitter, but not salt,” Riley said, “and it relieved our fainting spirits.”

Hunger began to derange the seamen and threatened to prove true, with ultimate irony, the myth that cannibals occupied the Sahara. At their lowest, some of the men ate the skin off their peeling arms, gnawing into their own flesh. Horrified, Riley tied one man's arms behind his back. Two others lured an Arab child away from the tents. Riley discovered them and rushed up as they were about to kill him with a stone. “I convinced them that it would be more manly to die with hunger than to become cannibals and eat their own or other human flesh,” he later wrote, and he assured them that their masters would feed them at least enough to keep them alive until they could be sold. For the moment, Riley had succeeded.

September 21 brought about a change even more inexplicable than the sudden about-face to a well Riley believed they could never reach. The Wandering Arabs, desperate for water, did not wander. Sideullah and some of his tribesmen pitched their seven tents, rested in them or tended their camels, and prayed at the usual times, cleansing themselves with sand. Riley wondered if they had taken the wrong path. He could think of no reasonable explanation for simply stopping. Had the Bou Sbaa lost hope too? Were they simply surrendering to the desert?

Sidi Hamet's Feast

At midday, after the nomads had taken refuge from the sun in their closed tents, two strangers on heavily loaded camels entered the valley. By desert custom, they should have stopped well short of the tents, dismounted, and waited for the head of the family to come out and greet them. These men, who peered out from slits in their swaddling and kept a hand near the double-barreled muskets on their saddles, rode directly into the friq.

From the corner of a tent, Riley, stupefied by the heat, eyed them warily. No matter how bad things were, he had learned that on the Sahara, they could always get worse. Beside him, deeper in the shade, Clark lay barely lucid, dying. He was “a perfect wreck of almost naked bones,” in Riley's words, “his belly and back nearly collapsed, and breathing like a person in [his] last agonies.”

It would have been customary for the tent owners to offer the travelers water, but there was none.

No one left their tents. The two fierce-looking men, whose haiks concealed the scars of wounds sustained on two failed caravans to Tombuctoo— both having cost the lives of many men and many camels— made their beasts sit in front of Sideullah's. They dismounted and sat on the ground, each propping his musket on a knee to keep it out of the sand. Riley wished that his master were there, but he and his sons had taken up their arms and ridden off with the other men before dawn. Or perhaps they had reached the end of the line and had abandoned them along with their own wives and children. If so, it would only be a matter of a day or two before they died.

Riley felt the palpitations of his frail body and listened to Clark's grating breaths. Sometimes they sounded to Riley like distant wood chops in the forest, confusing him as to where he was and sending his mind reeling. Clark's tattooed cross seemed to levitate on fresh crimson skin. The two sailors had descended into the zone where death inexplicably claims some men and spares others. Water makes up between 60 and 70 percent of the human body. Men have been known to die from losing as little as 20 percent of their water (or 12 percent of body weight); others have survived losses of up to 40 percent (or 28 percent of body weight). Riley's and Clark's relatively long, steady slide into severe dehydration had perhaps allowed them to endure to the extreme end of the spectrum.

Clark teetered on the edge, and Riley had also entered the later stages of dehydration, in which the body milks secondary systems to channel fluid to the blood so that it can perform high-priority tasks such as delivering oxygen and nutrients to the cells and carrying away heat to the skin to be released. Both men's circulatory systems siphoned their joint oil, causing them to move in a stiff, jerky way. Their mouths produced no saliva, their eyes no tears.

“One feels as if one were in the focus of a burning-glass,” a sufferer of severe thirst once wrote. “The eye-balls burn as though facing a scorching fire. The tongue and lips grow thick, crack, and blacken.” In the agonizing final moments of thirst, the blood becomes viscous and loses its ability to transport heat to the skin. The victim is consumed by his own body heat, suffering a sort of internal meltdown.

The nomad women maintained their sphinxlike indifference to the sailors' suffering. Sideullah's wife and a daughter emerged from their tent, carrying a large skin and a roll of camel-hair tent cloth toward the strangers. The men rose. “Labez, Labez-salem,” they greeted the women. “Labez-alikom.” Peace, peace be with you.

The women retrieved tent poles and constructed a shelter. They unloaded the strangers' camels and arranged their goods and saddles in the shade. Then they brought a rack to hold the visitors' most precious cargo: two bloated goatskins. Riley strained to hear as the women sat and talked with the men, who, it was now clear, were traders, asking them the usual questions of the desert: “Where did you come from? How long have you been traveling? What goods do you have?”