Skeletons On The Zahara (27 page)

Only the influence and diplomacy of Hamet prevented Seid from closing the deal. Hassar, who had offered camels and merchandise for Horace, backed down calmly, perhaps figuring that if they traveled together, time was on his side. It was clear that Seid was eager to sell the boy.

Over the next two days, the group traveled north about forty miles, passing more camps and more stands of bushes. Hamet slaughtered another goat, feeding the sailors meat and entrails. Hassar's wife, Tamar, whom Riley called “an uncommonly intelligent woman,” fixed them lhasa and talked to Riley in broken Spanish. When she was younger, she had helped rescue some Spaniards whose vessel had wrecked on the coast. Her father had held three of the sailors hostage while she had accompanied the Spanish captain to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands to retrieve goods for their ransom. It was simply the way things worked on the Sahara. Tamar promised Riley that he and his shipmates would not go hungry in her company.

Near dark on the second day, they reached the mouth of a deep wadi, probably, though Riley did not name it, the Draa, a thousand-mile-long channel that drains the southern slopes of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. They descended to it by the sea and discovered an Arab camp on the beach. Hamet stopped to talk to the head of the camp. The man then took Riley aside and asked him in a patois of Spanish and Arabic, “Have you a friend in Swearah?”

“Yes,” Riley answered in Spanish.

“Do not lie,” the man warned. “If you do, you will have your throat cut. If you have told Sidi Hamet this merely to get off the desert and to get food, he will pardon that pretext and deception now, though he will sell you and your friends to the highest bidder. In a few days, you will reach a river of running water and houses, and if you persist in lying, he will kill you.”

Riley did not hesitate. “I am incapable of lying to Sidi Hamet,” he responded indignantly. “Everything that I have stated is the truth. He has saved my life, and he will be well rewarded by my friend and by our Almighty Father.” Hamet listened as intently as the old man did and, Riley judged, with better understanding.

Hamet nodded. “You will see Swearah in several days,” he said.

When they caught up with the others, the man and his young sons guided them across the mouth of the wadi. They waded through a hundred yards of hip-deep salt water. On the far bank, beneath a steep rise, Riley noticed that one of the man's sons had a pair of kerseymere pants that had belonged to Savage. The chain of theft and barter by which the pants had arrived there was likely long, but to the captain the only thing that mattered was that they go back to their rightful owner, who needed them. Riley begged Hamet and Seid to buy the pants. Seid traded a piece of blue cloth, which he wore as a shirt, for them, and gave them to Riley. He objected when Riley began to give the pants to Savage. “He is foonta,” he insisted. “Give them to Clark or the boy.” But Riley handed them to the second mate.

At dark Riley and Horace accompanied the Bou Sbaa to a friq by the sea. Here the Arabs gave them a pile of dried mussels, which they carried back to camp and shared with Savage, Clark, and Burns. That night, Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah slaughtered the remaining goats. After the Arabs battled over their shares of the entrails and meat, all stewed together in a pot, there was none left for the sailors. Their only sustenance came from the mounting evidence that they were at last about to leave the Sahara. But Hamet warned Riley that the region they were about to enter, the populated perimeter, was in many ways more dangerous for them than the desert itself. “Many robbers and bad men inhabit these parts,” he told him.

The next day, October 16— a date that would gain historical significance for Napoleon's arrival at St. Helena— they set out early on a slow, tedious passage along the rocky, eroded seashore, picking their way as inconspicuously as thirty people accompanied by livestock could. With guns drawn, the Bou Sbaa herded Savage, Clark, and Burns on the camels while Riley and Horace kept up on foot, walking and running. The sailors were never left alone now. If one had to stop, a Bou Sbaa stayed with him. As the day wore on, Horace's strength faded. The boy's frequent stops made the Arabs increasingly testy, and he bore the brunt of their frustration.

By sunset they had gone only fifteen miles. Afraid to stop in these parts, they continued on into the night. Around midnight, at the edge of a wadi, Riley and Horace swapped places with Savage and Clark, who fell back with the women and children walking mutely through sand drifts. It took nearly two more hours to cross the gulf. By the time they climbed up the far slope onto an inclined plane of more drifts, Savage could not keep up even with the women and children. Riley himself was fading in and out of wakefulness on his camel when Clark's cry jarred him awake. “They're flogging Mr. Savage!” he yelled.

