by Dean King
They mounted the camel and rode until near sunrise, when they entered a friq where men were roasting a camel. Robbins’s mouth ached for the charred meat, but all Ganus could get for him was a helping of boiled blood. Robbins placed it in the crown of his hat. “Kul, Robbins,” urged Ganus. But his mouth was so dry he was afraid he would not be able to swallow it.
They took off again as the sun approached the rim of the earth and oblique morning light crept over the rippling crests of sand waves, leaving the troughs in darkness. Fatigue and the numbing cold lulled Robbins into a trance. His mind wandered. Had he been on board the Commerce out at sea, this would have been the sunrise watch, the bow rising and falling on choppy waves, the pangs of hunger in his gut soon to be appeased by Dick’s breakfast and hot coffee.
When the camel topped a hill, Robbins was jarred from his reverie. To the east, the sun, a vivid orange-pink ball, rose above the horizon, a glowing ogre head approaching from the far side of the world. In front of it, a silhouette of camels stretched across a valley and over a dune. In a place of few landmarks and fewer maps, the nomad’s standard unit of measure for distance was the span over which a camel could be seen clearly, a little over a mile. Robbins, accustomed to discerning an object and judging its direction and distance from a rocking masthead, quickly pegged them at about one camel away.
There was a brief pause to take in the sight, and then Ganus goaded his animal’s neck, directing it toward the camel train’s place of origin. Less than an hour later, they loped into a narrow valley dotted with tents, where Robbins listened intently when Ganus asked an old woman, “Where are the kelb en-Nasrani?”—the Christian dogs.6
She pointed toward a hill to the east. As they approached it, Robbins saw smoke rising from a fire. Their camel, having covered more than forty miles that night, stumbled over the brink of the dune, sinking in deep sand as it instinctively lurched toward the camp at the bottom of another narrow valley. For the second time that morning, Robbins smelled roasting meat, and it nearly crazed him with hunger.
Dismounting after Ganus, he blindly approached the fire, only half in his senses, intending to beg or steal. What he saw brought him up short: Scattered around the campsite, tending to the duties of packing, were Clark, Burns, Horace, Savage, and Riley.7 Immediately Robbins forgot his hunger, his thirst, his misery and sank to his knees. “Something whispered to me that my deliverance was near,” he later recalled, “that the day of my redemption had come.”
Ganus, a short man, approached Hamet and Seid, who towered over him, and the three fell into conversation. Ganus intended to sell Robbins. As they discussed his fate, Robbins, still marveling at seeing his friends, traded some of the boiled blood in his hat to Horace for a piece of gristle. The gristle was inedible, so he swallowed it whole.
Riley edged toward his new masters and Ganus. When it became clear to him that Hamet was refusing to buy Robbins, he got down on his knees and begged him to. Hamet told him to rise, insisting he had nothing left to trade. Although the deal for Hogan had failed the day before, he had since bought a young camel. His claim was not a ploy. He became irritated, kicked sand at Riley, and ordered his group, including Savage’s master, Abdallah, who had joined as a partner, to begin moving up the dune.
Robbins was stunned. His shipmates began to look away, as if he were a condemned man whom they could not face in his worst moment. He had come tantalizingly close to the hope of being saved. Instead, he was about to be left behind.
Riley could not interfere any more with Hamet. He knew it was dangerous to linger. He embraced Robbins. “Keep heart,” he said in an anguished whisper. “Do your best to stay healthy, and to encourage the others. You will find a means of liberation. If I make it, I will do everything I can to retrieve you.”
As his five shipmates trudged up the dune to begin a grueling march across the desert, Robbins broke down in tears. “While I rejoiced at their good fortune,” he later wrote, “I grieved, in the very depths of sorrow, at my own calamities.” His best chance to escape the desert had just passed before his eyes, and once again Robbins was alone.
PART THREE
Journeys and
Sandstorms
chapter 11
Is It Sweet?
