Skeletons on the Zahara

by Dean King

  That evening, Hamet searched futilely for a sheltered place with forage for the camels. Fifteen hours after setting out, they stopped in a shallow depression that offered neither. "The remaining flesh on our posteriors, and inside of our thighs and legs, was so beat, and literally pounded to pieces, that scarcely any remained," Riley wrote. Their bones "felt as if they had been thrown out of their sockets" by the constant jarring. Crying out in grunts and slurred oaths, the sailors fell from the kneeling camels to their hands and knees. They rose like drunken men and reeled about, joints cracking, trying to regain the use of their legs.

  The Bou Sbaa, using flint to make sparks, started a blaze despite the gusting wind. They roasted about a pound of the dried camel meat and shared it out among the eight men. Living on so little nutrition, with no cushion of fat or fluid in their bodies, the sailors experienced food and drink with biological profundity. Hunger and thirst played a seesaw battle, each tip in the balance sending an acute signal. Even these small portions of charred meat required more liquid for digestion than their bodies had to spare. They ate voraciously; then, inflamed by thirst, they surrounded a staling camel, drank, and were soon famished again. They lay down on the ground, huddling together against a gale. Their bruised muscles ached so badly that Riley compared the agony to the tortures of the medieval rack. Despite their exhaustion, they could not sleep. They were too exposed. A century later, Michel Vieuchange would affirm Riley's experience in simple but compelling words: "The cold nights of the Sahara," he scribbled in his diary. "I suffer from the cold a great deal more than from the sun" (p. 223).

  On the morning of September 30, Riley showed Hamet his bleeding sores and other evidence of the men's deteriorating condition. The Bou Sbaa was genuinely chagrined and a bit mystified at the sailors' infirmity, but he could see with his own eyes that they were not merely grousing. Clark and Burns were flopped on the ground like empty panniers, drained of all energy. Still, they had to move on, Hamet told them. "We should come to good water soon. After that we will not travel so fast."

  As they rode, Riley brooded over the shipmates he had left behind. Robbins's anguish at their separation was indelibly stamped on his heart. Williams he believed would die soon if he had not already. Porter was strong and clever and might survive, and the two Portlanders, Hogan and Barrett, had a fighting chance. Still, for all but Deslisle, the margin between gaining or losing the opportunity to leave the desert had been wafer thin. As for Deslisle, who Robbins said was "esteemed by the crew as a faithful, active cook," he never had a fair chance. Being black in a place where most blacks were slaves, coming from a country where the same was true, and having neither wealth nor a devoted benefactor, he had virtually no hope of escaping slavery on the Sahara or its purlieus.

  After four hours of riding farther to the east, they descended into a vast boxy canyon, a "dreary abyss," according to Riley. After they had driven the camels down the steepest pitch, Hamet sent Seid and Abdallah to search for a spring in the far wall. By the time the others reached the bottom, the two Bou Sbaa had disappeared on a boulder-strewn and pathless floor, which Riley determined, as they picked their way across it, had once been a river or possibly an "arm of the sea." Though the water that had flowed in it was now long gone, the hooves of the camels crunched through a crust of salt, all that remained, he imagined, of an evaporated sea and cruelly reminiscent of a crisp fresh snow.

  Riley was awed by the otherworldliness of the Precambrian bedrock, more than 2.5 billion years old, and the vastness of the chasm, which was eight miles wide in places and ran, by his reckoning, three hundred miles southwest to the coast. As Riley had guessed, the sea had washed over it, and the sea had receded, only to return again in another age, many times over. Each washing had left its layer of marine sediment to become another stratum of rock, some less porous than others and able to trap water. It is said that when rain falls in the western Sahara, a third of it evaporates, a third of it goes to the sea, and a third of it remains underground. Scattered beneath the western Sahara were pockets of trapped water— some vast, many ancient, some extremely deep, others shallow enough to wend through tortuous rifts and bubble to the surface. Occasionally, where the surface floor had sunk to form a canyon, water from one of these pockets seeped through a fault in the vertical wall.

