Skeletons On The Zahara (33 page)

Porter had recovered from the headache and the medicinal bleeding that had made him so low. He had been given a steady diet of camel's milk and was looking strong again. His eyesight had improved too. In his memoir Robbins recorded little of their meeting in the deep desert other than the fact that Porter had lost track of time and was eager to know the date. Robbins, who had abandoned his calendar string, could only give him his best guess.

All sense of time and order now took a death blow anyway as a great tide of locusts, or yerada, as the Arabs call them, rolled into their valley, filling the sky with their whirring bodies and obscuring the sun. When they landed, the three-inch-long russet insects carpeted the land, devouring every bush and sprig of new growth from the recent rains and sounding, according to Robbins, like “small pigs eating grain.”

To him, it was a nightmarish vision of Old Testament death and destruction. Though he was familiar with the biblical portrayal of these pests as the eighth plague, brought down on Egypt for refusing to let the Israelites go, he was perhaps unaware of a lesser-known passage from Leviticus, 11:22: “you may eat: the locust according to its kind, the bald locust according to its kind.” In Matthew, John the Baptist lives on locusts and wild honey in the wilderness. But Robbins was stunned by the Arabs' enthusiastic reception for insects he associated only with calamity.

“From the days of Moses to this time, [locusts] have been considered by Jews and Mahometans as the most severe judgment which heaven can inflict upon man,” he commented. “But whatever the Egyptians might have thought in ancient days, or the Moors and Arabs in those of modern date, the Arabs who are compelled to inhabit the desert of Zahara, so far from considering a flight of locusts as a judgment upon them for their transgressions, welcome their approach as the means, sometimes, of saving them from famishing hunger.”

In the heat of day, the locusts swarmed from place to place in ominous waves, but the cool November nights stilled them, and the Sahrawis easily harvested as many as they wanted. The bugs were attracted to the pool of water, and at night everyone living with Meaarah except Fatima and the two youngest children eagerly collected them in sacks. Robbins, who was again living on a diet of zrig and snails, wrote that he “declined this employ, and retired to rest under the large tent.” Whether Meaarah realized that he was too exhausted and weak to help, or all were in such high spirits over the ready food that Robbins's participation was optional, he does not say, but Meaarah's charitable attitude toward him was about to end.

Robbins called this place “the Valley of the Locusts.” The family harvested fifteen bushels of the insects in one night. They cooked only live ones, first digging a deep pit and building a fire in the bottom. After the blaze heated the pit, they removed the coals. Then they emptied a bag of the insects into the earth oven, shaking the bag vigorously to get them all out, and gathering around close to toss sand on them to keep them from flying away. Once the pit was filled with locusts and sand, they built another fire on top. They roasted about five bushels in each pit, digging three pits one after another to cook them all while they were still alive.

When the locusts had cooled enough to touch, they pulled them out of the sand and spread them on tent cloth to dry in the sun for several days. They had to guard them continually during the day to prevent new swarms of live locusts from landing on the dead ones and devouring them.

Robbins and Porter learned to eat the insects, breaking off the head, wings, and legs and chewing up the body. Although the pair found the bugs unappetizing, they craved the nutrition; about twelve ounces of locusts would provide each of them with his daily protein needs, as well as vitamins A and D, phosphorus, calcium, and potash. For a few days, the Delim had an unlimited supply of locusts to eat, which was fortunate since it took about two hundred of them to add up to an edible twelve ounces, and Porter and Robbins had the previous months of deficiency to make up for as well. Most of the locusts were flattened and packed into bags and skins. These the Arabs would later pulverize in mortars and mix with water to make what Robbins called “a kind of dry pudding.”

Despite this new source of nourishment, Robbins let his fatigue get the better of him at the wrong moment during the locust harvest. When Meaarah told him to carry a goatskin of water to the tent, Robbins hoisted the heavy skin onto his back and lugged it over. Swinging the bloated skin around to set it down, he lost control of it. The skin fell to the ground and burst. Meaarah erupted in anger. He had had enough of Robbins's incompetence. He grabbed an ax, cocked it back, and dashed at Robbins. At the last moment, Fatima stepped in front of him and deflected the blow. If she had not been there, Robbins believed, Meaarah would have taken his head off. The incident seemed to transform his master. From then on, Meaarah lost all sympathy for Robbins and began to treat him with “systematic cruelty.”

