by Dean King
They encountered no one as they silently made their way to a clearing in the center of the copse. Still, they did not risk lighting a fire. The sailors, like the Arabs, had nothing to eat that night, but at least they were protected from the wind. They slept soundly in the shelter of the oasis and in the morning had to be roused from their dreams.
At daylight on October 14, the group watered the camels and filled a goatskin at a brackish well near the bushes. Riley and his men tried eating some of the leaves but found them too salty. The Bou Sbaa brusquely urged them onto the trail again.
Before long, they dropped down a steep bank into the lowest part of the wadi, where each step of the camels broke through a crust of salt. Riley gazed in awe at the view in front of him. They had entered what appeared to be a vast, ancient bay, with embankments rising hundreds of feet in places and signs that it had once been filled nearly to the top with water.
Riley and his men now stood in what the Scottish trader Donald Mackenzie would describe in 1875 as a channel connecting the “Great Mouth,” on the coast near Cape Juby, to the “great depression called El Juf” (now called the Tindouf Depression), which he claimed was five hundred miles long and reached nearly to Tombuctoo. Mackenzie proposed clearing the sandbar that blocked the mouth, thus allowing the Atlantic Ocean to flood El Juf and create a shipping lane into the heart of Africa. In this way, Britain could advance trade with the interior, generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of profits while eliminating the dangerous and costly trans-Saharan caravan. Mackenzie’s grandiose scheme was embraced by London’s newspapers, which relished the vision of steamships running from Liverpool to Tombuctoo, “sending civilized influence into the interior of this vast continent” and returning with ivory, gold, and gum. However, it never came to pass.
Victorian England’s fantasy for this place could hardly have contrasted more with reality. After traveling several hours through the wasteland, Hamet and his group spotted two men driving camels down the sand slopes. It was quickly grasped by every man in the party that whatever food those riders possessed, the group had to partake of. Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah rode off to intercept them while the sailors waited behind. From a distance, they watched the meeting. The two riders then continued on their way with Abdallah while Hamet and Seid returned.
“There are goats there,” Hamet announced, pointing to the east-southeast. “We shall have meat soon.” With threats and harsh words, Hamet and Seid drove the sailors up the most direct route, a hot, two-mile climb over steep sand hills. Coho stumbled on his lame leg, rising slowly. A little later, he toppled again. The brothers cursed the poor beast, summarily pronounced it foonta, and, without hesitating, left it behind. Driven to extremes by heat, hunger, and trail weariness, they seemed dangerous now, Riley thought, like “madmen.”
Hamet, frustrated by the pace, pushed ahead alone. The sailors continued up the incline under the watch of Seid. At a peculiar cavity in the sand, Seid sniffed the ground like a dog and announced that the entrails of a camel had been cooked. As they emerged from the Saguia onto the desert plain again, they heard a gun fire, then saw Hamet driving a frightened shepherd and his flock of goats toward them.
Seid waded into the flock, culled out four stout goats, and drove them to Riley, who later wryly noted that the two Bou Sbaa “considered possession as a very important preliminary” to making a deal. What they did not realize was that the frightened shepherd was not alone. Like the great Bou Sbaa patriarch summoning the lions to defend his flock, the shepherd produced, out of nowhere, a wife. She was as defiant as her husband was cowed, scolding the bully brothers with contempt: “I will not part with any of the goats, even if my husband will. What is your name?”
Taken aback, Hamet told her.
“Sidi Hamet,” she crowed, “how can you be such a coward as to rob an unarmed man? The whole country will ring with your infamous name and actions, Sidi Hamet!”
Seeing the ugly looks on Hamet’s and Seid’s starving faces, the shepherd begged her to be quiet, but to no avail. Eyes bulging, she continued to rant: “I will find a man who will avenge this injustice, Sidi Hamet!”
What the shepherd could not accomplish, Seid’s musket raised to his eye and trained on her chest did. He warned her that if she said another word he would fire.
Hamet took advantage of the sudden hush to tell her that not far back they had left a good camel that had tired and that they would trade for the goats. Although she plainly did not believe him, and her mistrust would be borne out if she managed to find Coho, she had little choice but to accept. She insisted on swapping a different goat for one of the ones that Seid had selected, and the deal was done. Hamet and Seid roped the four goats together by their necks, turned them over to Riley, and then rode ahead to find the best passage back to their trail.
As hunger, thirst, the oppressive midday heat, and the yielding sand all conspired to sap their wills, Riley pressed his men to keep up the pace. Spiky euphorbias, bulbous gray plants hoarding their moisture in poisonous latex that not even the thirstiest animal would attempt to drink, studded their path. Savage, unable to resist temptation any longer, picked the leaves of a short green weed that grew among the euphorbias. “It’s delicious,” he announced, in a demented voice, “as sweet as honey.”
“Savage, do not swallow it,” Riley urged. “It might be poisonous. Wait and let me ask Sidi Hamet if it’s safe.”
Savage ignored him. He found more of the weed and ate it. Riley examined some and warned him that he thought it looked like Indian tobacco, better known as gagroot. Over the next two hours as Riley, Horace, and Savage, all on foot, tried to keep up with the goats and with Burns and Clark on the camels, Savage’s stomach convulsed in spells until he was heaving blood. His pace slowed to a crawl. Soon the camels had disappeared over the horizon. Riley now made a calculated decision, which he later stated unapologetically: “I could not wait for him.”