  Following Hamet, the seamen kept the camels in a line. They passed through a smaller, more recent riverbed etched into the larger one but now, like its predecessor, eerily still. The fact that they were heading east, not north, the direction Mogadore lay in, made the sailors anxious. Savage grumbled, and his insinuations lingered like the bitter taste of cotton-mouth.

  As they walked, Hamet motioned for Riley to join him in front. Since leaving the Oulad Brahim, the trader had had time to consider their venture and wished to impress upon el rais the importance of his promise. Hamet and Seid had traded everything they owned for him and his men, he reminded Riley, fixing him with his dark eyes. "Be candid with me, Rais," he said. "Have you been to Swearah?"

  The clever Arab had timed his inquisition well. Hollow eyes in the horned skull of a sun-bleached ram watched them pass. Nearby, the neck of a curled camel skeleton that could not make it up a slope arched back in enduring agony. Riley was as tired, thirsty, hot, and oppressed by the canyon as the others. It was clear that Hamet held their lives in his hands. If he rode off and left them, they would never find the spring. Should Riley come clean to the Arab who had shown that he was a friend? And if he did not, what were the odds that erratic, petulant Savage might give him away at any time?

  Riley was aware that the expression on his face was as crucial as the words he spoke. "I have been to Swearah," he said.

  Hamet, who made his living by reading other men, studied Riley for the merest twitch of guilt. "Are you telling the truth about having a friend who will pay money for you?" he asked.

  "I am, Sidi Hamet."

  "Do you own property in your country? Tell me," Hamet asked, more forcefully. "I am your friend. Allah will deal with you as you deal with me!"

  Riley allowed a reflective instant to pass, a hardly discernible pause, to give these words their due and to allow their power to dissipate. "I have a friend in Swearah," he said calmly, looking Hamet squarely in the eye, "who will advance me any sum of money I need."

  Hamet persisted. So, too, did Riley, although to avoid some specific questions he pretended not to understand. Hamet found one thing in particular hard to believe. "Will you really buy Clark and Burns?" he said. "They are good for nothing."

  "They are my countrymen and my brothers," Riley replied. "I will if you carry us to the Empire of Morocco and to the sultan."

  "No," Hamet answered. "The sultan will not pay for you, but I will carry you to Swearah to your friend. What is his name?"

  "Consul," responded Riley.

  The Arab nodded to indicate that the answer satisfied him. Using his hands, he showed Riley how to count to twenty (ashreen) in Arabic. He produced from his djellaba the seven dollar coins that he and Seid still owned. "Riley, you must pay ten times twenty dollars for yourself and the same for Horace. For the others, ten times ten dollars each. In addition to that, you must pay for all the provisions on the road." The sum was growing, but at this juncture it mattered little to the captain, who agreed without protest. Hamet asked him to point in the direction of Swearah. Riley, who was getting more and more accustomed to communicating with the Arabs, used his knowledge of the coast, the position of the sun, and the direction of the prevailing wind, and pointed correctly just east of north.

  "Now, if you will agree before God the most High to pay what I have stated, in money, and give me a double-barreled gun, I will take you up to Swearah," Hamet concluded, tacking on another reward. "If not, I will carry you off that way," he said, pointing to the southeast, "and sell you for as much as I can get, rather than carry you all the way across this long desert, where we must risk our lives every day for your sakes.

  "And know," he added with chil
ling candor, "that if we get there safely and you cannot comply with your agreement, we must cut your throat and sell your comrades for what they will bring."

  Riley nodded his head in assent, and Hamet took his hand. "You shall go to Swearah," he said, "inshallah."

  It was midafternoon when they finally reached the far side of the canyon, about five miles from where they had entered it. Hamet called, "Hoh, Seid! Hoh, Abdallah!" Their names echoed off the overhanging north wall, which long ago had been undermined by running water. Talus has massed beneath the bluff to three hundred feet, shelving just a hundred feet shy of the canyon rim. Hamet called again as they walked along the base of the scree.

