by Dean King
"Yes," Riley answered in Spanish.
"Do not lie," the man warned. "If you do, you will have your throat cut. If you have told Sidi Hamet this merely to get off the desert and to get food, he will pardon that pretext and deception now, though he will sell you and your friends to the highest bidder. In a few days, you will reach a river of running water and houses, and if you persist in lying, he will kill you."
Riley did not hesitate. "I am incapable of lying to Sidi Hamet," he responded indignantly. "Everything that I have stated is the truth. He has saved my life, and he will be well rewarded by my friend and by our Almighty Father." Hamet listened as intently as the old man did and, Riley judged, with better understanding.
Hamet nodded. "You will see Swearah in several days," he said.
When they caught up with the others, the man and his young sons guided them across the mouth of the wadi. They waded through a hundred yards of hip-deep salt water. On the far bank, beneath a steep rise, Riley noticed that one of the man's sons had a pair of kerseymere pants that had belonged to Savage. The chain of theft and barter by which the pants had arrived there was likely long, but to the captain the only thing that mattered was that they go back to their rightful owner, who needed them. Riley begged Hamet and Seid to buy the pants. Seid traded a piece of blue cloth, which he wore as a shirt, for them, and gave them to Riley. He objected when Riley began to give the pants to Savage. "He is foonta," he insisted. "Give them to Clark or the boy." But Riley handed them to the second mate.
At dark Riley and Horace accompanied the Bou Sbaa to a friq by the sea. Here the Arabs gave them a pile of dried mussels, which they carried back to camp and shared with Savage, Clark, and Burns. That night, Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah slaughtered the remaining goats. After the Arabs battled over their shares of the entrails and meat, all stewed together in a pot, there was none left for the sailors. Their only sustenance came from the mounting evidence that they were at last about to leave the Sahara. But Hamet warned Riley that the region they were about to enter, the populated perimeter, was in many ways more dangerous for them than the desert itself. "Many robbers and bad men inhabit these parts," he told him.
The next day, October 16— a date that would gain historical significance for Napoleon's arrival at St. Helena— they set out early on a slow, tedious passage along the rocky, eroded seashore, picking their way as inconspicuously as thirty people accompanied by livestock could. With guns drawn, the Bou Sbaa herded Savage, Clark, and Burns on the camels while Riley and Horace kept up on foot, walking and running. The sailors were never left alone now. If one had to stop, a Bou Sbaa stayed with him. As the day wore on, Horace's strength faded. The boy's frequent stops made the Arabs increasingly testy, and he bore the brunt of their frustration.
By sunset they had gone only fifteen miles. Afraid to stop in these parts, they continued on into the night. Around midnight, at the edge of a wadi, Riley and Horace swapped places with Savage and Clark, who fell back with the women and children walking mutely through sand drifts. It took nearly two more hours to cross the gulf. By the time they climbed up the far slope onto an inclined plane of more drifts, Savage could not keep up even with the women and children. Riley himself was fading in and out of wakefulness on his camel when Clark's cry jarred him awake. "They're flogging Mr. Savage!" he yelled.
Riley tumbled down from his camel and ran to the rear. Passing Clark, he found Seid and Hassar standing over Savage. He was unconscious, but Seid kept beating him with a goad. Hassar grabbed Savage's beard in one hand and pulled it to expose his throat. In his other hand he drew back his scimitar.
Riley took several determined steps, crouched, and butted Hassar hard, knocking him off his feet. He quickly grabbed and lifted Savage. "Water, please!" Riley begged. Enraged, Hassar climbed back to his feet, raised his scimitar, and lurched toward Riley. Just then Hamet arrived and spat out several harsh phrases of Arabic that stopped Hassar. The rest of the Arabs gathered around. Their enemies were near, and they believed that Savage was being purposely obstinate, heedlessly endangering them. They wanted to kill him.
