Skeletons On The Zahara (15 page)

Riley estimated they had traveled forty miles. This was to be their bivouac. No shelter from the wind. No food.

Savage, who had started out with the group, had disappeared that day. Clark, Horace, Deslisle, and Riley all lay down together on the brittle earth, merging their scaly bodies into one mass to protect themselves from the wind. They rose again, however, when the women brought out a bowl of camel's milk and carefully doled out each man's share— about a pint. Still warm from the beast, the frothy liquid soothed their throats far better than the foul, gritty water in the goatskins and reminded them of all the comforts they lacked: their pipes and boots, their beds and their wives.

That night the Sahara showed the sailors just how distant those comforts were. A ceaseless wind buffeted their bare skin. Rigid stones poked into their backs and legs. Dust adhered to the moist surfaces of their wounds. Throughout the night, groans of pain and the wheezing, rattling, fretful sounds of dehydrated lungs emanated from them all. Despair counteracted their exhaustion, preventing sleep. They tossed and turned in a body, now to get relief from their spiky bed, now to expose a different face to gusts stinging with chill, grit, and sand.

It was, Riley said, “one of the longest and most dismal nights ever passed by any human beings.”

Separated from his shipmates, Robbins's fortunes had seesawed repeatedly that day. He was paired initially with Williams and Barrett. Shortly after ascending through the broiling chasm and crossing an expanse of hammada, Robbins's owner, whom Robbins would come to know as Ganus, and the owner of Williams and Barrett ascertained where the boat was and, like Riley's owner, bolted to the west, leaving the women in charge of the sailors. With their combined droves, some forty camels, the women pressed on to the southeast, while the sailors suffered the rack of the camels and chose, like Riley, to trot on foot whenever possible. In both cases, the women seemed to be under strict orders to make all speed and ignored their captives' cries of pain.

Around two in the afternoon, a pair of menacing cameleers suddenly appeared from over a dune. The men had been at the well that morning and now swooped down on them. The angry women tried to fend them off but were unarmed, and the men easily brushed them aside. Fellow tribesmen would not steal one another's camels, which could be identified and reclaimed at a tribal council, but after the confusing melee at the well, ownership of the sailors could be disputed, and possession would count for much. In a flash, the men forced Williams and Barrett to mount behind them and rode off to the south.

Robbins was devastated by the sudden loss of his companions. Ganus's agitated sisters made it worse when they decided to take for themselves a scarce commodity on the desert: fine cloth in the form of his pants. Other men might come and take their last Christian slave, they evidently reasoned, but they would not get the valuable cloth in the bargain. The women filled up Robbins's hat with water and gave him a scrap of an old blanket. He fastened this around his waist with thorns.

In the evening, the reduced party reached two tents lying in a hollow on the desert floor. As soon as the travelers were spotted, half a mile from camp, family members rushed out of the tents to greet them. They held hands, embraced, and kissed. Robbins struggled to comprehend the strange people with whom it was his fate to wander on the desert. He considered them callous and barbaric, and this display of tenderness jolted him. Even he was welcomed. The gleeful children, all naked, held out their hands for him to kiss. A wrinkled old woman with breasts hanging almost to her waist clasped his hand in hers and then put her fingers to her lips in the Arab way of greeting, telling him to do the same. In her haggard face, he admitted, there was “something of humanity.” But Robbins quickly resurrected his cynicism. They were only pleased to have a new slave “to serve them, and more probably because they hoped to make a sum of money by the sale of me,” he concluded.3

The camels were driven up to the tent, which sat on a vein of sand in a basin of macadam-hard earth. Some of the camels bore two goatskins of water, others four, slung in pairs over their backs.

Arab tents in the desert of Sahara

(from An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, 1817)

After they unloaded the beasts, Robbins was allowed a brief rest inside the family tent, a dozen sections of woven camel-hair cloth sewn together and held up by poles and entered through a four-foot-high opening facing away from the prevailing wind. Ganus, his wife, and their three children— two girls and a boy, the oldest about twelve— all lived there, sleeping on a mat under a skin blanket. They had wooden bowls, geddacks, for cooking and eating and a few tools, including an ax and a knife. Otherwise, it was as empty as the desert itself. They could pack it up or unload it under half an hour.

