Skeletons On The Zahara (25 page)

As they approached the camels, they saw that they were loaded with goods in large tent-cloth sacks. Lashed to their sides were an earthenware pot and a few small skin bags, but there was no sign of any owner. The Bou Sbaa smelled a trap. Scanning the terrain for hidden enemies, they unsheathed their guns and primed them. They dismounted by the indolently grazing camels and motioned silently for the sailors to do the same. Only Savage, who had lagged behind on Goyette in the dash, had yet to reach the scene.

With his loaded gun ready, Hamet milled around, scanning the convoluted terrain for hidden enemies or the owner of the pack camels, who was obviously a trader. At the same time, he worked his way toward Savage, still struggling forward and vulnerable.

Stepping over a rise, Hamet nearly stumbled on a swaddled Arab fast asleep on the sand. Without making a sound, Hamet stooped and studied him, searching first for a weapon, then for an injury or a wound. He saw nothing, only a small bag of valuables by the man's head. The trader must have traveled all night; he slept as soundly as a snake that has swallowed an egg and settled in the sun. Hamet approached him and silently eased a hand toward the bag. He snatched it and backed away just as furtively. The trader did not move.

When Savage caught up, Hamet directed him behind the dune where Seid and Abdallah were rifling the trader's packs. They untied a sack and found what they were looking for: barley. Quickly they poured out about fifty pounds of the grain and stuffed it into one of their leather bags. They preserved the remaining grain as if it were their own, tying up the neck of the sack and carefully repacking it.

To the sailors, it was a curious act of thievery. Although the disappearance of fifty pounds of grain would be obvious to its owner even if the robbers vanished without a trace, they had taken the time to make everything appear in order. They could have just as easily made off with the man's camels and all his possessions and never seen him again, the sailors thought, and so they would have preferred. They were starving and did not care about the stranger. If they were going to be accomplices to a crime, they might as well take what they wanted and run.

But their masters seemed in no great hurry to depart. They rummaged through a number of smaller bags of personal effects. The bag Hamet had discovered on the slumbering trader contained the best find: barley meal, barley ground into an edible state. The Arabs dumped the meal into a bowl and stirred in some water. They wolfed down the gruel with their hands and then fixed a bowl for the sailors, who dispatched it with equal enthusiasm.

Finally, the Bou Sbaa mounted their camels and hustled the group off to the southeast, leaving the trader's camels behind.

Less than half an hour later, a man came running across the dunes, waving his arms and calling for them to stop. Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah calmly ignored him and goaded on the camels. Still, the stranger gained on them. It was the trader. “Poor devil!” Hamet said to Riley as he approached. “He does not even have a musket, and he let me take his bag while he was asleep.”

Riley later admitted that he, like the others, had only one concern at the time: that they not give the barley back. “If I had a loaded musket,” one of the sailors bluntly muttered, “I'd soon stop him and save the barley.”

The persistent man made to head them off. Seeing that they could not escape a confrontation, the Bou Sbaa prepared their muskets as they rode. Hamet warned the stranger to keep his distance, but he approached them fearlessly. Armed with only a scimitar, he cut them off and brought them to a standstill. What the man did next shocked the sailors more than if he had pulled out a hidden gun and aimed it at them. He threw up his hands and appealed to Allah. As they looked on, mesmerized, he bowed to the ground and began to pray loudly. Then he declared that he had lost part of his property and that he knew it was they who must have taken it. “I am your brother and would rather die than commit a bad action or to suffer others to do it with impunity,” he announced. “You have guns and believe you can kill me in an instant, but the God of justice is my shield and will protect the innocent. I do not fear you.”

“Leave your scimitar on the ground,” Hamet replied. “You have nothing to fear.” He made his camel kneel, and he dismounted.

The aggrieved man, still suspicious, came forward. “Is it peace, then?” he asked.

“It is,” replied Hamet, offering his hand. “Peace be with you. Peace be to your house, and to all your friends.”

As the sailors stood with the camels, the Arabs sat down on the ground in a circle. Hamet did not deny that they had taken the barley. “But,” he countered, “our slaves were starving to death,” a fact clearly exhibited in the gaunt faces around him. “You would not have denied us a morsel, if you had been awake.”

