Skeletons On The Zahara (32 page)

“Go and sleep till morning, and then you must write a letter to your friend, which we will carry,” he continued. “If your friend will fulfill your engagements and pay the money for you and your men, you shall be free; if not, you must die for having deceived me. Your men will be sold for what they will bring.”

On this matter, Riley did not doubt Sidi Hamet's word.

Valley of the Locusts

Archie Robbins supposed that marking the days with a knotted string had demonstrated some trifle of optimism. By it he knew at least roughly the date— it was the end of the first week in November— and the number of days of his captivity, fifty-nine. His crude calendar had served to remind him how long he had endured the ordeal but also that there would be an end to it. It had allowed him to live to a degree in the time frame of his former life, the one he had planned to return to just as soon as possible. But now, on the brooding, wind-whipped shore, time seemed to stand still. Living in the monotony and squalor of the seminomadic fishermen, his hopes of escape ceased, and he tossed his knotted string into the fire.

In the desert, he had seen only flies and scorpions, but wildlife teemed on the littoral. As the clear, cold Atlantic waters, rich in minerals and phytoplankton, upwelled in the tropical sun near the coast, they exploded into life. Fish of every imaginable sort fed along the shores on the abundant sea plants and creatures. Dogfish even hurled themselves onto the beach to scoff sand crabs and then wriggled back to sea. Pelicans, cranes, flamingos, and hundreds of other bird species converged on the sand islands to feed on the fish.

Compared with what was inland, the seaboard was a veritable garden, providing enough forage for the donkeys, mules, and goats, and an abundance of fish, or l'hoot, to eat or to trade with the Arabs, Berbers, and black Africans who came and went. Yet even with the traffic, it had a blind-alley feel about it, which terrified Robbins. With fish so plentiful they were even dried and used for firewood, this was a place one did not necessarily have to leave.

This stretch of rocky capes, sandy spits, and islets, now the northwest corner of Mauritania, was once an estuary when the Atlantic covered part of the Sahara. When the water receded, it left a fluctuating shoreline of mudflats and seagrass meadows next to a seabed only ten feet deep for fifteen miles out. To sailors, these shallows, called the Arguin Banks, were an infamous navigational hazard. Plenty of seamen had perished on them. Few ever saw them as Robbins now did, from the inside looking out.

“Stationary Arabs,” Imraguen, and others inhabited the coast and fished on a semipermanent basis, with the greatest number present from August to April, when the schools of mullet came close to shore to feed. The Arab nomads abhorred the sea, and the dominant tribes forced submissive ones— those who had been defeated in battle or who had sought protection from their enemies— to fish for them, exacting periodic tributes of roe, fish-head oil, and dried fish, as well as livestock. This was a life of drudgery, without honor, for these vassals were not allowed to keep camels, the measuring stick of the Arab nomad. Nor did they have tents, the other essential possession of the Arab nomad, or guns, which were forbidden them. Instead, they lived in immobile lean-tos, defended themselves with knives and scimitars, and kept goats and donkeys, which survived on the seaweed and ragged bushes along the bay shores. The goats gave them milk, and the donkeys allowed them to haul fresh water from their wells to their huts.

They at least had the advantage of an ample food supply. Robbins's owner, Meaarah, passed him around to various of these stationary Arabs, who employed him in fishing. The first fed him plenty of l'hoot, the size of “mackerel, nearly the colour of our salmon trouts, of the most delicious flavor, and very fat,” Robbins noted. For the first time since arriving on the desert, he found himself gaining rather than shedding pounds.

Several days after leaving the fishing village, Meaarah returned and questioned Robbins. “Soo-mook entar?” he asked. What is your name? Like Ganus, Meaarah pronounced it “Robbinis.” “Where are you from?” Robbins claimed he was “Inglesis.” “Is Inglesis better than Fransah?” his master asked. Robbins answered that they were both “bono.”

Meaarah asked if he had a father and mother, brothers and sisters, a wife and children. Lying, Robbins replied yes to each, hoping to play on Meaarah's feelings, a feat that in the Arab world “cannot be more readily done,” according to Robbins, “than by talking of wives and children.”

