Skeletons On The Zahara (28 page)

But before Porter's spirit could escape and he could be relieved of his miseries, his master's brother had returned on a camel to retrieve him. In an attempt to heal him, the Arabs had bled him from the head by making cuts in his skin with a l'mouse, or jackknife.

Gaunt and pale, Porter had sunk into a deep torpor and, it seemed to Robbins, had lost his will to recover. Although Robbins was loath to sound preachy, believing that the “cant of advising in such a case rather aggravates than mitigates sorrow,” he realized that he himself was undergoing a spiritual transformation on the desert. He could think of no other way to urge Porter to buck up: “It is God's will that we suffer,” he pleaded with him. “We must make the best we can of our situation, as wretched as it is.” Robbins left Porter reluctantly, knowing that he might never see his friend again.

The next day, Ganus's clan packed up their tents and traveled southwest over deep sand. They had run out of water, and Robbins finally sensed urgency in their behavior. In the evening, they rested for a few hours and then set out again after midnight, hurrying along under a canopy of iridescent stars. At sunrise, they stopped only long enough to pray. Shortly afterward, they arrived at a plain that Robbins described as flatter than the sea in a dead calm. Even the dunes withered in an abrupt line before it.

Robbins called his first steps on this pocked, fossilized terrain “the most gloomy entry I ever made upon any part of the earth.” Protruding stones made walking dangerous. Only the camels' hooves moved easily over the unyielding hardpan. No evidence of life appeared anywhere— no shrubs, no weeds, not even the meddlesome flies. In all directions, Robbins saw “the genius of famine and drought”; yet this disturbing view had its consolations. For a change, he did not feel like they were wandering aimlessly. He was sure Ganus knew where he was headed or he never would have entered such a place. Indeed, they raced across the desolate plain with a desperation Robbins found reassuring: he had reached the bottom, a place on the Sahara that even the Arabs found intolerable.

Just before sunset, to everyone's relief, they walked onto sand again. Several hours later they reached a fold in the surface with shrubs for the camels to graze on and stopped for the night. They had covered some ninety miles without drinking a sip of water.

At daylight, they set out to the west at a full rack. While the nomads showed no signs of weakness, riding even harder than they had the previous day, Robbins felt like he was dying of thirst. At noon, he found some relief at a tent, where they were given a drink of water and he found and ate a few roots and sprouts. As they continued toward the coast, the land gradually became less dreary, until they were winding past scrubby hillocks of sand, clay, and shrubs. After dark these grew denser. They threaded their way through a maze of mounds and stones, the only sounds coming from the complaining beasts. They finally stopped at midnight to eat and to let the camels graze. After sharing some meat, which though charred in the fire was as tough as leather, they set off again.

Night merged into wearying morning. The sun rose unobstructed, alone in the house of the gods, at their backs as they entered the east end of a promising valley surrounded by high rocky hills. Robbins could hardly believe his eyes when he saw in the distance what appeared to be a shimmering tower of smooth white marble. He believed they were approaching either a casbah for the defense of a city or the palace of a Moorish prince. As they advanced, he noticed approvingly the valley's grassy floor, which though strawlike from drought was the first groundcover he had walked on in Africa. At length, the white structure came into focus. Seventy feet high, a hundred long, and sixty wide— it was a block of stone.1

“I came to this astonishing monument— went round it— examined it as minutely as I possibly could, and could not discover upon it the least trait of human art,” he observed. “My expectations were blown away by the wind that whistled round it.”

Several hours later, around noon, Ganus located a bir. Robbins looked down through the well's triangular superstructure into the void. It was too dark to tell whether it held any water. As the well diggers had penetrated deeper into the hard earth, they had broadened the shaft at the top and added cross braces, which also served as ladders for users to clear sand from the bottom. Robbins shook his head in disbelief that the nomads did not bother to cover their wells with lids, which would have prevented this problem and cut down on evaporation.

In breathless silence, Ganus lowered the bucket, a wooden hoop with a tanned goatskin suspended from it. The pop of the stiff skin against water broke the tension. Amid their excited chatter, Ganus pulled up the bucket, holding about three gallons, and examined the liquid. It was green from stagnation and at the same time reddish from the dried camel dung that had blown into it. “It was with the greatest difficulty that I could force it into my throat, or retain it there when I had,” Robbins said. They filled just two goatskins with the foul water.