After more discussion, Hamet ordered the sailors to dust off an area on the hardpan, and he poured out the barley they had taken, showing the trader the inside of the leather bag to satisfy him. The trader loaded the barley into his own sack. They handed over what was left of the barley meal, along with a small bag of opium. Hamet assured the stranger that, other than what they had eaten, this was all they had taken. They prayed together and the man left on foot as he had arrived, seemingly bringing the affair to an end. It had cost them a little more than an hour, but they had gotten a good meal out of it— as well as the bag of valuables that Hamet had denied taking.

Hamet and his company mounted their camels and rode off to the east as fast as they could go, but Savage, who was now relegated to the lame Coho, and Horace, on Goyette, slowed them to little more than a man's walking pace. Disregarding their inferior mounts, the Bou Sbaa harangued the two laggards and beat them with their goads. They rode on all afternoon and into the night, covering fifty-six miles, according to Riley's calculations, before they heard voices ghosting on the wind from the north. The Bou Sbaa immediately stopped and listened in silence.

Fettering the exhausted Goyette, they led the other camels into a wadi, unsaddled them, and fettered them too. The Bou Sbaa checked the priming in their flintlocks and scrambled across the sand and up the bank, motioning for the sailors to follow. Unsure whether they were the hunters or the hunted, the five Commerces crept along on hands and knees, up to the dark place where earth and space seemed to meet, where the moon seemed far closer than Connecticut. At the brink, the nomads waited for the sailors to catch up and then suddenly broke out in a chorus of animal bellows, including what Riley took to be the sounds of a lion, a tiger, and “the sharp frightful yell of a famished wolf.” The Bou Sbaa, more likely, were imitating the Saharan wildcat, hyena, and cheetah.

At dawn, they returned to the wadi where they had left the camels. Riley was still mystified by the Arabs' actions the night before. After half a night of hide-and-seek with an unseen enemy or potential victim, they had circled up and collapsed in exhaustion, the Bou Sbaa clutching their guns, “as if afraid they should lose their slaves.” In the light of day, Riley noticed that the willowy bushes growing in the old riverbed seemed to be of a different species than they had seen before. They were thornless, taller than the big camel, and their trunks were as thick as a man's leg.

Other camels grazed here, and an old woman and a boy wandered into their makeshift camp. After conversing with the Bou Sbaa, the woman sent the boy off. He returned with goatskins and the remnants of a boiled sheep or goat. The Americans did not know what had transpired, nor did they much care. The Bou Sbaa tore the carcass apart, devoured the meat and entrails, and tossed the bones to the sailors, who crushed and ate them. They washed down the splinters with zrig.

Leaving the riverbed, Hamet's party resumed its journey along a ridge of high dunes. The camels, too, had been weakened by the fast pace and the lack of water. Since Burns and Clark were too frail to do anything but ride, Riley and Savage walked. The Bou Sbaa goaded any stragglers more often and more brutally now, ignoring Riley's pleas for mercy. Under this constant strain, some of the sailors showed signs of cracking.

Despite Riley's constant agitation on their behalf, one man in particular had taken to cursing him to his face. Any act of kindness only enraged the man further. “In the ravings of his distempered imagination,” Riley recalled later, “he declared that he hated the sight of me, and that my very smiles were more cutting to him than daggers.” The captain refused to name the belligerent shipmate but allowed that he had “transformed into a perfect savage,” perhaps suggesting by double entendre that Aaron Savage, already aloof and antagonistic, had slipped another notch toward insanity, or at least blind hostility.1

In their ill humor, the Bou Sbaa were not pleased to see a lone cameleer approaching them from the direction of the hills. While he was still far away, they dug holes in the sand and buried two small bags. As he neared, Riley could see what his masters had known immediately. The trader had tracked them down again.

The lone Arab, more aggressive this time, accused Hamet of deceiving him. Hamet had not, as he had vowed, returned all that he had taken. Hamet earnestly denied the charge, insisting that the man satisfy himself by searching their bags. “Allah as my witness,” he said, “we have nothing of yours in our possession.” The trader searched in vain. As the defeated man rode off, Riley was once again impressed by the ease with which his master deceived.

When they were sure the trader was gone, the Bou Sbaa dug up the bags. Hamet told Riley, with a laugh, “The trader wanted his bags and things, but he has not got them yet.” He opened a small box and showed Riley a reddish-brown substance, which was opium, and several hollow sticks as wide as a man's finger containing gold dust. The other bag held tobacco and some herb roots, which the Sahrawis smoked in a goat-bone pipe to ward off the evil eye.2 Under its influence they fancied themselves invincible, which made the herb more valuable to them than the opium or the gold dust.

