Skeletons On The Zahara (30 page)

They set out early the next morning, but they did not get far before Hamet grew so ill with aching in his head and limbs that they searched for a place to stop. This was fortunate for Burns, who was also sick and too weak to walk. They descended through steep gullies to a hard, barren plain, which, though a hundred feet above the ocean, looked to Riley as if it had once been under it. Its gnarled bushes even resembled sea coral. Another gully took them down to a large group of tents on the beach. Both Hamet and Hassar seemed to know some of the twenty traders who were camped there with their families in the midst of transporting large sacks of barley south.4 They placed Hamet in a tent and built a hot fire near his head to cure his ailment, which he diagnosed as “a stroke of the moon.”

Seid heated a large knife until it was red-hot. He pressed the back of the blade against his brother's scalp, making his hair singe and crackle. He repeated this several times and then reheated the blade. Riley commented that his master came close to “roasting his brains out,” but the treatment did little to improve his condition. Over the next hour, Seid branded his brother's arms and legs in four-inch intervals with the knife. Hamet writhed beneath the searing blade but never cried out. He instructed Seid to treat Burns too.

Seid pressed the scorching knife against Burns's flesh. Too sick even to tense, the sailor cried out, “God, have mercy upon me.” Unable to watch this senseless torture, Riley begged to be allowed to go down to the beach to search for mussels, but Seid refused him and pressed the blade to Burns's flesh again, seemingly oblivious to his cries.5

After the treatment was over, the Arabs fed the sailors lhasa and allowed them to sleep under a tent. In the morning, Hamet and Burns were still weak. The honey gorging had left them all suffering from dysentery. Little understood at the time, dysentery, also known as bloody flux, caused inflamed intestines, griping pains, and diarrhea. It could be deadly, “especially if there be a malignant fever,” wrote a contemporary medical expert, “and then it kills in seven, nine, or fourteen days.” Bees would be identified as carriers of dysentery in 1816. But dysentery from drinking impure water would be the bane of most explorers of Africa. Among others, the Scotsman Hugh Clapperton would die from it in 1827 on his second journey to find the source of the Niger.

Perhaps the only thing worse than dysentery was the common treatment for it: “first to bleed, then to vomit with ipecacuanha, afterwards to purge with rhubarb, and last of all to give astringents.” A cathartic, such as calomel or castor oil, and opium were often prescribed as well, along with various regional therapies. English soldiers suffering dysentery in Ireland were said to be cured by a “fungous substance between the lobes of a walnut” mixed with wine. In the East Indies, medics used an extract of saffron. Lacking any such substances, the Commerces were spared such regimens. They could only endure and worry that the painful voiding of fluids, including blood, might kill them by intensifying their dehydration.6

There was no chance to rest and recuperate. As they moved on, Hassar again traveled separately, taking most of the camels and attempting to divert attention from the others. The sailors, the Bou Sbaa, and a pair of Hassar's men set off along a section of coast frequently broken by sea-bound gullies, which they had to cross. Finally, they reached one so steep that it was impassable.

Before long they found a route down to the sea and a strip of beach, no more than ten yards wide, running north as far as they could make out. Heedless of the Arabs, Riley waded into the cold water and let it wash over him. It had been two months since he had bathed. Under the salt water, his skin, both scorched and new, and his flesh wounds roared back to life. Hamet, fearful of the undertow, shouted at him angrily to get out of the water and admonished him and the others to stay on land.

The sailors, on foot, followed the three Bou Sbaa riding camels up the beach. After about four miles, as they rounded a bend, four burly men with muskets and scimitars suddenly broke from the shadows of the bluffs and dashed in front of the camels. As they did, the Bou Sbaa drew their guns and dropped from their saddles.

Despite his illness, Hamet took the lead. He faced the bandits with his gun at his shoulder and trained on them. “Is it peace?” he demanded.