Phoebe Riley had seen nothing like it before. An oppressive heat, as if a mysterious visitation from faraway equatorial regions, had permeated Middletown for several days. Then on Friday, September 22, the Gale of 1815 hit the coast of New England like a blast of grapeshot. Waves six feet high broke on the streets of New London. At Potapaug, a falling tree crushed a stretch of the ropewalk, the roof of the Episcopal church blew off, and two ships sank. As the furious wind whipped up the sea, brackish rain salted fields a mile inland and coated apples on trees with a briny frost. Winds funneled up the Connecticut River, lifting roofs, knocking down barns, and scattering hay in the meadows. All along the coast, merchant seamen, having already fastened down or stowed everything that could move, cursed and prayed for their vessels.
Left alone with five children, one a baby, Phoebe had her hands full on a normal day; to watch the Valley flood and blow down around them and to have to try to calm her brood’s fears at the same time was almost too much.
The wind had started to blow on Wednesday. Soggy and sullen, it dropped down chimneys and suffocated fires in fireplaces. On Thursday, Phoebe and young James had closed the shutters, put the animals in the barn, and brought in everything that might blow away. By Friday, the wind was howling at fifty miles an hour. Still young and supple, her husband’s poplars, the ones he had planted on Prospect Hill and then had to abandon, bowed to the ground, but they were no longer hers to trouble with. How they had dreamed: a grand spa with a four-story brick mansion, pools of bubbling mineral water for bathing, broad esplanades for strolling, and formal gardens. But that chimerical vision was as far away as her husband now seemed.
On the river, the men battled the rising tide. They secured wharves and warped down vessels to keep them from being driven ashore. The houses nearby stood on foundations of brownstone, but if the banks flooded, they would soon be under and, like the vessels, pummeled by fallen trees and other large objects caught in the sweep of the floodtide.
But Phoebe had even darker thoughts in the back of her mind. Some said the storm and its torrid air had blown all the way across the Atlantic from Africa. Her husband would be in constant danger from such weather. Everyone was talking about the disappearance of the Épervier, which had set out from Gibraltar in early July. Decatur had dispatched the brig with a copy of the new U.S. treaty with Algiers, ten captives he had freed, and Captain Lewis and Lieutenant Neale, who had married sisters just before embarking for the Mediterranean. Word had it that the British West India fleet had caught a glimpse of the brig in a vicious gale that sank a number of the fleet’s merchant ships. The Épervier had not been heard from again.
The Commerce had been crossing the Atlantic at exactly the same time. Phoebe had not received a letter from James since New Orleans. This in itself was not a cause for concern, but now she could not help wondering what might have happened. Had this gale hit the Commerce at sea? And if it was this fierce after blowing all the way from Africa, what must it have been like for her husband and his men?
As the citizens of Middletown set about repairing their waterlogged village, part of the crew of the Commerce, with visions of Connecticut’s pristine fields in their hearts, set off across the Sahara. Riley, of course, knew nothing of the storm or of Phoebe’s recent worries, but he ached to see her and the children, all the more so now that he saw a glimmer of hope of one day returning to them.
A band of Oulad Brahim rode along briefly with Hamet, Seid, Abdallah, and the five sailors, bidding them a raucous farewell and getting a head start on disputes over future transactions that might never be. The clamor gave Sideullah a chance to commit a last bit of malice against Riley, whom he and his family had “shunned as they would a pestilence” ever since selling him. While Riley was
watching the drove, his former master sneaked up to one of the camels and slashed a rope holding a large slab of meat from the recent slaughter. Riley tried to stop him from taking it, but his shouts went unheard. Sideullah merely glared at him with disdain and rode off with his prize, leaving Riley dumbfounded that his former master, a leader of worship and a respected member of his tribe, would brazenly steal another man’s food, and troubled over what his own punishment might be when the loss was discovered.
While Riley was thus distracted, Hamet’s big camel strayed off, following a drove heading northwest. The old jmel stood out like a ship of the line among frigates. Riley tore off in pursuit, finally catching him after an exhausting run. Hamet put Horace, Burns, and Savage on this towering animal. They clung to its packsaddle and one another in a shifting stew of flesh and sweat, of matted hair and woolly beards. Burns, wearing an old jacket, and Horace and Savage, draped in ratty goatskins, looked like desperadoes. Riley, shirtless, and Clark, clad in a fragment of sail, rode on Seid’s camel while Seid shared Abdallah’s. Hamet straddled the new, young camel, which he was breaking in, bareback, behind the hump.
