by Dean King
“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.
Among 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 shimmering 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.
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 tha
n 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.