Skeletons On The Zahara (38 page)

Bel Cossim played his hand coolly. “Now that you have stopped me and my Christian slaves against the laws of justice and hospitality and kept us here this long,” he told the sheik, “I have no desire to move them, until Sidi Hamet arrives and proves that you have done wrong in detaining us.” Ali and Ibrahim insisted that the men would be safer and happier in Agadir, where they might find a doctor as well. Bel Cossim gradually allowed himself to be talked into the journey, consenting to it only under the conditions that a guard of Ibrahim's men accompany them and that Ali provide all the sailors with riding camels. Ali agreed and left to make arrangements.

Under the direction of bel Cossim, the sailors spent much of the night preparing for the journey. They killed the last chickens, boiled the remaining eggs, and packed these away. At daybreak, five camels awaited them, all with better saddles than any the sailors had used in the desert, as well as bags of barley and empty ten-bushel sacks made of tent cloth. This gave them both more padding and something to hold on to as they rode. Each camel was accompanied by his master, who would serve as a guide, leading the beast on foot for the entire journey.

As the camels stood up with their riders, first the hind legs rising, then the forelegs, in their awkward way, Riley was thrown head over feet off the backside of an enormous beast, nearly ten feet tall. He had the good luck to land on his heels, jarring but not injuring himself.

The guides helped Riley back onto his camel, steadying his legs as it rose and imploring him to hold on. His mount's owner told him: “Allah be praised for turning you over. Had you fallen upon your head, these stones must have dashed out your brains; but the camel is a sacred animal, and heaven protects those who ride on him! Had you fallen from an ass, though he is only two cubits and a half high, it would have killed you, for the ass is not so noble a creature as the camel and the horse.”3

The group left Shtuka in a hurry, accompanied now by Moulay Ibrahim, heading northeast across a broad, fertile plain shaped like a long compass needle, with its base at the sea and pointing northeast between the Atlas and Anti-Atlas. The mountains towered above them at more than twelve thousand feet. Ibrahim had discreetly deployed two hundred men on horses along their route. The guard shadowed the caravan, only occasionally coming into sight.

Other than Oued Souss, with its mouth at Agadir, there were virtually no streams here. The land was dry but fertile. The party passed an increasing number of villages, which were supplied with water by deep wells tapping the subterranean flow from the mountains to the sea. These sat amid grain fields now being plowed, vineyards, and orchards. The argan trees were still green, the figs barren. Riley, who felt strongly the pull of civilization, reveled in the groves of date, almond, orange, and pomegranate trees.

After six hours, the guides running beside the camels the entire time, they came upon another scene of devastation. A mile southwest of the trail, an eerie still life of seven silent villages with breached walls and abandoned battering machines loomed on the plain. A family feud between two of the villages had engulfed them all in a ruinous monthlong war. Bel Cossim, who was from near Agadir, told Riley that feuds were common here. He knew many families in good circumstances caught up in them. “They were seldom finished until one family or the other was exterminated,” he told Riley, “and their names blotted out from the face of the earth.”

Despite this second scene of human folly, Riley found the increasing signs of commerce and cultivation encouraging. By midday the white walls of Agadir— a Berber word meaning “fortified granary”— came into sight at a great distance across the plain. Though much of the land was still barren and lacking in forage for livestock, they saw many people around the small villages busily plowing fields and sowing barley. They passed a continual stream of men in unsoiled haiks, who were refreshingly unarmed. Their droves of camels and asses carried salt, dried fish from the coast, and other merchandise for peaceful trading. A flourishing merchant class working under safe conditions, Riley knew, was a hallmark of all civilized nations during peace.

Still, the landscape— a battleground of the earth's surfaces— embodied instability, and there was something eerie about it. The arable land seemed temporarily borrowed from the craggy Atlas foothills, the snowcapped mountains, the sea that had once covered it, and the sand that still might. Human existence was elemental and tenuous. That afternoon, as they angled toward the coast, they encountered the grasping tentacles of the Sahara— massive sand drifts twenty miles from the sea. The walls and domes of aged saint houses still resisted the tide of “clean coarse beach sand” but only because the locals periodically pushed aside the drifts and tended to their walls. The company passed by the ruins of Rabeah, where Moulay Ibrahim was born. “It was a thriving place,” Ibrahim told Riley, “until the sands toppled over the north wall and swallowed the town within a year.”