Riley pleaded with Hamet. "Savage only fainted from exhaustion and illness," he explained. Hamet did not understand; to Riley's surprise, the Arab had no concept of fainting. But at Riley's insistence, Hamet had a camel brought up and water given to Savage. When he revived, Riley noticed tears in Hamet's eyes. The trader was clearly angry and fearful— it would have been costly for him to lose one of the sailors, whose ransom represented his only chance to appease his merciless father-in-law— but Riley sensed that he also felt some sympathy for the man who had almost been killed. Hamet ordered Clark and Savage to be put on the camel together to support each other and told Riley to ride another with Horace. "The English are foonta— you see even our women and children can walk and run," he gibed.
The insult nettled Riley. "I will go on foot," the captain insisted. He mustered the camels and began to drive them on. Hamet laughed at el rais the indignant, whose support of his men and boldness had enhanced his character in the Arabs' eyes, even Hassar's once he had calmed down. "Come and walk with me, Rais," Hamet said, beckoning Riley with his arm. "Leave the camels to the others. Good Riley, you will see your children again, inshallah."
chapter 13
Skeletons
From the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Ganus's little band— Sarah, Ishir, Muckwoola, his mother, the three children, and Robbins— had begun drifting to the southeast the day after Robbins had been accosted by the lone scimitar-wielding Arab. The man had raced up to him on the plain, brandishing his weapon and angrily demanding, "Soo-mook en tar?"— What is your name?
"Robbinis, Robbinis!" he had replied.
"Me-nane jate?" he asked, and Robbins pointed in the direction of his master's tent. "Ille-mein en tar?"
"To Ganus," Robbins answered.
"He seemed, by his conduct, to know my master, and said no more," Robbins noted, "but eyed me very sharply as I walked hastily from him." Rattled, Robbins returned to the camp, which had been abandoned now by all but a few families. Early the next morning, Ganus and his sisters had at last returned with water. The group left the valley that same day, riding off with another family— twenty Arabs and one American, with four tents and sixty camels.
For ten days they drifted southeast into the interior. One day they procured a camel head from a friq they passed. They baked it that night in a hole in the sand and ate regally. Then they turned due east into hillier country, where the grazing was better and where there were clumps of twisted acacia trees, one of the most useful plants on the desert. Though Robbins made no mention of it, the nomads extracted its resin to treat stomach ailments and eye problems and to improve blood clotting; they chewed its wood to relieve distress caused by drinking too much salty water; its berries they crushed for dye.
Here, "having retired to the most secret place," according to Robbins, they slaughtered a two-year-old jmel. "Before the skin was off, five or six Arabs came bounding over the sandy desert to partake of it," he recorded, as dismayed as Riley had been at the expansiveness of a Saharan feast. As they butchered the camel, they sliced off hunks of the hump, which Robbins described as "like the brisket of an ox," and ate it raw. The women carved off long pieces of lean meat to hang in the sun for drying. "Joy seemed to pervade every heart," Robbins observed, as they stewed the entrails in paunch water. He was not disappointed by his portion. For the first time since reaching the desert, he fully sated his appetite.
The following morning, Robbins assisted in preparing and preserving the camel hide, which they sliced into sections and threw into the fire. Once the pieces were dry and the hair had been singed off, they packed this jerky away for future meals. Vistors, some friends, some strangers, arrived periodically. Ganus and Sarah shared with them equally, cooking meat and serving zrig. Robbins could not but be impressed by their generosity. By American standards, it was prodigal. Tomorrow did not seem to exist for them until it arrived.
Am
ong the callers was Hogan's master, with Hogan. The sailors embraced, much buoyed by the sight of each other. For a moment they could ignore the fact that they were being carried into the interior, farther from Mogadore. Hogan, who had put on some weight and regained his spirit, received a generous helping of the feast. "He tore off the meat from the hard, unyielding neck of the camel like a tiger," Robbins recalled. But before he had satisfied his hunger, Hogan stopped himself and stashed away a hunk for Deslisle, who had been left at camp. Then, summoned by his master, he went off, as quickly as he had come.
