by Dean King
The camels had not drunk for twenty days. Their dung had become so dry that as soon as the pellets dropped, they could be used as fuel for the fire. The sailors filled the goatskin fifteen times for Hamet's big one alone and grew more amazed with each delivery. "Is he not done yet?" they cried. "He alone will drink the spring dry!" Unlike the men, the big camel would retain with great efficiency the sixty gallons it absorbed.
The unusual ability of the camel to endure thirst would not be accurately explained by scientists until the twentieth century. When dehydrating, camels sustain their plasma volume, losing tissue fluid first and maintaining good circulation. Even as a camel's blood thickens, its small red blood cells circulate efficiently. When water becomes available, camels can drink great volumes because the liquid is absorbed very gradually from their stomachs and intestines, preventing osmotic distress, and, whereas the red blood cells of other species can swell with water to only 150 percent of their normal size, a camel's can grow to 240 percent.
When all the camels had finished, the men filled two skins with the chalky water that remained in the pool.3
Riley thanked God for Sidi Hamet's profound knowledge of the desert and for taking them out of the hands of the aimless nomads. How had Hamet discovered the hidden pools pinned to the side of the remote canyon? Riley had seen "not the smallest sign of their ever having overflowed their basons," nor any other clue to their existence. He could not help but look at Hamet with greater respect.
On the desert again, dire reality soon prevailed. They were alive, and they had water, but they could feel their hunger the more severely, and the landscape was no more promising where they emerged from the canyon than where they had entered it. As far as they could see, the desert was empty, "no rising of the ground, nor any rock, tree, or shrub," Riley wrote. "All was a dreary, solitary waste." One crucial factor did change, however. They altered course, heading northwest.
They rode several hours as the sun dropped toward the horizon, momentarily a pleasant, glowing ghost of itself casting shadows behind them before leaving them in empty desolation. Finding no shelter, they finally stopped in the middle of the plain. Before lying down to sleep, they ate the last of the dried camel meat, about an ounce for each man. Since Hamet's camels produced no milk, they had no more nourishment. They would now have to forage. That night, the frigid north wind pummeled them like buntlines on a billowing canvas, and the next day the wind continued, gusting in their faces. The rejuvenated camels walked so briskly that those on foot had to trot to keep up. The sailors struggled with hunger and monotony until, in the afternoon, Hamet called out, "Riley, shift jmel"— I see a camel.
Riley searched the horizon. He saw nothing. The other sailors could not make out any sign of a rider either, but Hamet looked delighted as he altered their course to due east. Two hours later the sailors glimpsed the small outline of a camel on the horizon. By sunset, they had reached a large drove of camels and herders, who invited them to their camp. It was after dark when they reached four tents on the plain. They stopped at a distance and collected brush for the fire.
After traveling forty miles in fourteen hours without food or water, the sailors were in bad shape. Their wounds had reopened from the jolting, and their "various and complicated sufferings," wrote Riley, caused them great discomfort. They were certainly feeling the effects of scurvy or some other form of malnutrition. They had no shelter to protect them from the wind and no sand to lie on, only the spiky hardpan. They had been promised food, but on the desert such promises, they knew, were fleeting. As the hours passed, they lost hope for anything but milk, which would be served around midnight, if at all.
An hour shy of that, Hamet called Riley over to the circle of light and handed him a bowl. Riley returned to his men and gleefully displayed its contents: boiled meat. They tore it into five portions, cast lots for them, and ate voraciously. The meat was tender and aromatic, not ashy or burned, just enough to fill their stomachs. As the sailors lay down again to sleep, the Arabs brought them a large bowl of zrig. "This was indeed," Riley glowed, "sumptuous living."
In the morning, one of these generous nomads proudly produced an acquisition he had made on the coast. It was shiny and new and, assuming from its appearance that it would fetch a vast sum, the Arab presented this novel and mysterious object to el rais to ask its value. It was the spyglass that Riley had bought in Gibraltar. He told the man it was worth about ten Spanish dollars, a not inconsiderable sum. Hamet wanted to buy it, but having only seven dollars, he was not able to.