Outside, around this tent and the other, where Ganus's mother, Annbube, and sisters lived, camels gnawed at the scattered knee-high bushes. The hulking beasts with their exaggerated chomping jaws looked particularly absurd next to these stalks already stripped of their scant foliage. The smell of dry camel feces and urine permeated everything.

The squalor of the camp staggered Robbins. He was no longer on his way somewhere, he had arrived— not just at a desolate place, but at a bygone era. One of the girls motioned him to follow her outside. She swung the ax into the sand at the base of a bush stalk until the stalk fell, then told him to cut more. Undertaking his first task as a domestic slave without significant reflection, he delivered three loads and was told to sit in front of the tent.

The wrinkled woman was Sarah, Ganus's wife, though she looked old enough to be his mother. The women, who did all the domestic work and were expected to take care of the children while keeping up with the men on the trail, seemed the more worn out. They did not even break to nurse the young. Their breasts “hang down to such a length,” Robbins observed, “that they can furnish the child upon their backs with food . . . by thrusting them under their arms.”

Sarah scooped out a hole in the sand and sparked a fire in some dried weeds, using a flint and steel. She rolled dry camel dung in her hands and placed it on the flame, blowing until it ignited too. She then laid the bush wood on top and dropped several fist-size stones onto the blaze. After slicing a morsel of Robbins's salt pork into a wooden bowl, she took the rocks from the fire and put them in the bowl, too. Robbins salivated as the meat sizzled on the scalding stones. The nomadic Arabs rarely cooked, and they ate little solid food. During lean times, they lived almost entirely on camel's milk. Because she was a Muslim, Sarah would not eat pork, but she fed the meat to her son, Elle, and her two daughters, and she placed a piece for Robbins in his hat. As a non-Muslim, Robbins would never be served from the same eating or drinking vessels the Arabs used. More than once, he would forfeit an opportunity to drink water for lack of a bowl.

Robbins spent that night on the sand under a corner of Ganus's family tent, the first night he or any of the sailors had had shelter since the shipwreck. Around eleven o'clock, after the camels had cooled enough to be milked, the Arabs woke him and gave him a bowl of zrig. Of his master's twenty camels, three were in milk, and each night they produced about six quarts, which was mixed with an equal amount of water and served among eight people. Robbins was given about two pints— the smallest share and only a fraction of the amount a man would require to sustain himself in the desert.4 He could do nothing but take what was given. And Robbins was the best cared for of all the crew.

Later that night, Ganus returned. Robbins was stunned that his master had been able to reach the remote sliver of beach where they had abandoned the broken longboat and return so quickly. But he had plunder to prove it. Ganus and presumably the master of Williams and Barrett, with whom he had set out, were the first of the Arabs to reach the wreck, and the two had taken all they had found. According to Robbins, Ganus's share included a sack of rice the crew had ditched because it had been ruined by salt water.

Ganus had also retrieved a slab of pork that the sailors had not been able to carry with them, as well as a variety of salvage, including a scrap of sail, pieces of rope, and something that pierced Robbins with intense nostalgia: the brig's red, white, and blue colors.

The next morning, Riley and his three comrades received nothing but half a pint of camel's milk to share, barely a swallow for each man. After dawn, the Arab women hastily ordered them to drive the camels on. As they set out, their bare, mangled feet sent shocks of pain through their bodies. Soon they were trotting on bleeding soles to keep up with the drove.

After a while they reached a cluster of three or four tents in a depression where their masters were waiting for them. They were mingled in with other men, all heavily armed with double-barreled muskets, scimitars, and daggers. Despite the smiles and apparent decorum, all was not well here. Riley felt the strangers' eyes greedily examining him and his crew and sensed the tension roiling beneath the surface. Four rabbits had just entered a den of wolves.

It was not long before the wolves began to bite— one another. As the shouting and arguing grew more vehement, the Arabs drew and brandished their weapons. Each side grabbed onto the sailors, who found themselves the objects of another tug-of-war.

As the struggle ensued, Riley tried to comprehend the laws that governed these strange people. It was not quite a free-for-all. He could see that even as they pulled, they jockeyed verbally for the moral high ground. Possession was important, but just because one of the nomads took control of a sailor did not mean he would get to keep him. They continued arguing bitterly even as they all set out traveling in the same direction.