  Finally, they heard the reply: "Hamet, amet, amet!" and Seid appeared from behind some large upright rocks. He and Hamet called back and forth. "Stay," Hamet told Riley. "They have not found it." And he proceeded up the slope on foot to search for the spring while the camels foraged and the sailors rested their heads on stones.

  An hour later, Hamet called down and told Riley to come up, and the captain fumbled his way up the tumult of debris. Worried that his legs would give way, he hoisted himself up between the bigger rocks with his arms. His sores cracked open as he stretched and bent. His hands and wrists quivered under the strain.

  When he finally reached the spot where Hamet stood, he saw nothing but rock and dust. The spring was dry. From the open sea, to the coast, to the desert, and now to the dusty canyon, it had been a steady, mind-boggling descent. At each phase he had thought it could not get worse. But this was the worst place. It appeared their luck had run its course. He began to sob.

  "Look there," said Hamet, pointing through a narrow fissure in the rocks. Riley stared into a dark crevasse. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, he made out a reflection. There was water below. But how would they get to it?

  Hamet indicated a place among some boulders lower down but not far away, where the spring surfaced in a more accessible groove. "Sherub, Riley. Drink," he said. "It is sweet."

  Riley followed a crooked path under and behind boulders fifteen and twenty feet high, then squeezed through a narrow passage along the face of the canyon. He tasted the water—"cool, clear, fresh"— and gave a shout. Soon Burns, Clark, Savage, and Horace were scrambling up the slope. "Where is the water?" they called eagerly. "For God's sake, where is it? Oh, is it sweet?" Yes, it was sweet beyond imagination.

  Not far from where Riley had left him, Robbins surveyed the place where Ganus and three dozen other Arabs had pitched their tents and reckoned it the Valley of the Shadow of Death— only without the benefit of an actual shadow. Its merits consisted of a few feed bushes for the camels and hills to break the wind. Lying in the corner of a sweltering tent, he surrendered to despair, slipped in and out of waking dreams. His subconscious interwove threads of past and present, wefting him to his parents' hearth, to the smell of baking bread and the feel of blackberry jam in his mouth, and warping him back to the unctuous odor of the remaining boiled camel blood in the crown of his hat and the knot in his gut from being left behind.

  He and Ganus had found the family's relocated tents late two nights before. The shock of seeing his shipmates depart had left that long day a grotesque blur. The next morning after dawn prayer, he had learned from Sarah through signs and words that they would not go north until the rainy season, probably January— another blow to his sinking spirits. Under a scorching sun, nearly vertical at noontime, they moved fifteen miles to the east, crossing hills and descending into the southwest end of a broad canyon. They crawled along a dusty rubble floor until, in the late afternoon, they saw three tents in a gully in the canyon's south wall.

  They drove the camels into the gully, where Robbins felt an immediate drop in temperature but not much relief. The Arabs in the tents had invited Ganus and his family to drink and eat with them. Alone, Robbins watched the camels and felt deeply dejected. This and his burning throat drove him, as he watched the Arabs lift the bowl to their mouths and then pass it, to ponder the unthinkable: If he became a Mohammedan, as they were constantly urging him to do, they would always share whatever food and drink they had. Could anything be worse than what he was already experiencing? This thought was interrupted when Ganus waved to him to drive the camels in closer. As he did, a boy pointed to a tent and indicated that one of his shipmates was in it.

  Inside, wearing the remnants of an old coat and trousers hacked off at the knees, was Porter, who greeted Robbins like a lost brother, elated to learn that he was not alone and that another had survived. Robust by nature, Porter was less beaten down than the others. But they had barely exchanged more than a greeting when Ganus had called "Robbinis!" and they had moved on.