Hamet's party left this company of nomads and continued traveling northwest on the hammada until late afternoon, when they met up with another party of Arabs whose camels wore selaďs on their sides like armor and lugged full waterskins. Another invitation was issued and accepted. They followed these men two hours to the southwest to reach their camp of fifty tents and the first sheep the sailors had seen on the Sahara. When they went out searching for firewood, a crowd gathered to see the pale blond-bearded men who had come from across the northern sea. They identified Riley as el rais and asked him questions about his ship, about the country they had come from and their families.
Hamet's group stayed with these nomads two more days, traveling fifteen miles north with them. The tribe treated both the Bou Sbaa and their captives as honored guests, erecting tents even for the Christians. Although their sheep were perishing, barely able to stand and graze on the brown moss, the Arabs lavished milk on their guests at night. Unsure when they would eat again, the sailors gorged until they vomited.
On October 5, they left this band of Arabs, who had impressed Riley and his crew with a generosity that was as liberal to the lowly slave as it was to the master. Hamet bought a sheep and traded his young camel for an old one and a calf. The old camel soon proved to be lame in the right forefoot. They called it Coho, "Lame," and the calf Goyette, "Little Child," though it was big enough to carry an emaciated sailor on its back.
Riley led the sheep with a rope tied around its neck until noon, when they reached a small valley with a bir sunk amid bushes with thick roots. This was no small find. Until recent times, Western Sahara, a region the size of Colorado, possessed only about a hundred known sources of potable water. Wells tapping them— categorized by their depth, a hassi being as deep as forty feet and a bir anything deeper— are so essential and the land otherwise so devoid of landmarks that even modern maps show their locations.
They pulled up bucket after bucket from the deep well, each man drinking as much as he wanted. After watering the camels and filling two goatskins, they slaughtered the sheep, which could not keep up. When Riley started to clean the entrails, the Bou Sbaa stopped him, put them, still intact, back inside the carcass, and slung it across a camel. They mounted again and continued northwest, driving riderless Coho on in front.
That night, the Bou Sbaa roasted and ate two of the mutton quarters while the sailors devoured the offal nomad-style— with its partially digested grain still inside. On the morning of October 6, they set off on foot, driving the camels on in front of them. Since leaving the chasm, Riley had noticed that Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah had more trouble navigating. Before, they had steered by the desert's landmarks. Now they seemed more concerned about their location, frequently checking the sun and the wind and dismounting at sandy patches on the hammada to smell the sand. By the middle of the morning, even the sailors began to notice signs of change. The sand that lay in small, loose heaps began to mount. The distant terrain took on an ominous, choppy look, like the sea under an approaching storm. By early afternoon, wind-borne grit stung their skin.
For another week, Ganus's family remained in Robbins's so-called Valley of the Shadow of Death, where, empty-handed, they searched farther and farther afield for sustenance and pushed the limits of tribal obligation, borrowing, cajoling, and filching from those who still had milk or a cache of food or water. One of Ganus's camels had gone dry, reducing their milk supply to four quarts a day.
Robb
ins and Hogan crossed the hill to the east into another valley, where they found snails. Robbins stashed his in his sailcloth satchel until they could take fire from a camp and roast them. So reduced were the Arabs that when the pair returned to Ganus's tent for zrig and Ganus discovered what they had found and eaten, he scolded them for not sharing. It was a fair rebuke, Robbins had to allow, since Ganus was always as generous as his circumstances permitted.
What Robbins could not abide was the Sahrawis' resignation in the face of starvation. As he put it, "to waste away and go down to the grave for the want of food was too much for the small portion of philosophy imparted to me to endure with fortitude." How maddening it was to persist on the barren Sahara and not make an effort to leave it while they still had strength. What sailor becalmed in the horse latitudes would not make every effort to set his vessel in motion again? Unable to fill their stomachs on snails, Robbins and Hogan now investigated the refuse around the camps. A pile of decaying camel bones had already been gnawed by dogs, but the sun had softened them. Robbins dug into a crevice with his teeth for a bit of gristle and nearly dislocated his jaw.