They crossed a ten-mile band of high dunes and then came to the steep banks of a wadi that Riley identified as “el Woa Sta,” but was probably Oued Souss or Oued Lahouar, since el Woa Sta, or Oued-i-Sta, lies much farther to the south. Nearly a hundred feet deep in places and perhaps four miles wide, the gorge accentuated the jagged mountains to the east and south of them buttressing the formidable Atlas range towering on the horizon. Even without scientific evidence, from the signs that water once filled much of the lowland and on the grandeur of the mountain range, Riley sensed that this might have once been “one of the fairest portions of the African continent.”

As dark fell on Agadir, Moulay Ibrahim, bel Cossim, Sheik Ali, the sailors of the Commerce, and the company of camel guides and servants quietly entered the lower town, a fishing port at the base of a mountain. A square-walled casbah on a conical hill dominated the bay. The sweet reek of bacalao, or codfish, assailed their nostrils, reminding Riley of previous visits to the Canary Islands, not far to the west of Agadir, where the fishermen sun-dried the catch on their decks. Locals were impervious to the stench, while foreign vessels, unable to bear it, anchored well away. Still, even foreign sailors prized the cod, which Riley praised as “extremely fat and delicate.”

Fishing boats and nets sprawled on the beach, along a bay considered the southernmost anchorage on Morocco's Atlantic coast, with shelter from the east and northeast winds, though Riley quickly perceived that it was too open for a good winter harbor, when the winds would embay ships and drive them on shore. Masts of shipwrecks littered the beach in various stages of being consumed by the rising sand.

The town itself had a long history of boom and bust. The Portuguese had founded it three centuries earlier to tap into the riches of the Saharan caravans and had been driven from its shores by the Moroccans, who later abandoned it, moving many of its merchants north to Swearah. William Lempriere, who visited Agadir around 1790, observed that this former center of European habitation and international trade was then “a deserted town, with only a few houses, which are almost hourly mouldering to decay” (p. 714).

Lempriere might have exaggerated the town's decline. While the sailors took heart in reaching another milestone on the journey, Sheik Ali and Rais bel Cossim planned their next moves. Despite the cover of dark, the large company of men, including foreigners, could hardly go unnoticed, and the streets soon teemed with curious residents, fishermen and fishmongers, and the sons of fishermen and fishmongers, eager to see the Christian slaves or anything that would break the monotony of their daily lives. The Souassa, as people from the Souss region are known, spat on the sailors, heaved sticks and stones at them, and cursed them in Spanish. The greeting “¡Carajo a la mierda le sara, perro y bestias!”— You are lower than the dung of beasts!— stuck in Riley's mind. Bel Cossim, who was born near Agadir, spotted a man he knew. Taking advantage of the maelstrom of unwanted attention, he greeted him warmly in the Arab fashion and spoke to him in furtive tones.

Bel Cossim and the rest of the party made their way from the beach to the back of the town, where they pitched camp by a smithy. Some Souassa prepared baked and boiled fish and couscous for the Arab visitors and gave the leftovers to the sailors; the camels and mules were fed barley. Afterward, bel Cossim discreetly warned Riley to remain alert and told him that he would watch Ali, who he was sure was still plotting against them, and get information from his own allies in town. Despite bel Cossim's concerns, Riley calmly reassured his edgy men that they were now safe in the sultan's territory, just days away from liberation, and urged them to rest up for the final push. They lay down on the ground, curled up in the blankets they had been given, and went to sleep. Riley remained awake.

Just after midnight the Moor returned with bad news. “Sheik Ali has made a deal with the governor,” he whispered to the captain. "They will seize you in the morning and make you pay the ransom Ali demands. If you cannot, he will be allowed to make off with you and return to his stronghold near the desert.

“You must get up now and ride out of town. If you are at least four leagues [about fourteen miles] out of Agadir by sunrise, I believe you will be safe,” he said. “If not, the governor's men will overtake you and bring you back.” Bel Cossim roused the cameleers, who were nearby, and instructed them to prepare the camels.