They rode eastward at a purposeful, long-striding rack, a beating for the feeble sailors, made worse by the constant sun on their backs. At midday they stopped in a shallow depression to adjust the saddles. Hamet pulled a checked shirt out of a saddlebag and gave it to Riley, declaring that he had stolen it for him and that he had tried to find another for Horace but failed. “Put it on, Rais,” he said, looking at Riley’s raw skin. “Your poor back needs a covering.” Riley kissed Hamet’s hand and put it on. Although he was surprised that even Hamet, on whose trustworthiness he had staked his future, would steal from a fellow tribesman, he could not deny that he was grateful that he had.
The rest of that afternoon and the following day, Hamet pushed them east across the hammada, stopping only to feed the camels on thornbush and at night to camp by thornbush. The second night, they shared out the last of the rank rumen water, about four quarts, equally among the eight men. Swearah lay north by northeast, but Hamet continued to head east, deeper into the desert.
Riley would at first figure, based on his observations of the sun’s height at noon, that they traveled as far south as 20º N latitude, into the deepest, driest section of the western Sahara. This would have placed them in what is today the region of Adrar, Mauritania. But this is a hilly region, and Riley did not encounter hills on this leg of the journey; nor did he mention crossing a long wadi that bisects the route.
It is probable that Hamet’s course was more northerly than Riley originally thought (in fact, a map that accompanies later editions of his memoir shows a northeasterly route). Hamet might have been making for a water source in the granite of Zug, or even more likely, for Assouard, a remote wadi, where the Oulad Bou Sbaa were known to congregate.
It is certain that Hamet’s path through the stubby sand hills and shallow valleys took them at times toward all easterly points of the compass. The route would have been impossible to accurately track without scientific devices and the means for keeping notes. Because the region was uncharted, Riley did not even have a template on which to transfer his memories.
It seems likely that they did not travel as fast or as far as Riley believed either. He recorded that the camels reached speeds of up to seven miles an hour and, on consecutive days, covered 63, 105, and 50 miles. Though camels are rightly prized for their stamina, the speed and distance they can travel has long been a matter of lore. In 1791, William Lempriere reported that they ran so fast “their riders are obliged to tie a sash round their waists to preserve the power of respiration” (p. 708). But Lempriere, who said it was normal for camels to cover five hundred miles in four days, had been fooled to a substantial degree. In his 1959 classic, Arabian Sands, desert explorer Wilfred Thesiger told of once dashing 115 miles on camelback in twenty-three hours and covering 450 miles in nine days, but that was on the “finest riding camels in the Sudan.”
With only four camels for eight men, five of whom were frail, ailing, and inexperienced riders, the pace of Hamet’s company could not have approached Thesiger’s, nor even that of the French adventurer Michel Vieuchange, who journeyed to Smara, the forbidden city of the warrior-sheik Ma el Anin on the Saguia el-Hamra, in 1930. “I know now that I can cover 110 to 120 miles in forty-eight hours, going day and night, by camel and on foot,” he scrawled in his diary, but his camels could not keep up the pace. As he fled back to civilization, Vieuchange had to abandon two of his three mounts, which were too exhausted to continue. In 1817, Robert Adams, of the Charles, gave the most unvarnished assessment of a camel’s pace and a more applicable benchmark for Riley’s rate of travel: A fresh, lightly burdened camel, he said, will travel from eighteen to twenty-five miles a day, but when loaded down and poorly fed, as is usual, only about ten to fifteen miles.
On the second day, September 29, Hamet led the party across another stretch of gnarled tamarisks, saltwort, and stones.1 After the Arabs prayed at noon, they all caught camel urine in their hands and drank it. Hamet assured Riley that the Arabs considered camel urine good for the stomach. Indeed, as is recorded in the Sunnah, the book of traditions relating to the Prophet Muhammad, the Prophet himself had directed its use for medicinal purposes. Riley noted that the sailors preferred the beasts’ urine to their own.
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 wher
e 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.