The next day, Robbins saw Deslisle for the first time since leaving the well near Cape Barbas. The cook was returning from the hilltop where he had been keeping the animals. He appeared relatively hearty and had better clothes than Hogan. Robbins and Hogan greeted Deslisle eagerly, but his mistress saw him at the same time and ordered him to keep moving. Anxious to speak to Robbins, Deslisle lingered, which infuriated the woman. She attacked him, cuffing and clawing his head. Deslisle did not dare strike back. She dragged him up the hill, scolding him loudly, and at the top, Mohammed knocked him down and clubbed him repeatedly. Deslisle could do nothing to defend himself. As he cried out in pain, Robbins fumed. "Never did I more ardently pant to revenge the injury of a shipmate," he recalled later. "I was desperate but knew I must be humble and see my shipmate mauled to pumice."
Near dusk, Robbins went to check on Hogan and Deslisle. He wore a new article of clothing that he had made to protect his skin from the sun. He had folded a yard-and-a-half square of the brig's colors, cut a hole in the center, and sewn up the sides, leaving holes for his arms, to approximate a shirt. His mistress had sewn a dress out of a larger section of the flag and was vainly sashaying about camp in the latest fashion of "striped bunting." Relishing the irony, Robbins mused that this was probably the first U.S. flag to fly over the Sahara. Arriving at Hogan's master's tent, Robbins found that Deslisle was still out with the camels. Hogan was moribund. Robbins strutted around in his absurd new attire to cheer him up. "If you like this," he jested, "you should see my mistress. She has also covered herself in glory." He chuckled at his own joke, but Hogan could not shake his dark cloud. His effort at laughter ended in a sorry hiccup of despair.
"Yesterday," he muttered to Robbins, "good Dick brought me some cooked snails. But our confounded master would not suffer me to eat them. I will starve soon." Robbins tried to reassure Hogan, but nothing seemed to work. He wished Deslisle would come in, but the cook still had not arrived by the time Robbins had to return to his master's tents. He never saw Deslisle again.
A blast of heat hit Riley like campfire smoke in a sudden gust, and he broke out in a clammy sweat. It had been just three days since he, Savage, Horace, Clark, and Burns had saturated themselves with water, laughing like children. Now as they labored through burning sand, chronic diarrhea plagued them. Clark and Burns and the rebellious second mate appeared wan even in their desert color. As thin as scarecrows, they looked like they might combust and vanish in a puff. Horace was already little more than a vapor.
Before the group had trudged long, Hamet assigned the men to camels. As the beasts rose, the sailors looked out on an awe-inspiring sight. Stretching to the north and south as far as they could see, dunes towered hundreds of feet high. Wind-ripped crests gave them the appearance of storm-churned sea rollers, Poseidon's anger writ in grit.
The trade winds, which had cooled their bodies under the broiling sun, "now blew like a tempest" and became their "formidable enemy," Riley wrote. "The loose sand flew before its blasts, cutting our flesh like hail stones, and very often covering us from each other's sight, while the gusts (which followed each other in quick succession) were rushing by."
On the sliding hills, the camels faltered and sank into the sand. An anxious Hamet ordered everyone to dismount. He, Seid, and Abdallah went ahead to find a route. On foot, the sailors struggled to keep up with the camels, especially on the downhill slopes. At the same time, they had to make sure that old Coho, walking with no load at all, did not lag behind, or they would be beaten.
Wind and sand. Sand, wind. They saw nothing else for two days, as the irifi, the region's legendary desert wind, unleashed its fury on them. The two elements sucked and scoured all the moisture out of their bodies and tore at their skin to get more. The first day, they struggled on for five hours until around dark, when they discovered a flat trough, like a "lake surrounded by mountains," where some shrubs grew. While the camels chewed the leaves and limbs of the bushes, the men pushed sand up against the saddles to form a barrier against the wind. They cooked the remainder of the mutton, pulverizing the bones with rocks so that they could eat them too. "It was sweet to our taste, though but a morsel," Riley wrote.