For the next several hours, the sailors found themselves shifted among different Arabs. In the end, Clark and Horace were hauled off separately by new owners. Riley, who had sworn to himself to protect Horace as a son, was powerless to prevent it. He and Deslisle remained with their original master.

They reached more tents around noon. The women in this camp examined the tattered Christians, whose skin had turned to chaff before the sun. Instead of arousing sympathy, the spectacle ignited a fit of disgust in women deeply encumbered with superstitious fears. In a culture where females were often denounced as conduits of evil, any contact with Christians was dangerous. They reviled the men with shrill curses and spat on them.

Such startling behavior had been related by Pierre de Brisson before Riley: “two of my fellows in misfortune were reduced to a most dreadful state; the women especially, far more ferocious than the men, took a pleasure in tormenting them.” Charles Cochelet, a French survivor of a shipwreck off the west coast of Africa in 1819, also noted that if the women “by any accident happened to touch [us] . . . instantly spat in their hands, in order to wash them, testifying by that the horror and disgust which our presence inspired.”

The Sahrawi women's potential for brutality was still being reported in 1934. During a battle outside the Spanish fort at Cape Juby, a mail plane arrived and scared away an attacking tribe. The Izarguien women— members of what some called the most civilized of the region's tribes— took advantage of the opportunity to dash onto the battlefield and gouge out the eyeballs of their enemy's dead.

Toward nightfall the sailors and their captors arrived at a large depression filled with dozens of tents. It now appeared to Riley that they had been heading here all along for the purpose of settling the tribesmen's conflicting claims to the sailors. That this quarrelsome group was united in any but the loosest sense was almost impossible to see. As far as Riley could tell, they had only one outward symbol of their kinship: four lean white mares, which seemed to be communal property and their greatest pride. To the nomads, the horses meant speed and maneuverability in battle and in hunting ostriches, much prized for their feathers, which were used as a currency on the Sahara. Having none of the camels' natural defenses against sand, heat, and drought, however, the mares had to be coddled. Indeed, they were treated far better than the sailors.

Riley's group was joined by Robbins, who arrived on foot, looking like a caveman, his unshaven face and hair now merged with a cape of skins hanging to his knees. Ganus had made his sisters return Robbins's pants, though now truncated at the knees, and he had given him shoes and a section of the ship's colors. Ganus's son had forced Robbins to trade the latter for the quilt of skins. In his pocket, Robbins nervously rubbed a string of knots: he had already begun to keep a calendar of his captivity. Others of the crew, weary, discouraged, and shedding skin, arrived throughout the day and were kept in the shelter of a tent while the Arabs prepared to debate their fate.5

Riley estimated that 150 nomad men of all ages, including some who were remarkably old, had convened here for the yemma, or tribal council. For the first time, he was able to listen carefully to their conversations and to clearly make out their words and names. His own master was Mohammed. Others were called Hamet, Abdallah, Seid, Sideullah. He had also heard Fatima, Ezimah, and Sarah for the women. By these names, he determined that they were “Mohamedans,” and thus “Arabs or Moors.”6

Arabs are often defined simply as Arabic-speaking people; thus, Riley was correct. They were also Muslims, further uniting them to the Arab world. Their ancestors had been converted by the waves of Islamic Arabs who had crossed northern Africa from the Middle East beginning in the seventh century; especially, in the west, by the Beni Hassan, a division of the camel-riding Maqil bedouins of Yemen, who had raided and rampaged across the northern Sahara, stopping only when they hit the Atlantic at Oued Draa in 1218. At first, the Sanhaja tribes that traveled between the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara had deemed the Maqil “locusts,” pests that would devour and depart, but these Maqil warriors had come to stay.

Over time, the Maqil, fierce in nature but small in number, fused with and were subsumed by the Sanhaja tribes, a Berber people who were also the primary ancestors of the Sahrawis— including the Kabyles of Algeria and the Tuareg of the central desert. A strange thing happened, however: the culture of the smaller group came to dominate that of the larger. The Sanhaja of the western desert became largely Arab, adopting Islam and the Hassaniya dialect of Arabic. By 1800, these Arabized tribes had spread across the western Sahara and south into Mauritania, vassalizing the weak and creating a caste system.