  The next day, frustration and hopelessness consumed Robbins again. Porter, his closest mate among the crew, was just a valley back, but he might never see him again. Porter had told him that Hogan and Deslisle were in the valley where Robbins now lay, but he could not make himself get up to look for them. The sounds of camp, of the women's careless voices as they combed and braided one another's hair— to "divest it of the vermin that generally colonize it"— taunted him. He could not understand their complacence. On occasion they spun wool or wove, but usually, he complained, they were "listless, inactive, and stupid." In his rage over their cruelty and his desperation, it did not occur to Robbins that the Sahrawis might have chosen this way of life for a love of the desert, despite its hardships, or that they were amazingly well adapted to it. He cursed their world. He cursed their God, and his God. He rued the day he was born.

  Near midday, from where he lay muttering to himself, Robbins caught a glimpse of a shuffling, stooped figure wearing a small animal skin and a piece of sail. "Hogan?" he called out. John Hogan looked up and walked over. "Robbins, how are you?" he croaked.

  Staring at Hogan's gaunt face, Robbins could not produce words. The Portlander's mouth had contorted into a lopsided scowl that made him look demented. Burned and cracked, his eyelids were merely retractable scabs, his eyes the fresh part of a wound. Robbins felt his empty stomach convulse. He embraced his shipmate, the strong and audacious youth who on a stormy night— ages ago, it now seemed— had led the way down the hawser from the wrecked brig to shore.

  Robbins took Hogan back to his tent and begged his mistress to allow them to enter. At first she refused. Then, taking a look at Hogan, she relented. Inside, the sailors exchanged news. Hogan told Robbins how on that recent fateful day the traders had bought him from Mohammed and then returned him when a dispute broke out with Porter's master. The feud had raged on afterward until the two came to blows. Ever since, Mohammed had treated him worse, feeding him even less and forbidding him to sleep inside the tent. Mohammed also owned Deslisle, who tended his camels from dawn to dusk. The cook ate better than Hogan did but was often beaten by their master.

  Robbins related his own near miss with the traders and his news of Porter and shared the rest of the three-day-old camel blood with him. Hogan gratefully swallowed the rich morsel down. Sarah gave them zrig, and Hogan remarked that compared with his mistress, she was an "angel of mercy." The two sailors remained together mending each other's spirits into the evening. They made plans to hunt for food together the next day, and Robbins urged Hogan to bring Deslisle with him. Hogan replied that Mohammed would never allow it.

  In the morning, Robbins rose with the family at dawn. They went outside to the sand in front of the tent, and the few who had them slipped off their camel-skin slippers. Facing east, they dropped to their knees, with what Robbins deemed "peculiar solemnity," for the first of their five daily prayers.2 Robbins knew that after their morning worship, the women would remove the reed baskets that covered the camels' udders so that the young animals could nurse. The women would milk what was left over and share it with the others who had prayed. All he had to do was join them.

  "My master Ganus bade me follow his motions," Robbins recounted. Ganus and the others knelt and rubbed sand on their hands, arms, and faces, their abluti
ons in the absence of water. "I did the same," confessed Robbins. Always facing east, Ganus rose up and loudly exclaimed the call to prayer, which Robbins recorded as "Sheda el la lah, Hi Allah— Sheda Mahommed— Rah sool Allah." Robbins repeated the words, not knowing what they meant, and continued to follow his master's example. Ganus was delighted.

  In the desolate canyon far to the east, Riley and his men reveled in water as pure as a Connecticut creek. They drank and drank, so much so that they grew giddy and water-drunk. Even as Riley admonished them not to consume too much too fast, he continued to guzzle himself. Their stomachs twisted like Turk's heads, they bent double, and still they heedlessly drank more. Just as they had at the well the first day, they fouled themselves like infants while the Bou Sbaa, who were fastidious in such matters, looked on in disgust.

  Seid and Abdallah drove the camels up switchbacks to within fifty yards of the spring. At the top, Riley filled a four-gallon goatskin and handed it down to his men, who were stationed in a line and carried it down to the selaď, the large bowl used for watering the camels. Even the intense griping of their stomachs and the cramps in their sides barely diminished their feeling of satisfaction as they went about the work.