Faced with being left behind, Savage found reserves he did not know he still had. Over and over he stopped to retch and then ran to catch up. Riley, focused on tending to the goats and not losing sight of the camels, encouraged him but did not slow down. As he and Horace crested the summit of a hill, they stopped and scanned the terrain to find the camels, but they were nowhere to be seen. They searched further on the horizon, but all they saw was a narrow dark stripe shimmering between dune and sky. At first they did not know what it was. Riley took it to be an “extensive ridge of high woodland.” Horace disagreed. “It’s too dark and too smooth for land,” he said.
Riley stared hard. The boy was right. It was the ocean. Riley clapped him joyfully on the back. For a moment they forgot hunger and thirst as they breathed deeply. They could smell the sea. They could taste it in their mouths. They laughed. It tasted, they thought, like freedom.
Riley found camel tracks near a breach in the face of the bluffs. He and Horace herded the goats over the edge and picked their way down the steep dunes, followed at a distance by Savage. They reached what he deemed a “tolerably inclined plane” of sand covered with lustrous egg-shaped stones in hues of ocher, charcoal, and maroon. The stones had been buffed as smooth as bone china by ancient seas, whose violent surf had once crashed there before receding to its present reach. Riley scanned the coast for the others but could neither see nor hear any sign of them. The flush rays of the sun setting across the sea gave horizontal surfaces a rosy brilliance, etched with deep shadows. To the north, cliff faces receded in what seemed to Riley like infinite regression, imbued with futility and loneliness. If the sight had not been so magnificent, it would have crushed him.
Suddenly, Hamet emerged from behind a knoll and called him. They were much closer than Riley would have thought possible. Behind the dune and under a tarp of skins, Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah sat with several families, while camels foraged around the hidden camp. The Arabs instructed the seamen, who had just walked thirty miles, to collect brush on the steep bank and to place it around the camp as a windscreen and
for use in the fire.
Savage was still retching. Riley made him a bed and left him to rest. When he returned with an armful of brush, however, he found Seid beating him for not helping. Riley pleaded with him to leave Savage alone. He tried to convince him that he was too sick to work and that he himself would do Savage’s chores. Seid grudgingly relented.
Hamet slaughtered a goat, severing its head and holding its neck over a bowl to catch the blood. He slashed its hide free of its legs and extracted the carcass from the skin through the neck cavity, preserving the skin in one piece. He butchered the meat and gave the intestines to the seamen to boil. They drank the resulting broth and shared a small piece of meat as well. Riley called the meal “a seasonable relief.”
In the night, the Arabs fed the men a barley pudding and camel’s milk, but they refused to serve Savage, who was still ill. Riley kept a piece of meat for him and gave him some of his pudding. Hamet saved Savage’s portion of pudding to give to him later, but in the morning, while they were preparing to break camp, Abdallah devoured it.
They now proceeded between the bluffs and the shore, along a plain of sandstone and lime-cemented sands, the seafloor of another age, filled with the fossils of fish and mollusks and littered with centuries’ worth of bleached snail shells. Although there were now five goats to tend to, Hamet having bought two more from the nomads, Riley did not have to worry about losing his way if he lagged behind; he only needed to follow the coast. Savage had a long day ahead, but Riley was in a better position to help him now that everyone had eaten and the Bou Sbaa were less edgy.
At dusk they came upon an Arab encampment. Hamet and Seid ingratiated themselves with the leader, a man named Hassar. His band was also traveling north, and in the course of the evening Hamet and Hassar agreed that they should proceed together for the increased safety of all. Hassar had other motives as well. He was intrigued by the Christian slaves. As the hour grew later and the camaraderie warmer, he made an offer of camels and other goods for Horace. Seid, who claimed to personally own both the boy and Savage, began to haggle with Hassar.
This was an ominous and disturbing turn of events. When two Arabs begin negotiating, they expect to reach a deal. Asking the price of an item or making a counteroffer, as Seid did, commits one to a process in which two reasonable people acting in good faith should be able to arrive at an agreement. (This explains why a Westerner who casually asks the price of an object for sale in an Arab market often finds the merchant overly aggressive, and also why, when the Westerner suddenly breaks off a negotiation, the merchant is insulted.) Hassar now had a right to expect his offer to be either accepted or countered. When Riley realized what was taking place, he objected. Seid scoffed at him.
Only the influence and diplomacy of Hamet prevented Seid from closing the deal. Hassar, who had offered camels and merchandise for Horace, backed down calmly, perhaps figuring that if they traveled together, time was on his side. It was clear that Seid was eager to sell the boy.
Over the next two days, the group traveled north about forty miles, passing more camps and more stands of bushes. Hamet slaughtered another goat, feeding the sailors meat and entrails. Hassar’s wife, Tamar, whom Riley called “an uncommonly intelligent woman,” fixed them lhasa and talked to Riley in broken Spanish. When she was younger, she had helped rescue some Spaniards whose vessel had wrecked on the coast. Her father had held three of the sailors hostage while she had accompanied the Spanish captain to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands to retrieve goods for their ransom. It was simply the way things worked on the Sahara. Tamar promised Riley that he and his shipmates would not go hungry in her company.
Near dark on the second day, they reached the mouth of a deep wadi, probably, though Riley did not name it, the Draa, a thousand-mile-long channel that drains the southern slopes of the Anti-Atlas Mountains. They descended to it by the sea and discovered an Arab camp on the beach. Hamet stopped to talk to the head of the camp. The man then took Riley aside and asked him in a patois of Spanish and Arabic, “Have you a friend in Swearah?”
“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 hars
h 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?