“The drivers know the road,” he told Riley. “It is very rocky. Tell your men to hold on tight and to use their utmost exertions. In three more days you will be in Swearah with your friend, inshallah. I will join you as soon as I can.”

The sailors mounted the camels, and the guides led them through the town, whispering soothing words to the animals to keep them calm. As they edged their way up along the northward path, the group had to pass right beside the fortress's lower batteries and the old Portuguese fort. For such large beasts, the camels were remarkably quiet on their padded feet. Often noisy growlers, none so much as bellowed or snorted now. Meanwhile, bel Cossim lay down in front of the door to the room where Sheik Ali slept. If the sheik stirred, he would know. Before drifting off, bel Cossim scripted the impending confrontation with Ali.

The sailors and the guides, now in the pay of bel Cossim, rounded Pointe Arhesdis, and rode north above a rocky beach, the crash of the surf below covering their escape. In a transcendent moment, the roar of the waves caused Riley to reflect on the “direful shipwrecks” that were sure to succeed his “and the consequent miseries of the poor mariner driven on this inhospitable coast.” They traveled in silence for two hours, passing Oued Tamrhaght (the Wife's River, in the Tachelhit Berber dialect), a channel that when flowing carries water through a fertile valley and marks what is today the northern border of Souss. About nine miles outside Agadir, they heard the noise that they dreaded, the iron-on-stone clinking of horse or mule riders. While they were at an advantage in that their camels could not be heard at a distance, the hills had blocked out the sound of the approaching riders until they were very close. They had no time and no place to hide.

Suddenly, a large party of men appeared. Riley was momentarily confused, then relieved, then wary: these men were not pursuing them from Agadir but rushing toward it.

Riders at night meant urgency, usually trouble of one sort or another, men prepared to act first and ask questions later. It was too dark for either party to make out the faces of the other. Neither group wished to acknowledge or to be acknowledged by the other. The situation was so tense that a stumble, a sudden move, a glimmer of metal in the starlight could have started a fight. Every man with a weapon gripped it. But Riley, high on his tall camel, perceived something in the passing silhouettes.

On an impulse, he shouted out, “Sidi Hamet!”

“Escoon? Riley?” came the reply. Who is it? Riley?

Sidi Hamet had returned.

The Road to Swearah

The two parties lurched to a halt. Riley followed the sound of Hamet's voice, found him, took his hand, and kissed it. Hamet was equally glad to see the captain. He had spent many uneasy hours in Willshire's cluttered house and in the bustling streets of Swearah worrying about Riley, his son, and the other sailors. Nearby, Sidi Mohammed's ebullience indicated his satisfaction at reuniting with the men they had committed to saving.

As Riley recounted Sheik Ali's actions and warned of the current threat, Hamet shook his head.

“Ali is a bad man,” he said. “He does not fear Allah.”

Hamet told Riley that the sailors must continue on toward Swearah. He would settle affairs with his father-in-law either in Agadir or on the trail. At the least, he would do his best to slow down Ali's pursuit of the sailors. They wasted little time in conversation. Riley met Bel Mooden, another emissary of Willshire's, a short, stout, neatly dressed gray-bearded Moor, who spoke Spanish fluently and listened intently as Riley gave him news of bel Cossim. Without ceremony, Bel Mooden took possession of the sailors and in turn presented the ransom money, entrusted to him by Willshire, to Sidi Hamet.

The camel guides, uncertain of allegiances, remained on guard throughout the midnight meeting— even within these small parties, alliances could shift with the momentum. Under strict orders from bel Cossim, the cameleers urged the party to continue on. As they parted ways once more, Hamet promised Riley that he would see him again. Bel Mooden refused to return to Swearah while his colleague bel Cossim was still within the grasp of Shiek Ali and went with Hamet.

The sailors continued north with the camel guides and with the three muleteers and mules brought by Bel Mooden to help carry them back. Once again, they found themselves in the awkward position of having handlers who could not speak their language, no one who could interpret their problems without a laborious conversation, no one to reassure or encourage them. Having had their hopes raised and dashed more than once, the sailors remained leery of their circumstances. Without Rais bel Cossim or Sidi Hamet, who would defend them if they were confronted by armed Moors or Arabs now?