At dawn the next day, Hamet ordered Riley to gather the camels. He, Savage, and Clark quickly found the two strongest, which were fettered, their forelegs tied together about a foot apart, so that they could hobble around to feed but not run far. Riley went for Seid's, the spunkiest, leaving Savage the big one. The captain, who was fast learning how to handle the beasts, which were never bridled or haltered, made the camel kneel, took off its fetter, and climbed on, using a goad and soothing words to guide it.
While he was doing this, Savage made the mistake of unfettering the big camel before making it kneel. Just then, lame and recalcitrant Coho, who had given the men so much trouble by lagging, bolted to the south. Goyette, the calf, followed. Bellowing, Hamet's big camel wrenched free of Savage's grasp and dashed off at a full gallop. Abdallah's camel followed.
Riley struck his swift camel with the goad. He soon caught up with the runaways and maneuvered in front of them. He tried to head them off, but they bumped him and dodged by, at a full gallop, weaving around the dunes. The impulse to flee was contagious. All at once, Seid's camel went berserk trying to free itself of Riley. It bolted, bucking its suddenly flexible body, bellowing and growling like a wild animal. Rafts of stinking froth flew from its mouth into Riley's face. He hung on desperately. In response, the fiendish camel lay down and rolled over, dumping him, then reared its head and gnashed its teeth against his thighs. Riley leaped back on the animal before it could rise to its feet again.
The camel's fury was spent. He had beaten it. He guided it near the others, now a good distance from camp, but he could not make the stubborn brutes turn. Fearing that he was lost in the tortuous sand hills, he stopped his camel and turned back.
The three angry Bou Sbaa came running over the dunes. Hamet shouted for Riley to make his camel lie down and to get off. Catching up, Hamet leaped on, wheeled the rising animal, and sped off with Seid and Abdallah tailing him on foot. Riley followed their tracks back to camp, where he ruefully collected some skins that Goyette had dumped. The Arabs did not return for three hours. As the time passed, Riley grew increasingly frightened for Savage, who would certainly be severely beaten for causing this trouble and might not survive it in his current state.
As the Bou Sbaa rode back into camp, Riley encouraged Savage to apologize or plead for mercy, but he refused, enraging the Arabs even more. Riley begged for forgiveness on Savage's behalf, but the Arabs, fuming and hungry for vengeance, ignored him, grabbed Savage, and beat him with their camel goads. They accused him of driving off the camels on purpose, spat at him, and pronounced him foonta, or bad. Savage survived, but he would suffer further from this reputation.
It was nine o'clock before they set
out again, as close to north-northwest as the sand hills would allow. For two hours, they wound through passes between slopes at a trot. Then the hills became so thick and treacherous that Hamet feared for the camels and bade the men all to dismount. The Bou Sbaa went ahead to scout a route, spreading themselves out so that they could relay directions. The sailors followed with the camels, taking the utmost care to keep the beasts in line.
They walked at a miserable pace through sand heated until it felt like "wading through glowing embers." Wind-borne grit coated their bodies. For twelve chafing hours they marched with nothing to consume, finally stopping aloft on the sea of dunes, where there was no forage at all for the camels. Exhausted and frustrated, the men each had a drink of water before collapsing in comalike slumber. In the dead of night, Riley awakened with a start. He heard and felt in his shivering body a low, distant rumbling to the north that was not just the wind. The noise reverberated with the force of a hurricane. It must be a hurricane of sand, he reasoned, which will bury us alive.
He rose in a panic and woke his men, who listened in shocked silence, convinced that the distant thunder was the sound of their impending death. At first they were certain it was a noise unlike any they had ever heard before. But soon someone noticed that the rumbling, though persistent, grew no closer and the wind no stronger. Suddenly acutely aware of his mistake, Riley announced, "It's the sea!"