by Dean King
In breathless silence, Ganus lowered the bucket, a wooden hoop with a tanned goatskin suspended from it. The pop of the stiff skin against water broke the tension. Amid their excited chatter, Ganus pulled up the bucket, holding about three gallons, and examined the liquid. It was green from stagnation and at the same time reddish from the dried camel dung that had blown into it. "It was with the greatest difficulty that I could force it into my throat, or retain it there when I had," Robbins said. They filled just two goatskins with the foul water.
Over the next five miles, as they exited the valley to the southwest, Robbins carried a bowl full of the water, deriving a small degree of comfort from determining for himself when to take a sip, no matter how disgusting. That evening, they used it to moisten their dried meat, which was so hard that after roasting it they had to grind it into meal to make it edible. Fortunately, the next day Ganus learned from a traveler of better water nearby. He ordered camp to be made and then took Ishir and Muckwoola with him to find the well.
The sisters returned the following day with skins of fresh water and some dried fish, but Ganus did not. In his absence, the women fed Robbins only fish skins and treated him with contempt as they wandered idly northwest in search of grazing for the camels. After four days, Ganus reappeared, to Robbins's relief, but with nothing other than a piece of tent cloth to show for his absence. Early the next morning, however, he awakened Robbins and they set out together with Ishir and Muckwoola, driving the camels to the west all day. Ganus had never taken him on his water runs before, which made Robbins suspect that something was up. They reached the coast as the salmon-tinted sun sank into clouds on the horizon, like a coin slipping into a bank.
With mixed emotions, Robbins gazed out on the ocean for the first time since being carried onto the Sahara. It was a month since he had been left behind by his shipmates. The Atlantic waves, which had thrilled his northbound shipmates with the promise of home, pierced southbound Robbins like a knife in the back. He had other worries too, but he barely had time to reflect on a fact of which he was now certain— Ganus was about to sell him— when the camels took their first tentative steps down the slope. Smelling the sweet vapors of the wells, the beasts launched into a headlong dash toward the bottom.
Robbins leaned back to keep from sliding onto his mount's craned neck. He clutched its shoulders in his legs, while with his hands he grasped at the saddle battering his tailbone like a buckboard. The lead camel, maddened by the presence of water, bolted maniacally toward the wells, and as the drove of twenty pursued it down a precipice just north of Cape Mirik, the front-runners— under Ganus, Ishir, and Muckwoola— kicked up sand like birdshot. Robbins saw blue sky, then black ocean, then his mount's wire-hair head. Then the whole cycle, a blazing blur, repeated with each jolt of the camel. The ground rose and receded beneath him. Obstacles surged up and vanished in a blink.
Robbins hit speeds he had never experienced before, not on horseback, not on a ship. He prayed that the camel knew what it was doing. He had no control over it. He cursed the refractory beasts. Even on a good day, they triggered conflicting emotions in him. He considered them "odious and deformed," yet he recognized their worth. On the desert, they were "noble" saviors. Their arrival with bags of zrig or water elicited "joy bordering on delirium." But while the Arabs believed camels were blessed and that anyone who fell from one was protected by Allah, Robbins did not share their faith. If he fell now, he would most likely break his neck and be trampled. If the camel stumbled at this speed, he could be crushed. He cursed the Arabs for not using a bit, a bridle, or stirrups. Somewhere in his lurching mind, he recalled the voice of Porter, who had witnessed his master's traverse of the bluff above the boat wreck: "An Arab on a camel can descend a precipice that will kill an American." As he raced down the slope, Robbins prayed that the magic was in the camel, not in the Arab.
Ganus's drove came tearing into the crowd below, "a great multitude of camels," and pulled up, frothing and growling. No one paid them any more notice than if they had just dropped in for tea. Around a number of wells, Arabs noisily watered their droves or restrained their beasts while waiting their turn. Others stood around, cooking, talking, or trading.
Trembling, Robbins made his camel kneel and dismounted, thankful to be on the ground again and unaware that he had reached a crossroads. He was closer both to freedom and to lasting servitude than he knew. Ganus had indeed brought him to the communal wells to sell him, as was the common practice among the Sahrawis. Yet just to the south was the territory where the coastal Arabs had a pact with the British to exchange all castaways for a cash reward.