The bandit chief, a huge man, lowered his musket, sheathed his scimitar, and stepped forward. “It is peace,” he said, with a foul-toothed grin, holding out his hand. Warily, Hamet took it. The bandit gripped Hamet's hand tightly, slowly increasing the pressure until it was crushing. He would not let go. As they glared at each other, locked together, he raised his heavy musket with one mighty hand, as easily as if it were a dagger, and wrapped his finger around the trigger. Before he could level it, however, Hassar's two men, who had fallen back, came running around the bend. Each had a musket raised and ready to fire.

The bandit leader saw them just before reaching the point of no return. Releasing Hamet's hand with a stage laugh, he made as if he were just pretending to give him a friendly scare. Not having an overwhelming force, Hamet pretended not to take offense.

After an awkward few moments, the bandits backed off, and Hamet's party continued up the beach. The bandits trailed them, watching for an opportunity, hoping to pick off a straggling slave. Hamet ordered Riley to keep his men tight on the heels of the camels and jockeyed into position between the bandits and the sailors. Without the benefit of surprise or overwhelming power, the bandits now did not dare directly start a skirmish. Instead, they stalked along the beach, hurling heavy stones, which Riley estimated at six to eight pounds, at them, shattering some against the cliff face.

When Hamet's group reached the end of the beach, they climbed to the surface of the desert. Hamet was shaken by the ambush and the manner of their escape, the last-second reprieve provided by Hassar's men. He had gotten out of tough scrapes by small miracles before, but never, he believed, had he seen Allah's hand at work so clearly. “Those were cutthroats,” he said to Riley. “They would have murdered me and Seid, and they would have taken you to where you would have had no hope of ever seeing your homes and your families again— if Allah had not sent us the men.” He paused. There was something else on his mind. “Would you fight to save my life?” he asked Riley.

“I would,” Riley replied, in his usual direct way. “No one will kill you while I am alive if it is in my power to prevent it.”

Hamet was not surprised by this answer. In fact, given what the captain had survived already, and his conduct toward his men, Hamet believed him to possess a certain baraka. “Good Riley, you are worth fighting for,” he declared. “Allah is with you, or I would have been killed back there.”

Near dark, as they marched on to their rendezvous with Hassar, they passed a man riding a donkey loaded with numerous large fish. The fish resembled the plump salmon the Connecticut River was famed for in those days, Riley observed longingly, and they weighed ten pounds apiece. As Phineus, whose food was spoiled by the Harpies, knew, having no food where there was none was painful, but seeing it and being denied it was torment. Riley asked Sidi Hamet to buy a fish, suggesting it would be good for Burns's health. Hamet agreed, but the man, probably a servant or else a provider for someone who would not be scanted, refused to part with even a single fish at any price, infuriating the Arabs nearly as much as it disappointed the sailors.

They soon arrived at Hassar's camp on a hill near the cliffs. This was a curious positioning. Camps on the Sahara, especially along the windy coast, tended to be made at the base of a hill, in a depression in the desert floor, or behind any other natural fortress that would shield them from the sandy wind and where there was more likely to be forage for the camels. The site Hassar chose seems to indicate that the group was now more concerned about having a defensible position than going unnoticed, which was perhaps impossible anyway. Hamet warned Riley that there were many brigands in the area and that they should not wander from camp for any reason.

Not long afterward, Seid, Abdallah, and two of Hassar's men left camp with their muskets. They were gone about two hours. Later, when Hamet, Hassar, and his men heard footsteps approaching the hill, they rose in alarm, taking up their weapons.

It was Seid and his companions. Smugly, they opened a blanket revealing four of the large fish Riley had seen earlier. Despite the fact that they did not eat fish, which some Arabs believed caused lunacy, they had robbed the intractable fishmonger. “Riley, are these good to eat?” Hamet asked suspiciously. Riley replied that they were. “Take them and eat them,” Hamet told him, “but be careful not to choke on the bones.”

Riley sliced up three of the fish, put them in a pot with water, and made soup. Since none of the Arabs would eat the fish, the sailors had all they wanted without worrying about their meal being snatched away. The meal filled them and eased their dysentery, a relief for Savage particularly, who was in great pain and nearly debilitated by cramps. But even the desert's purlieus seemed to give nothing without exacting a price. That night the Americans slept soundly within a ring formed by the Arabs and the camels, but setting off just after daybreak, they found themselves desperately thirsty from the fish and with nothing to drink. Hassar again took the women and children on one route, and the rest of the men traveled together for speed and stealth off the main route.