Riley tumbled down from his camel and ran to the rear. Passing Clark, he found Seid and Hassar standing over Savage. He was unconscious, but Seid kept beating him with a goad. Hassar grabbed Savage's beard in one hand and pulled it to expose his throat. In his other hand he drew back his scimitar.

Riley took several determined steps, crouched, and butted Hassar hard, knocking him off his feet. He quickly grabbed and lifted Savage. “Water, please!” Riley begged. Enraged, Hassar climbed back to his feet, raised his scimitar, and lurched toward Riley. Just then Hamet arrived and spat out several harsh phrases of Arabic that stopped Hassar. The rest of the Arabs gathered around. Their enemies were near, and they believed that Savage was being purposely obstinate, heedlessly endangering them. They wanted to kill him.

Riley pleaded with Hamet. “Savage only fainted from exhaustion and illness,” he explained. Hamet did not understand; to Riley's surprise, the Arab had no concept of fainting. But at Riley's insistence, Hamet had a camel brought up and water given to Savage. When he revived, Riley noticed tears in Hamet's eyes. The trader was clearly angry and fearful— it would have been costly for him to lose one of the sailors, whose ransom represented his only chance to appease his merciless father-in-law— but Riley sensed that he also felt some sympathy for the man who had almost been killed. Hamet ordered Clark and Savage to be put on the camel together to support each other and told Riley to ride another with Horace. “The English are foonta— you see even our women and children can walk and run,” he gibed.

The insult nettled Riley. “I will go on foot,” the captain insisted. He mustered the camels and began to drive them on. Hamet laughed at el rais the indignant, whose support of his men and boldness had enhanced his character in the Arabs' eyes, even Hassar's once he had calmed down. “Come and walk with me, Rais,” Hamet said, beckoning Riley with his arm. “Leave the camels to the others. Good Riley, you will see your children again, inshallah.”

Skeletons

From the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Ganus's little band— Sarah, Ishir, Muckwoola, his mother, the three children, and Robbins— had begun drifting to the southeast the day after Robbins had been accosted by the lone scimitar-wielding Arab. The man had raced up to him on the plain, brandishing his weapon and angrily demanding, “Soo-mook en tar?”— What is your name?

“Robbinis, Robbinis!” he had replied.

“Me-nane jate?” he asked, and Robbins pointed in the direction of his master's tent. “Ille-mein en tar?”

“To Ganus,” Robbins answered.

“He seemed, by his conduct, to know my master, and said no more,” Robbins noted, “but eyed me very sharply as I walked hastily from him.” Rattled, Robbins returned to the camp, which had been abandoned now by all but a few families. Early the next morning, Ganus and his sisters had at last returned with water. The group left the valley that same day, riding off with another family— twenty Arabs and one American, with four tents and sixty camels.

For ten days they drifted southeast into the interior. One day they procured a camel head from a friq they passed. They baked it that night in a hole in the sand and ate regally. Then they turned due east into hillier country, where the grazing was better and where there were clumps of twisted acacia trees, one of the most useful plants on the desert. Though Robbins made no mention of it, the nomads extracted its resin to treat stomach ailments and eye problems and to improve blood clotting; they chewed its wood to relieve distress caused by drinking too much salty water; its berries they crushed for dye.

Here, “having retired to the most secret place,” according to Robbins, they slaughtered a two-year-old jmel. “Before the skin was off, five or six Arabs came bounding over the sandy desert to partake of it,” he recorded, as dismayed as Riley had been at the expansiveness of a Saharan feast. As they butchered the camel, they sliced off hunks of the hump, which Robbins described as “like the brisket of an ox,” and ate it raw. The women carved off long pieces of lean meat to hang in the sun for drying. “Joy seemed to pervade every heart,” Robbins observed, as they stewed the entrails in paunch water. He was not disappointed by his portion. For the first time since reaching the desert, he fully sated his appetite.

The following morning, Robbins assisted in preparing and preserving the camel hide, which they sliced into sections and threw into the fire. Once the pieces were dry and the hair had been singed off, they packed this jerky away for future meals. Vistors, some friends, some strangers, arrived periodically. Ganus and Sarah shared with them equally, cooking meat and serving zrig. Robbins could not but be impressed by their generosity. By American standards, it was prodigal. Tomorrow did not seem to exist for them until it arrived.