At the plentiful wells, Robbins drank as much water as he wanted. He imbibed wholeheartedly, like a sailor in port for the first time in months, "for thirst past, thirst present, and thirst to come," as Melville would put it in White Jacket. That night, he, Ganus, Ishir, and Muckwoola slept under a large bush with other nomads near a fire. Ganus and his sisters rose early to water the camels, which drank deeply for the third time in five days.
Robbins had kept a keen eye on Ganus, but he had detected no overt signs that his master was trying to sell him. Now, however, Ganus showed unusual concern for his slave's filthy condition. He made Robbins remove his cutoff trousers and give them to Ishir and Muckwoola to wash. Naked except for a section of the Commerce's American flag, which hung from his waist, Robbins tended to the camels while the sisters scrubbed his pants and hung them from a camel to dry. Then Ganus mounted his jmel and told Robbins to get on behind him.
They set out with a stranger at a fast clip to the south. Coming across fishermen on the coast with a fresh catch, Ganus bought and roasted fish for their breakfast. At midafternoon they reached a bluff over a sizable bay to the north of Cape Mirik, and they descended a trail to the beach at the head of the bay. Even this considerable body of water, which Robbins could not name, was unable to escape the dominion of the desert; low tide had pocked its dappled surface with peaks of sand.
From several shallow wells beneath the bluffs they tasted the water, which was so brackish only the camels could drink it. At last they reached a village of tents and lean-to huts, where they dismounted. As Robbins looked at the first fixed dwellings he had seen in Africa, he had a sinking feeling. Nomad camps were abysmal, both austere and disheveled, as unpleasant to the nose as to the eye, but this was worse. The stench of smoldering sewage permeated the place, and bone piles bespoke another age. At least with the nomads, every situation was by nature temporary. Life was miserable, but the next day it changed. The static squalor of this place struck dread in his heart.
The man who had accompanied them led Ganus off to a hut, leaving Robbins where he stood. In a trance, he gazed at the bay and at the point of Cape Mirik, which stretched out to sea. He studied the lean-tos around him, built of crotched branches hammered into the sand ten feet apart and supporting a horizonal beam. Other branches extended from the beam to the ground to form a roof, which was thatched with seaweed. "Lest they should blunder upon something that looks like the convenience and comfort of civilized life," observed Robbins, thoroughly cynical by now, "they are careful to make them so low that a human being cannot stand erect in one of them." Inside, they slept on beds of the same seaweed.
Soon, Ganus returned with several Arabs of the Oulad Delim tribe, the purest of the Beni Hassan-descended bedouin tribes in the western Sahara. The Oulad Delim were feared warriors, "Sons of the Gun," a tribe with which the Bou Sbaa alternately traded and feuded.
Ganus had adopted a stern, rigid demeanor. He was no longer the relatively considerate master Robbins had come to know but a stranger. He prodded the sailor and told him to walk around. A Delim wearing a blue frock to his calves and a white haik examined him as he would an animal for sale. "I suspected he was about to open my mouth to judge of my age by my teeth, and examine my feet to see if I had been foundered by high living with Ganus," Robbins noted sardonically.
The Delim, Mohamet Meaarah, was better groomed than
Ganus and seemed of higher status. He looked to be a little over thirty and had an open, ingenuous face, reassuring Robbins about his new circumstances.
Meaarah pronounced Robbins bono. A deal, the sailor now discovered, had already been struck contingent on his passing muster. With no further ceremony, Meaarah led him off to another hut, and Ganus rode away without so much as a good-bye.
Robbins believed Meaarah had come to the coast to buy fish, but he was probably collecting the horma, a tribute paid family-to-family by a zenaga tribe to a master tribe. Meaarah fed his bony Christian slave dried fish, which he got from the fishermen. It was then that it dawned on him that Robbins, wearing only a scrap of American flag and a rag of gazelle skin, was absurdly dressed. "Have you no other clothes?" he asked.
"No," Robbins replied, "this morning Ganus took my trousers and my shoes, which are worn out anyway."