“We will go to Swearah,” Meaarah promised, but he did not say when.

Meaarah now attached Robbins to a group of fishermen heading to what Robbins called the outer bay, formed by the cape that made the inner bay and an island in the ocean close to the shore. There the fishing was even better than near the village.

Neither the Imraguen nor the Arabs had boats. They fished, as their ancestors had, along the shore with nets made of twined seagrass. The men started at low tide, crossing over the spit of land to the outer water, carrying with them their gear, mainly nets, firewood for cooking, and a skin of water. Loaded with the gear, Robbins labored across seven miles of deep, soft sand to reach the spit of land. Frequently sinking to his knees and stopping to rest, he became, he recalled, “an object of their scorn.”

Each fisherman had as his prized possession his own tightly meshed seine with floats on the top and weights on the bottom. Any number of these nets were attached together to make one big net. Six-foot poles were inserted through the meshes at the ends, and two men walked together into the water to their armpits, holding the poles. They then moved in opposite directions, letting out the net as they went.

After they had extended the net fully, other men churned the water with threshing-poles, driving the fish into it as the two men holding the ends circled around and closed together. Their cohorts “then enter the circle made by the seine,” Robbins reported, “and continue to thresh the water, until they suppose they have gilled all the fish.” Afterward each man claimed his own net. The fish caught in it were his.

As the sun set, the men retired to their camp on the beach, cooking and eating their fill of fish. Robbins refused to learn the work of a fisherman's slave, feigning ignorance of the chores they tried to teach him, fumbling the tackle and tangling their nets. The fishermen despised him for his obstinacy and stupidity and “found,” according to Robbins, “that the small benefit they derived from my labor cost more than it would fetch.” As a result, he did not share fully in the mealtime bounty.

Returning to camp after two days, Robbins carried a load of fish. When he and the fishermen he was with saw a party of Arabs approaching them, they hid the catch. As they neared one another, Robbins could see that there was also a white man among them. To his astonishment, Robbins soon found himself embraced by James Barrett.

Both men had given up hope of ever seeing any more of their shipmates. Robbins was especially surprised at Barrett's appearance: he too had managed to put on weight. For the last three weeks, Barrett explained, he had been living at a fishing outpost about seven miles up the coast and eating as much fish as he wanted. His master's brother had stolen him and taken him out onto the desert, but he had now been reclaimed and was on his way back to his master's village.

Robbins was elated to hear from Barrett that Williams, who had been near death when Robbins last saw him, was still alive. He had recovered to a considerable degree and was in good spirits again. Barrett's master also owned Williams, and, he told Robbins, despite his efforts, he was convinced their master would never sell either of them. “I cannot conceive why the cursed creatures want to keep me,” he said. “I am not the least service to them.”

“That is the great grounds of my hope too,” Robbins told Barrett. “Be as useless as possible, ignorant and obstinate. This only will induce them to carry us to Mogadore.”

The meeting was over in a short time. Robbins bade farewell to Barrett. He would never see him again.

Back at camp, the fish were slit open, gutted, “gashed . . . cross-wise,” and laid out to dry in the sun. In the arid heat of the Sahara, they needed neither salt nor smoke to preserve them. “The rays of the sun are so powerful,” Robbins reported, “that fresh meat and fresh fish are dried so suddenly that putrefaction is always prevented.”

Robbins was no longer starving, but after five days in the fishing village, he was despondent. The thought of remaining a fisherman's slave in the reek of drying mullet and the saline haze of seaside campfire smoke was more than he could bear. Worse, Meaarah was planning on leaving him again. Robbins pleaded with his master to take him with him. Meaarah agreed.

The next day, Robbins helped Meaarah pack his camel with fish, and they set off to the southeast at dawn. They traveled all day on the camel, passing from the littoral dunes to the small inland ones with scruffy, sparse bushes. Sixty miles from the fish camp, they reached Meaarah's tents. His family rushed out to greet them. His wife, Fatima, and daughters, Tilah and Murmooah, pawed Robbins affectionately, delighted that Meaarah had returned with a Christian slave. His son, Adullah, and brother, Mid-Mohamote, also tried to make Robbins feel welcome. Unlike the Bou Sbaa, these Arabs wore robes made of the finest cloth. The women's hair was braided with beautiful shells and wrapped in blue turbans.