As they rode on and Riley reflected on the robbery, he grew less and less sure about the deal he had struck. He did not question his own lie, which he knew was born of necessity and uttered in good faith, but he struggled with Hamet's deceit, which seemed to have crossed the line from necessity to profit. Before Riley, the French traveler Saugnier had wrestled with the Sahrawi ethic regarding property. According to him, on the desert things stolen unperceived became rightfully the property of the thief, and things unwatched, it followed, deserved to be stolen. “In vain would the owner recognize his own property in his neighbour's tent,” he observed. “He cannot reclaim it; it ceases to be his from the moment he has been negligent in its care. Hence arises this people's inclination for rapine; they do not think they commit a crime, and only follow, in this regard, a custom allowed by their laws.” Riley deduced only that, on the desert at least, the Arabs “regard no law but that of superior force.”

They rode hard into the night and camped late. Hungry and— lashed by the northeast wind— bitterly cold, the men hugged the unyielding ground and one another through the wee hours. They rose early and, having nothing to eat or drink, rode on with no comforts. In the afternoon, they discovered tracks. Desperate for food and water, the Bou Sbaa followed them until they found a drove of camels grazing in a depression alongside sheep and goats rooting among the rocks for patches of short brown moss. They approached the herders of these animals, who invited them to their nearby camp.

In a valley half an hour away, twenty tents sat beside a thicket of thornbushes. After introductions were made, Hamet attended to their immediate needs, trading for a kid. Seid and Abdallah slaughtered it and gave the entrails to the sailors. Adopting nomad custom, the hungry sailors did not clean them out before roasting them. The sailors were well aware by now that Arab manners demanded the sharing of meals and that no one would be bashful in claiming his portion, so when the camp's curious began to surround them, they grew nervous of their intentions. Reaching a quick consensus by whispers and nods, the sailors extracted the smoking food from the fire and divided it with their hands. Before anyone could insist on a share, they devoured the entrails, warm but still raw. Their hurry was unnecessary. None of the Arabs disturbed them. Nor would their hosts accept any of the meat Hamet offered them. Riley took this as a good sign, indicating that the tribe had plenty and that his party was nearing more fertile territory. These Arabs gave them water and returned at midnight. The bowl they offered up contained five pounds of what Riley called “stirabout or hasty pudding” and the nomads called lhasa, boiled semolina with a hole pressed in it and filled with fresh sweet milk.3

The sailors scooped it up with their bare hands. The hot mush scalded their mouths and throats, but they could not control their craving to feed. Riley commented that it was the first “kind of bread” they had eaten since leaving the wreck. It warmed their stomachs and had the salutary effect of soothing their dysentery-plagued bowels. The best meal of their journey was the gift of men they did not know and would never see again. Like so much on the Sahara, it opened their minds to the unexpected, and to small graces in the midst of adversity.

The next day, they reluctantly left these friendly Arabs and traveled ten hours northeast to reach a brackish well surrounded by a horde of men and camels. There, beasts sucked down long throaty drafts and then fed on nearby thornbushes to fill their rumens. The sharp smells of freshly belched cud and wet dung contrasted markedly with the dry whiffs of ancient dust on the hammada. As Riley prepared to water the camels, Hamet, having studied the crowd of cameleers, stopped him. He ushered the sailors aside. In the south, he had worried primarily about surviving the harsh environment. With just 150 miles of desert to go before they reached cultivated lands, he began to focus on negotiating the Sahrawi clans. Although his party had been greeted amiably, they were in a region dominated by the powerful and quarrelsome Tekna, a fusion of Lamta Berbers of the Oued Noun region and Maqil Arabs, part nomadic and part sedentary, living in walled villages from the fringes of the desert to the foothills of the Anti-Atlas, and the ascendant Reguibat, a tribe almost purely of Sanhaja Berber blood, though they had adopted Islam, spoke Arabic, and claimed chorfa status, as descendants of Muhammad. Hamet did not want to excite anyone's envy, so he ordered the sailors to sit down and keep to themselves. After a long day riding and walking, this came as a relief to Riley. “We were so extremely reduced and weak,” he wrote, “that we could not without difficulty stand steady on our feet.”