At the same time, the teacher Mahomet began pressing Robbins all the harder to renounce Christianity, reviling him for being an eater of pork. He considered “a hog as possessed of the devil, and those who eat it as possessed of him also,” noted Robbins. Mahomet tried to entice him to convert to Islam with promises of “wealth, and power, and wives upon earth, and eternal felicity and sensual enjoyment in paradise with the divine Prophet Mahommed,” but Robbins resisted.

When the water in the basin ran out, the locusts vanished, and the Arabs began to do the same. Robbins had to say good-bye to Porter, a painful separation for both men. Meaarah now led his group to the northwest at a pace that reduced Robbins to the misery he had known under the Bou Sbaa. Walking and riding all day and sleeping under the stars at night, he lost weight and dehydrated. The chafing of his skin became insufferable. The coarse blanket he wore around his waist and hanging to his knees shredded the flesh on his legs, stripping them bare. Night offered him little relief. “After sleeping upon the sand for several hours, and rising upon my legs,” Robbins wrote, “the blood gushed out of my excoriated and dried flesh.”

Ten days after leaving the Valley of the Locusts, they crossed the St. Cyprian wadi, reaching the coast just north of Cape Barbas. Robbins had come full circle, in more ways than one. Neglected by Meaarah, he found his health had begun to deteriorate. It would continue to decline over the next month, until Robbins hit his lowest state since arriving on this shore in the longboat. His diet of hard-boiled blood and locusts made him severely costive. “I was completely dried up; and the skin was contracted and drawn tight around my bones,” he said. The combination of his chafing clothes and sleeping on the hardpan had rubbed the skin and flesh off his hips so that he could touch his hipbones on both sides. He was “now literally reduced to a skeleton.”

The end, one way or another, seemed near.

A Slow Rush to Swearah

Sheik Ali

Was God with Riley? Or was that just a wishful conceit that he and Sidi Hamet shared? Clearly these two men from different cultures and different religions drew the conclusion that a divine power was watching out for the captain. Hamet had risked everything he owned on Riley and his men, when he could have already sold them at a profit with much less risk or hardship. Instead, he had fought even his own brother to secure the independence of this Christian, a man in whom he recognized great integrity and who he came to believe was blessed by Allah. Despite their differences, Riley and Hamet both believed in a higher being, whether called God or Allah, and found unity in his presence in their relationship. Still, they were engaged in a dangerous transaction for earthly rewards— freedom and fortune— and both dreaded failure.

Riley had, in fact, reached a physical, mental, and moral crisis. He spent the night before Hamet and the old man, Sidi Mohammed, were to depart for Swearah in “a state of anxiety not easy to conceive.” Having bluffed his way this far north, he now had to produce real evidence that he had not been lying all along. “To whom should I write?” he fretted. “The Englishman Renshaw, who might or might not still be there? I know no one at Mogadore.” And what should he say to procure the aid of whoever received the letter?

Riley recollected the vivid dream he had had the night the Arabs held a council to divvy up the sailors. To this point, the dream had proved true. He had survived all the hardships the desert had thrown at him. He had to keep faith: it was all he had.

Early in the morning, the Arabs woke the sailors and drove them inside Sidi Mohammed's gates. Riley was groggy from the sleepless night outside, but he was determined to persuade Hamet to allow him to go to Swearah too. “Come, write a letter,” the Bou Sbaa enjoined him, handing him a ragged piece of paper, eight inches long and the width of his palm, and a reed with some inky black liquid.

Riley hesitated only slightly. He looked his good master in the eye. “Sidi Hamet, please take me with you,” he said, “I beg you, sir. I will leave my son, whom I love with my whole heart, here as a hostage, as well as my three men.” The boy was still recovering from Seid's abuse.

“I cannot,” Hamet replied emphatically. “It is useless to plead.” The decision had been made that he and Sidi Mohammed would travel on alone. Hamet had another serious matter to discuss, and he changed the subject. “Rais, the amount that you have agreed to pay is not enough,” he said. “You must tell your friend, in the letter, to pay two hundred dollars for yourself, two hundred for Horace, and two hundred again for your mate Aaron. For your men Burns and Clark, one hundred and sixty dollars each. You have promised me a double-barreled gun, and you must give one to Seid too,” he continued. “He is a hard man, but he has helped save your life.”