Over the next five miles, as they exited the valley to the southwest, Robbins carried a bowl full of the water, deriving a small degree of comfort from determining for himself when to take a sip, no matter how disgusting. That evening, they used it to moisten their dried meat, which was so hard that after roasting it they had to grind it into meal to make it edible. Fortunately, the next day Ganus learned from a traveler of better water nearby. He ordered camp to be made and then took Ishir and Muckwoola with him to find the well.

The sisters returned the following day with skins of fresh water and some dried fish, but Ganus did not. In his absence, the women fed Robbins only fish skins and treated him with contempt as they wandered idly northwest in search of grazing for the camels. After four days, Ganus reappeared, to Robbins's relief, but with nothing other than a piece of tent cloth to show for his absence. Early the next morning, however, he awakened Robbins and they set out together with Ishir and Muckwoola, driving the camels to the west all day. Ganus had never taken him on his water runs before, which made Robbins suspect that something was up. They reached the coast as the salmon-tinted sun sank into clouds on the horizon, like a coin slipping into a bank.

With mixed emotions, Robbins gazed out on the ocean for the first time since being carried onto the Sahara. It was a month since he had been left behind by his shipmates. The Atlantic waves, which had thrilled his northbound shipmates with the promise of home, pierced southbound Robbins like a knife in the back. He had other worries too, but he barely had time to reflect on a fact of which he was now certain— Ganus was about to sell him— when the camels took their first tentative steps down the slope. Smelling the sweet vapors of the wells, the beasts launched into a headlong dash toward the bottom.

Robbins leaned back to keep from sliding onto his mount's craned neck. He clutched its shoulders in his legs, while with his hands he grasped at the saddle battering his tailbone like a buckboard. The lead camel, maddened by the presence of water, bolted maniacally toward the wells, and as the drove of twenty pursued it down a precipice just north of Cape Mirik, the front-runners— under Ganus, Ishir, and Muckwoola— kicked up sand like birdshot. Robbins saw blue sky, then black ocean, then his mount's wire-hair head. Then the whole cycle, a blazing blur, repeated with each jolt of the camel. The ground rose and receded beneath him. Obstacles surged up and vanished in a blink.

Robbins hit speeds he had never experienced before, not on horseback, not on a ship. He prayed that the camel knew what it was doing. He had no control over it. He cursed the refractory beasts. Even on a good day, they triggered conflicting emotions in him. He considered them “odious and deformed,” yet he recognized their worth. On the desert, they were “noble” saviors. Their arrival with bags of zrig or water elicited “joy bordering on delirium.” But while the Arabs believed camels were blessed and that anyone who fell from one was protected by Allah, Robbins did not share their faith. If he fell now, he would most likely break his neck and be trampled. If the camel stumbled at this speed, he could be crushed. He cursed the Arabs for not using a bit, a bridle, or stirrups. Somewhere in his lurching mind, he recalled the voice of Porter, who had witnessed his master's traverse of the bluff above the boat wreck: “An Arab on a camel can descend a precipice that will kill an American.” As he raced down the slope, Robbins prayed that the magic was in the camel, not in the Arab.

Ganus's drove came tearing into the crowd below, “a great multitude of camels,” and pulled up, frothing and growling. No one paid them any more notice than if they had just dropped in for tea. Around a number of wells, Arabs noisily watered their droves or restrained their beasts while waiting their turn. Others stood around, cooking, talking, or trading.

Trembling, Robbins made his camel kneel and dismounted, thankful to be on the ground again and unaware that he had reached a crossroads. He was closer both to freedom and to lasting servitude than he knew. Ganus had indeed brought him to the communal wells to sell him, as was the common practice among the Sahrawis. Yet just to the south was the territory where the coastal Arabs had a pact with the British to exchange all castaways for a cash reward.

At the plentiful wells, Robbins drank as much water as he wanted. He imbibed wholeheartedly, like a sailor in port for the first time in months, “for thirst past, thirst present, and thirst to come,” as Melville would put it in White Jacket. That night, he, Ganus, Ishir, and Muckwoola slept under a large bush with other nomads near a fire. Ganus and his sisters rose early to water the camels, which drank deeply for the third time in five days.