Among the callers was Hogan's master, with Hogan. The sailors embraced, much buoyed by the sight of each other. For a moment they could ignore the fact that they were being carried into the interior, farther from Mogadore. Hogan, who had put on some weight and regained his spirit, received a generous helping of the feast. “He tore off the meat from the hard, unyielding neck of the camel like a tiger,” Robbins recalled. But before he had satisfied his hunger, Hogan stopped himself and stashed away a hunk for Deslisle, who had been left at camp. Then, summoned by his master, he went off, as quickly as he had come.

Robbins would never lay eyes on Hogan again.

Ganus now led his band south and west through a hilly, sandy wilderness. They were besieged by the irifi. At fifteen miles per hour, a desert wind picks up sand and dust and whisks it across the plain. At thirty miles per hour, it creates conditions of almost zero visibility. When the irifi reaches sixty miles per hour, as it is known to do, it blasts lentil-size grit through tents and clothes, hones sandstone hills smooth, and drives migratory birds to the coast, where many drink seawater out of desperation and die. Large mammals stampede before it as if from a forest fire.

For three days, the wind punished them, casting a demonic red glow on the horizon and making Robbins wonder if he was not at last approaching the gates of hell. More galling still was the fact that this same wind, gusting out over the Atlantic and carrying sand miles out to sea, was a part of the mariners' beloved east-to-west trade wind, the steady gale they relied on for crossing the Atlantic. It would have carried the Commerce on its homeward voyage.

“The atmosphere was as filled with hot sand as ours is with snow in a snowstorm,” Robbins recalled. “The vertical rays of the sun beating upon a body almost naked— the sand filling the eyes constantly exposed— the feet sinking, ankle deep, into the sand at every step, made travelling all but destruction.” They could not erect a tent for shelter either— the shifting sand would not hold pegs.

So they kept moving. With heads down, they rode or walked alongside the camels, constantly strafed from behind. Robbins's ears, nose, and sometimes his mouth filled with grit. He lived inside his own head as sight and sound, other than the monotonous roar of the wind, were virtually nil. As he walked, the clinging sand chafed his skin, rubbing him raw between the legs. His cracked throat plagued him. The sand obsessed him. During lulls in the wind, he tried desperately to rid himself of it, but without water it was impossible. Frantic, he caught his urine and washed his face and body with it.

On October 23, Ganus steered his band due south. The wind finally moderated, and at midday they stopped and pitched camp. Ganus's son, Elle, told Robbins that “Joe,” the name the Arabs used for William Porter, was in a tent nearby and that he would show him the way. They set out immediately.

A few miles outside camp, they stopped at a tent where they found one of Savage's former masters, with Ganus and Porter's master, about to slaughter a camel cow. Ganus told Robbins to gather brush to feed the fire. With massive root systems for collecting the desert's scant nutrients, the bushes grew fifty feet apart. For three hours, Robbins gathered wood to feed the fire over which the Arabs stewed a kettle of entrails and meat. As a reward for this work, they tossed Robbins a fetus, the size of a rat, that they had found in the cow. Robbins was not in a position to reject any food, no matter how unappetizing. He roasted it in the sand and coals beneath the kettle of stew. Fearing that someone might take it from him, he soon dug it up and gobbled it down while it was still steaming hot. He noted later only that “extreme hunger made this a delicious meal.”

Porter's master urged Ganus to let Robbins visit Porter, who was ailing. Ganus agreed, and at sunset, Robbins finally reached his shipmate, who, he discovered, had been suffering from, among other things, a massive headache for several days. Porter was also sandblind. The glare of the sun had begun to kill the cells in the outer layer of his corneas, the covering of the iris and pupil. With this condition, called ultraviolet keratitis but more commonly known as snow blindness, the dead cells create a stippling effect, and in severe cases, like Porter's, the cells mass and slough off, leaving the unprotected eye especially susceptible to airborne grit. Porter could now make out only things very near to him. His eyes were swollen and squinted.

As his sight had worsened on the desert, he had been unable to keep up with his master's family. One day in frustration, his master had beaten him into the dust, then left him behind. Porter lay where he fell for twenty-four hours, while the sun and the wind robbed him of his senses, just as they leach color from bones. He was left with only the agony of his throbbing head and thirst. All his sensations, some ebbing some flowing, seemed to be converging on the moment when his spirit would abandon his body to the jackals and his corpse would join the company of skeletons on the Zahara.