"Ganus is foonta for taking them," Meaarah declared, angry at the Bou Sbaa's greed. "I will retrieve them." Though the trousers were long gone, Meaarah did return with the shoes. He did not indicate by what means he had gotten them. He gave Robbins a section of a haik to wear and then departed into the desert, leaving his new slave with an elderly zenaga fisherman. For the moment, Robbins was at rest. But he was not at ease.
chapter 14
Wednoon and the Atlas
On the morning of October 19, three days after seeing the ocean, Riley, Savage, Horace, Clark, and Burns were roused from a brief, lethargic slumber. They had traveled fifty miles the previous day and through most of the night. Shortly after dawn they set out again, forcing their cold, weary bodies back into motion. Their path lay between the first and second banks from the sea, stone-pocked dunes sheltering a sloping groove of sand.
North of the Draa, they had entered Souss, on the shoulders of the Sahara, where the Anti-Atlas Mountains reached down from the northeast tentatively, like fingers touching a stove. In 1815, not only were Moulay Sulayman and the makhzen, or ruling class of Morocco, unable to control the Sahara, they were defied by this southern region of their would-be kingdom.1 Two independent city states, Tazeroualt and Wednoon, had sprung up on the cusp of the great void, thriving on lawlessness, extortion of travelers, and the ransoming of Christian slaves who shipwrecked there or came up from the Sahara. The two states had also come to control the lucrative caravan traffic to the interior. Joseph Dupuis, who served as British vice-consul and agent for the United States in Swearah before the War of 1812, called the natives of Souss "more bigoted and cruel than even the remoter inhabitants of the Desert" (Robert Adams, p. 130).
As horizontal rays of sun spiked across the rocky eastern horizon, the five sailors made out vague saturnine shapes above the plain. With guarded enthusiasm, they nudged and whispered to one another. Unless this was another cruel illusion, the looming contours appeared to be proper hills, not dunes.
The sun climbed in the sky, and the sailors' imaginations brimmed. What lay behind those hills? Why not streams of icy running water? Fruit trees and onion fields that rivaled Wethersfield's? Civilized people?
Their path gave evidence of steady camel traffic. Around noon, they saw to the northeast the black tops of mountains. The sight bolstered their burgeoning confidence at a critical time. They had not slept for more than four hours in the past thirty. By this point, they had each lost more than half their original body mass. Riley, the biggest of them, would later find that he weighed less than 120 pounds. Savage, in particular, was barely hanging on.
Before nightfall they entered a deep valley heading south through bare black hills and then turned southeast in another valley on a well-trod path. They soon came to the banks of a river, where bullrushes and bushes resembling dwarf alders flourished, but the bright green water in the stream, which was about thirty feet wide and two deep, was brackish and undrinkable.2
Across the river, in another stream, a troop of men watered several dozen remarkably fine horses and a few camels. Hamet and his companions hailed these men and then crossed the briny stream to the good one, where fish surfaced and splashed. While the sailors eyed the fish hungrily, the Bou Sbaa ignored them. The horse riders bolted south along the river. After they had watered their camels, Hamet and Hassar led their group toward the sea, where Hassar's women pitched tents in the sand. Having traveled nearly ninety miles in two days, they cooked a goat and ate voraciously.
They left the sea the following day around noon and climbed up a path in a ravine between two slopes at the foot of what Riley described as "high mountains." As rough as the terrain still was, the sailors rejoiced at seeing the solid slopes of hillsides, with nooks and crannies where plants and trees grew. However, a growing sense of uneasiness pervaded the Arabs now that they had left the desert proper. When one of Hassar's young sons found a three-gallon earthen pot used for boiling and started lashing it to his camel as they might do with any found item on the desert, Hassar and Hamet rebuked him harshly and made him leave it. They had entered a zone where it was dangerous to give or even suggest offense.
That evening they camped in a farm clearing next to a heap of barley straw, a sight wondrous to the sailors in its very ordinariness. They had reached cultivated land at last. They celebrated by roasting a slab of goat that had been hanging from one of the camels for four days. "Some of my comrades, as if their taste had become depraved by the rage of hunger, declared that putrid meat was far preferable to fresh; that it wanted neither salt nor pepper to give it a relish, and that if ever they got home again, they should prefer such food," Riley wrote, granting that the aged meat was tender and flavorful. After eating, they made beds of fresh straw. Having slept on hardpan or sand for so long, resting their heads on nothing but their bony arms, they found the straw "softer and sweeter than a bed of down strewn over with the most odoriferous flowers."