Robbins would never lay eyes on Hogan again.
Ganus now led his band south and west through a hilly, sandy wilderness. They were besieged by the irifi. At fifteen miles per hour, a desert wind picks up sand and dust and whisks it across the plain. At thirty miles per hour, it creates conditions of almost zero visibility. When the irifi reaches sixty miles per hour, as it is known to do, it blasts lentil-size grit through tents and clothes, hones sandstone hills smooth, and drives migratory birds to the coast, where many drink seawater out of desperation and die. Large mammals stampede before it as if from a forest fire.
For three days, the wind punished them, casting a demonic red glow on the horizon and making Robbins wonder if he was not at last approaching the gates of hell. More galling still was the fact that this same wind, gusting out over the Atlantic and carrying sand miles out to sea, was a part of the mariners' beloved east-to-west trade wind, the steady gale they relied on for crossing the Atlantic. It would have carried the Commerce on its homeward voyage.
"The atmosphere was as filled with hot sand as ours is with snow in a snowstorm," Robbins recalled. "The vertical rays of the sun beating upon a body almost naked— the sand filling the eyes constantly exposed— the feet sinking, ankle deep, into the sand at every step, made travelling all but destruction." They could not erect a tent for shelter either— the shifting sand would not hold pegs.
So they kept moving. With heads down, they rode or walked alongside the camels, constantly strafed from behind. Robbins's ears, nose, and sometimes his mouth filled with grit. He lived inside his own head as sight and sound, other than the monotonous roar of the wind, were virtually nil. As he walked, the clinging sand chafed his skin, rubbing him raw between the legs. His cracked throat plagued him. The sand obsessed him. During lulls in the wind, he tried desperately to rid himself of it, but without water it was impossible. Frantic, he caught his urine and washed his face and body with it.
On October 23, Ganus steered his band due south. The wind finally moderated, and at midday they stopped and pitched camp. Ganus's son, Elle, told Robbins that "Joe," the name the Arabs used for William Porter, was in a tent nearby and that he would show him the way. They set out immediately.
A few miles outside camp, they stopped at a tent where they found one of Savage's former masters, with Ganus and Porter's master, about to slaughter a camel cow. Ganus told Robbins to gather brush to feed the fire. With massive root systems for collecting the desert's scant nutrients, the bushes grew fifty feet apart. For three hours, Robbins gathered wood to feed the fire over which the Arabs stewed a kettle of entrails and meat. As a reward for this work, they tossed Robbins a fetus, the size of a rat, that they had found in the cow. Robbins was not in a position to reject any food, no matter how unappetizing. He roasted it in the sand and coals beneath the kettle of stew. Fearing that someone might take it from him, he soon dug it up and gobbled it down while it was still steaming hot. He noted later only that "extreme hunger made this a delicious meal."
Porter's master urged Ganus to let Robbins visit Porter, who was ailing. Ganus agreed, and at sunset, Robbins finally reached his shipmate, who, he discovered, had been suffering from, among other things, a massive headache for several days. Porter was also sandblind. The glare of the sun had begun to kill the cells in the outer layer of his corneas, the covering of the iris and pupil. With this condition, called ultraviolet keratitis but more commonly known as snow blindness, the dead cells create a stippling effect, and in severe cases, like Porter's, the cells mass and slough off, leaving the unprotected eye especially susceptible to airborne grit. Porter could now make out only things very near to him. His eyes were swollen and squinted.
As his sight had worsened on the desert, he had been unable to keep up with his master's family. One day in frustration, his master had beaten him into the dust, then left him behind. Porter lay where he fell for twenty-four hours, while the sun and the wind robbed him of his senses, just as they leach color from bones. He was left with only the agony of his throbbing head and thirst. All his sensations, some ebbing some flowing, seemed to be converging on the moment when his spirit would abandon his body to the jackals and his corpse would join the company of skeletons on the Zahara.