Hamet's tone convinced Riley not to argue. He had learned that when two Arabs disagreed on a course of action, he could potentially affect the outcome in his favor, but when two Arabs agreed on a plan, there was nothing a Christian could do to change it. Hamet had obviously struck a deal with Seid and Sidi Mohammed and there was no reversing it now. Riley took the pen, steadied his hand, and began to scrawl the letter that would determine his and his shipmates' fate:

Sir,

The brig Commerce from Gibraltar for America, was wrecked on Cape Bajador, on the 28 August last;

Suspecting that at best his letter would fall into the hands of an Englishman and not knowing what degree of assistance he might expect so soon after the war, he deliberately worded it so as to make his own nationality obscure. When the small crowd of Arabs who had gathered around saw him write Arabic numerals, they were amazed. Since Hamet and Seid denied teaching him, one of them suggested that Riley must have been a slave before, a smart and helpful one, and had thus been taught by his former master despite laws that forbade it.

With the Arabs gazing on intently, he continued:

myself and four of my crew are here nearly naked in barbarian slavery: I conjure you by all the ties that bind man to man, by those of kindred blood, and every thing you hold most dear, and by as much as liberty is dearer than life, to advance the money required for our redemption, which is nine hundred and twenty dollars, and two double barrelled guns: I can draw for any amount, the moment I am at liberty, on Batard, Sampson, & Sharp, London— Cropper & Benson, Liverpool— Munroe & Burton, Lisbon, or on Horatio Sprague, Gibraltar. Should you not relieve me, my life must instantly pay the forfeit. I leave a wife and five helpless children to deplore my death.

Eager to set off, Hamet looked over Riley's shoulder and hurried him. After establishing his commercial relations, Riley insisted on another scrap to write on. When it was produced, he saw that it was part of a Spanish bill of lading. He continued writing:

My companions are Aaron R. Savage, Horace Savage, James Clark, and Thomas Burns. I left six more in slavery on the desart. My present master, Sidi Hamet, will hand you this, and tell you where we are— he is a worthy man. Worn down to the bones by the most dreadful of all sufferings— naked and a slave, I implore your pity, and trust that such distress will not be suffered to plead in vain. For God's sake, send an interpreter and a guard for us, if that is possible. I speak French and Spanish.

James Riley, late Master and Supercargo of the brig Commerce.

Riley folded up his note. He was unwilling to gamble on addressing it only to Renshaw. Consuls came and went. He could not risk having Hamet think his friend was abroad, even temporarily. As for the hope of finding an American representative there, it was unlikely. America's poorly funded, extemporary network often used merchants from other nations as agents, some of whom were not even permanently based in the port they served. Unsure even of which nations kept consuls in Mogadore, let alone who might be present at the time, he addressed it to the “English, French, Spanish, or American consuls, or any Christian merchants in Mogadore or Swearah.”

Rightly figuring that they were in a race against time and fate, Sidi Hamet and Sidi Mohammed sped off to the east on mules. Others more powerful than they had divined that the Christian slaves were in the village and had begun scheming to take them. A steady parade of curiosity seekers from the village— Moorish and black Arabs armed with long knives or scimitars and their black slaves— came to the yard where Seid and Bo-Mohammed kept watch. One Arab, grabbing a button on Savage's pants, demanded, “Button, cut it wit a nif,” startling the Americans, who had not met an Arab who spoke English, but it was all he could say in English other than a few profanities. While the villagers sat on a mat observing them, the sailors kept to the shade as far as possible, sitting in the unavoidable manure of cattle, sheep, and donkeys. As promised, they were allowed to drink as much water and eat as much as they wanted, barley bread twice daily and lhasa once. Still, they remained weak, all suffering from dysentery and severe hemorrhoids. “Our bowels seemed to ferment like beer,” Riley said, “and we were tortured with cholics.” While their skin healed in delicate patches, their wild hair, bushy beards, and filthy clothes harbored lice, which became a constant irritant.