Around noon Hamet's band came to a massive stone-and-lime cistern. Riley estimated it to be eighty feet long, ten feet wide, and about twenty feet deep. Covered by a vaulted top four feet off the ground, it was supplied with water by aqueducts from the nearby hills. The Arabs told the sailors that the cistern was the gift of a rich and pious man. It could still provide water even after a year without rain, water considered sacred and consecrated for the use of people only. Camels were kept away, a thing unheard of anywhere else. But Christians were not forbidden. Eager to slake their fish thirst, the sailors drank their fill.

They continued to journey along the coast, separated from the sea by a row of dunes, but here deep gullies from the now-dry mountain torrents blocked their route, adding frequent tedious ascents and descents. Though the going was slower, the sailors were encouraged to be entering settled regions. They were in the land of the Shilluh, or southern Berbers, ruled by Sidi Hashem, rich in cattle, wheat, and beeswax. Flocks of sheep and goats of the finest breeds grazed on remote mountain plateaus. Hashem's camels were renowned for their docility and endurance. These were the fruits of his thriving commerce with the south and an annual market in the village Hamet a Moussa that attracted traders from across the region and beyond.

At two walled towns, on hilltops surrounded by prickly-pear bushes and tilled land, men plowed fields of brittle dirt behind peculiar teams: one cow and one donkey. Women fetched the household goods, transporting bundles of wood on their backs and urns of water on their shoulders, all from some distance. Many carried children as well.

While Hashem's people were relatively well off, they showed none of the open generosity of the friendly Sahrawi tribes the sailors had encountered. They were inwardly focused and suspicious of outsiders. Dupuis made them out to be much worse, calling the Shilluh a people capable of “despicable treachery and murder, not merely against Christians . . . but even against Mohammedan travellers who have the impudence to pass through their country without having previously secured the protection of one of their chiefs” (Robert Adams, p. 183).

In the afternoon, Hamet's party came upon a walled village near the road. Outside its fifteen-foot walls, heaps of dried thornbush taller than a man protected a series of gardens. They hoped to get at least a drink of water, but the villagers would not open their gate. The band plugged on, at dusk entering a valley overlooked by two more walled villages. A stream irrigated an oasis of gardens. Turnips, onions, and cabbages grew, protected by borders of thornbush, fig, and pomegranate trees and stone walls. These villagers shunned them as well, refusing even cursory hospitality to the travelers. Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah were stung by the irony that on the wild desert, where people had virtually nothing, they shared freely, but here, where resources were comparatively abundant, no one would offer them so much as a drink. They cursed the callous behavior of these unworthy Muslims.7

Certain that word of their arrival was rippling through the territory, they moved as rapidly as possible to keep ahead of trouble and considered themselves fortunate not to encounter any armed guard that day or the following morning. After crossing three dry riverbeds, they reached another that was blocked by sand, forming a small pool. Berber villagers who had gathered there to fill skins and urns and to water livestock eyed the company of Arabs and white men with guarded curiosity and evident mistrust.

It was in the afternoon that they heard the first strains of danger. As ten horsemen raced across a plain to confront them, their spurs jingled shrilly on their stirrups. Their cries—“Hah! Hah! Hah!”— indicated that they meant business, and that it was urgent. They headed straight for Hamet and his ragtag band of travelers, who had added another member with two camels during the day, making six Arabs. As the riders neared, the six dismounted and drew their guns from the sheaths on their camels, five double-barreled muskets in all. Moroccan gunpowder was notoriously unreliable, and they reprimed their guns while forming a line in front of the sailors.

The riders came on at full speed. At ten yards' distance, Riley thought they were not going to stop, that they were going to simply ride right over them. Hamet and his men had their guns trained and their fingers pressed on the triggers.

Five yards from the group, the riders lurched to a halt.

“Who are you?” the lieutenant demanded of Hamet. “Where did you come from? What country are these slaves from? Where did you find them? Do you know Sidi Hashem?”