Robbins had kept a keen eye on Ganus, but he had detected no overt signs that his master was trying to sell him. Now, however, Ganus showed unusual concern for his slave's filthy condition. He made Robbins remove his cutoff trousers and give them to Ishir and Muckwoola to wash. Naked except for a section of the Commerce's American flag, which hung from his waist, Robbins tended to the camels while the sisters scrubbed his pants and hung them from a camel to dry. Then Ganus mounted his jmel and told Robbins to get on behind him.

They set out with a stranger at a fast clip to the south. Coming across fishermen on the coast with a fresh catch, Ganus bought and roasted fish for their breakfast. At midafternoon they reached a bluff over a sizable bay to the north of Cape Mirik, and they descended a trail to the beach at the head of the bay. Even this considerable body of water, which Robbins could not name, was unable to escape the dominion of the desert; low tide had pocked its dappled surface with peaks of sand.

From several shallow wells beneath the bluffs they tasted the water, which was so brackish only the camels could drink it. At last they reached a village of tents and lean-to huts, where they dismounted. As Robbins looked at the first fixed dwellings he had seen in Africa, he had a sinking feeling. Nomad camps were abysmal, both austere and disheveled, as unpleasant to the nose as to the eye, but this was worse. The stench of smoldering sewage permeated the place, and bone piles bespoke another age. At least with the nomads, every situation was by nature temporary. Life was miserable, but the next day it changed. The static squalor of this place struck dread in his heart.

The man who had accompanied them led Ganus off to a hut, leaving Robbins where he stood. In a trance, he gazed at the bay and at the point of Cape Mirik, which stretched out to sea. He studied the lean-tos around him, built of crotched branches hammered into the sand ten feet apart and supporting a horizonal beam. Other branches extended from the beam to the ground to form a roof, which was thatched with seaweed. “Lest they should blunder upon something that looks like the convenience and comfort of civilized life,” observed Robbins, thoroughly cynical by now, “they are careful to make them so low that a human being cannot stand erect in one of them.” Inside, they slept on beds of the same seaweed.

Soon, Ganus returned with several Arabs of the Oulad Delim tribe, the purest of the Beni Hassan-descended bedouin tribes in the western Sahara. The Oulad Delim were feared warriors, “Sons of the Gun,” a tribe with which the Bou Sbaa alternately traded and feuded.

Ganus had adopted a stern, rigid demeanor. He was no longer the relatively considerate master Robbins had come to know but a stranger. He prodded the sailor and told him to walk around. A Delim wearing a blue frock to his calves and a white haik examined him as he would an animal for sale. “I suspected he was about to open my mouth to judge of my age by my teeth, and examine my feet to see if I had been foundered by high living with Ganus,” Robbins noted sardonically.

The Delim, Mohamet Meaarah, was better groomed than Ganus and seemed of higher status. He looked to be a little over thirty and had an open, ingenuous face, reassuring Robbins about his new circumstances.

Meaarah pronounced Robbins bono. A deal, the sailor now discovered, had already been struck contingent on his passing muster. With no further ceremony, Meaarah led him off to another hut, and Ganus rode away without so much as a good-bye.

Robbins believed Meaarah had come to the coast to buy fish, but he was probably collecting the horma, a tribute paid family-to-family by a zenaga tribe to a master tribe. Meaarah fed his bony Christian slave dried fish, which he got from the fishermen. It was then that it dawned on him that Robbins, wearing only a scrap of American flag and a rag of gazelle skin, was absurdly dressed. “Have you no other clothes?” he asked.

“No,” Robbins replied, “this morning Ganus took my trousers and my shoes, which are worn out anyway.”

“Ganus is foonta for taking them,” Meaarah declared, angry at the Bou Sbaa's greed. “I will retrieve them.” Though the trousers were long gone, Meaarah did return with the shoes. He did not indicate by what means he had gotten them. He gave Robbins a section of a haik to wear and then departed into the desert, leaving his new slave with an elderly zenaga fisherman. For the moment, Robbins was at rest. But he was not at ease.