In the morning, Riley, Savage, Clark, Burns, Horace, and their masters approached Oued Noun from the south. Although Moulay Sulayman, like many sultans before him, could not claim to control this region, the 550-mile river rising in the mighty Atlas Mountains east of Marrakech and terminating at the Atlantic did mark the southern frontier of his realm, as he perceived it, and of civilization, as he defined it.
The sailors had no expectations of what the Noun should look like and thus no disappointment upon reaching a shallow, fifteen-foot-wide stream. Nor did they care that the famous river, drained of strength by drought, petered out somewhere to the west, not in the Atlantic but in a dead-end dune. They had reached the end of the desert at a place where the pebble-bottomed Noun curled through a cultivated valley lined with date trees and blooming shrubs. Cows, sheep, and donkeys grazed on green grass, and the sailors reveled in sights that two months before they would not even have noticed. They plunged their heads into the cool northwest-flowing stream and drank until their bellies swelled. Afterward they sought the shade of the fig trees and slept for two hours.
They had almost reached Wednoon, a town on the wadi forty miles inland; in theory, they were just a week's travel from Swearah. Moreover, Sidi Hamet was now on familiar turf. His wife was from Wednoon, and he had twice journeyed from there to Tombuctoo. Wednoon was a magnet for northbound travelers off the Sahara, a place where the long deprived found provisions and the pleasures of society, where the naďve lost their djellabas, and even the wise were often outmaneuvered by the wise and also powerful. Many Christians being carried north for ransom had suffered heartbreak and a protracted stay at Wednoon after being bought by local middlemen or powerbrokers, who often worked the men until they were nearly dead before selling them for head money.
After roaming the desert in captivity for two years, Robert Adams of the Charles had reached the town in August 1812. His hopes of continuing on to Swearah ended when an Arab named Abdallah bel Cossim bought him and put him to work in his fields.3 When Adams struck bel Cossim's cruel son, Hameda, in self-defense, he was beaten until blood dripped from his ears. When he refused to kiss Hameda's feet in apology, his master shackled him and barely
fed him for two months. Bel Cossim finally sold Adams to keep from losing his investment to starvation. During his captivity in Wednoon, Adams saw one sailor-slave stabbed in the chest and murdered by his master. Two others lost hope and converted to Islam, the mark of circumcision changing their lives forever.
Hamet knew that if his presence were made known in the town, he would risk being coerced into selling the Christians to Sheik Ali, his father-in-law, or to Sheik Beyrouk, the ruler of Wednoon. Thus he decided to bypass Wednoon. In the late afternoon he woke the sailors and took them to a nearby hut, where he had bought a honeycomb. Hassar's hungry men had caught wind of the meal and loitered around, hoping to share in it. Balancing a bowl containing the hive on his knees, Hamet distributed sections to the sailors with one hand while holding his gun in the other in case Hassar's men abandoned their tenuous hold on self-restraint. The sailors attacked their portions like bears, swallowing along with the rich honeycomb the tender young bees that filled it. Tears rolled down their hollow cheeks as they ate the calorie-laden gold. They were so sated that they fell asleep again under a palm tree until dark.
At night, after the Americans had gathered the firewood as usual, the Arabs fed them a pudding made with argan oil, a dietary staple in Souss, the only place where the argan tree grows and where it was not unusual to see goats sitting in the branches of trees, like so many overgrown crows, eating the oblong green fruit. The goats passed the fruit's pits, which were obtained in this way, Riley observed, by the women and children, who cracked the shells with stones and pressed the meat inside for oil. Except for Riley, who was too full from the honey to eat again, the sailors downed this pungent food, which they found delicious, preferring argan oil even to butter. They slept outside the thornbush hedge surrounding a whitewashed and domed saint house, the mausoleum of an Islamic holy man. Riley mentioned only that they had "found a good shelter," unaware of the significance of saint houses to the inhabitants of the region, who left kura, round stones, on the ground around them to absorb the baraka, blessings from God, of the holy man. The Kura were later fetched when needed and applied to various body parts for healing. If the sailors heard the hooting of an owl that night, it came, according to local Berber belief, from the pained soul of someone who had not fulfilled his religious duties during life. A bee or a fly could be a soul leaving a body and heading for heaven, and a bird, a creature never shot near a cemetery, a soul returning to the tomb.