But before Porter's spirit could escape and he could be relieved of his miseries, his master's brother had returned on a camel to retrieve him. In an attempt to heal him, the Arabs had bled him from the head by making cuts in his skin with a l'mouse, or jackknife.
Gaunt and pale, Porter had sunk into a deep torpor and, it seemed to Robbins, had lost his will to recover. Although Robbins was loath to sound preachy, believing that the "cant of advising in such a case rather aggravates than mitigates sorrow," he realized that he himself was undergoing a spiritual transformation on the desert. He could think of no other way to urge Porter to buck up: "It is God's will that we suffer," he pleaded with him. "We must make the best we can of our situation, as wretched as it is." Robbins left Porter reluctantly, knowing that he might never see his friend again.
The next day, Ganus's clan packed up their tents and traveled southwest over deep sand. They had run out of water, and Robbins finally sensed urgency in their behavior. In the evening, they rested for a few hours and then set out again after midnight, hurrying along under a canopy of iridescent stars. At sunrise, they stopped only long enough to pray. Shortly afterward, they arrived at a plain that Robbins described as flatter than the sea in a dead calm. Even the dunes withered in an abrupt line before it.
Robbins called his first steps on this pocked, fossilized terrain "the most gloomy entry I ever made upon any part of the earth." Protruding stones made walking dangerous. Only the camels' hooves moved easily over the unyielding hardpan. No evidence of life appeared anywhere— no shrubs, no weeds, not even the meddlesome flies. In all directions, Robbins saw "the genius of famine and drought"; yet this disturbing view had its consolations. For a change, he did not feel like they were wandering aimlessly. He was sure Ganus knew where he was headed or he never would have entered such a place. Indeed, they raced across the desolate plain with a desperation Robbins found reassuring: he had reached the bottom, a place on the Sahara that even the Arabs found intolerable.
Just before sunset, to everyone's relief, they walked onto sand again. Several hours later they reached a fold in the surface with shrubs for the camels to graze on and stopped for the night. They had covered some ninety miles without drinking a sip of water.
At daylight, they set out to the west at a full rack. While the nomads showed no signs of weakness, riding even harder than they had the previous day, Robbins felt like he was dying of thirst. At noon, he found some relief at a tent, where they were given a drink of water and he found and ate a few roots and sprouts. As they continued toward the coast, the land gradually became less dreary, until they were winding past scrubby hillocks of sand, clay, and shrubs. After dark these grew denser. They threaded their way through a maze of mounds and stones, the only sounds coming from the complaining beasts. They finally stopped at midnight to eat and to let the camels graze. After sharing some meat, which though charred in the fire was as tough as leather, they set off again.
Night merged into wearying morning. The sun rose unobstructed, alone in the house of the gods, at their backs as they entered the east end of a promising valley surrounded by high rocky hills. Robbins could hardly believe his eyes when he saw in the distance what appeared to be a shimmeri
ng tower of smooth white marble. He believed they were approaching either a casbah for the defense of a city or the palace of a Moorish prince. As they advanced, he noticed approvingly the valley's grassy floor, which though strawlike from drought was the first groundcover he had walked on in Africa. At length, the white structure came into focus. Seventy feet high, a hundred long, and sixty wide— it was a block of stone.1
"I came to this astonishing monument— went round it— examined it as minutely as I possibly could, and could not discover upon it the least trait of human art," he observed. "My expectations were blown away by the wind that whistled round it."
Several hours later, around noon, Ganus located a bir. Robbins looked down through the well's triangular superstructure into the void. It was too dark to tell whether it held any water. As the well diggers had penetrated deeper into the hard earth, they had broadened the shaft at the top and added cross braces, which also served as ladders for users to clear sand from the bottom. Robbins shook his head in disbelief that the nomads did not bother to cover their wells with lids, which would have prevented this problem and cut down on evaporation.