In a festive mood, the Delim fed their new slave generous servings of fish and zrig, while they too ate as if the supplies were endless. Knowing all too well how they would suffer later after squandering this ration of food, Robbins became irritated by their profligacy. The nomad celebration also reminded him that it was nearly Thanksgiving in Connecticut, and his imagination wandered to his parents' home, a place as different from this as sod from sand.

In his mind he saw his friends and family gathered around the table laden with the bounty of the Lower Valley. “I could see the eyes of parents, beaming with benignity upon their visiting children, blessing heaven for the gift of them, as well as for the luxuries that loaded their hospitable board, rendering thanks that they had been blessed 'in their basket and in their store,' and that they had been preserved once more to form the happy family.”

Nothing could have made him feel farther from home than the alien joy of these desert dwellers. “My heart,” he said, “was near bursting at this recollection.”

In the morning and over the next six days, Robbins learned much about these Delim. They were more advanced than the Bou Sbaa he had known. Compared with them, Meaarah was a wealthy man. His tent and the others in his friq were much more lavish, and his blankets were of a superior quality. A female slave from Guinea served them domestically. The women spent hours each day grooming their hair with needles and fish oil, fastening on the shells.

Meaarah supported a spiritual adviser and teacher, named Mahomet, who taught the children how to read and write using passages from the Quran. He was strict, and the lessons, which took place for three hours in the morning and three more in the evening, were solemn, since they dealt with sacred words. Robbins, who had seen no books at all among the Bou Sbaa, was fascinated by Mahomet's ancient tomes, with their strange alphabet, and by the fact that they were written from right to left and read from back to front, epitomizing so singularly the gulf between his culture and theirs. Mahomet indulged Robbins's curiosity and never stopped proselytizing to the kelb en-Nasrani, urging him to join them in daily prayers. Robbins refused, having come to the conclusion that it was a “sacrilege to offer up worship to a prophet whose followers shew so little of humanity in their practice.”

Fatima's brother, Illa-Mecca, and their mother, also Fatima, lived in a tent nearby. Meaarah owned sixty-eight camels, half a dozen of them in milk, and Illa-Mecca kept them. With so many to feed on scattered bushes in the hills and dunes, he needed all the help he could get. Meaarah appointed Robbins.

After the prayers, Robbins accompanied Illa-Mecca out to the drove of camels. While he performed his chores willingly around camp, he refused to be taught to tend the camels, just as he had refused to learn to fish. Anything that would enhance his value to them would, he believed, lengthen his servitude. The more useless he was, he reasoned, the sooner they would trade him, and the more likely he would be to find his way to redemption.

Not surprisingly, Robbins frustrated and angered Illa-Mecca. Finally, Meaarah, who while in this place mostly stayed in camp enjoying the pleasures of his tent, accompanied them out to the herd and tried to teach Robbins how to tend to the camels. They climbed to the tops of hills, spotted strays, and then drove them back in. Robbins ran beside his master like a faithful retriever, but when Meaarah instructed him to continue doing it on his own, he feigned incomprehension. Meaarah finally gave up, convinced that Robbins was incapable.

After six days, the family packed up their tents. They traveled to the east for eight days, at about forty miles a day, into the interior of the desert, crossing vast empty plains interspersed with rocky hills and shallow valleys of sand and stone. The region was similar to where Robbins had been before but more heavily populated. Encountering other nomads with large droves of camels, Meaarah and Fatima were treated with great deference as they shared news and sometimes a meal with other Arabs.

When they reached a vast stretch of dunes, the family was pleased, revealing their genuine affinity for sand.1 To celebrate, they slaughtered a camel that night, gorged, and then dried the meat in the sun the next day. They turned northeast now, crossing the dunes, and four days later reached a small valley with a pool of fresh water from a recent rain. The pool had attracted nomads from all around. Tents belonging to both Oulad Bou Sbaa and Oulad Delim—“these two tribes, at this time, being at peace with each other,” Robbins noted— surrounded the pool. Among the other group, Robbins discovered to his delight William Porter.