Skeletons On The Zahara (20 page)

Undeterred, Riley now urged Hamet to buy Savage and Clark. “It is impossible,” Hamet told him again, “for two men to transport four Christians to Swearah. It would be easier to lead gazelles through a lion's den.” To get to Swearah, they would have to run an eight-hundred-mile gauntlet of bandits and warlords, who would think nothing of killing him and Seid to steal their slaves. It was not simply a matter of greed, it was also a question of power and control of lands. No sheik would let them pass carrying such a valuable cargo without paying a tribute. It would belittle him. Hamet and Seid had only a small amount of money and no power base from which to forge alliances and promise goodwill in kind. They were anybody's prey. The more Christians they had, the slower they would travel and the more attention they would attract.

Riley turned a deaf ear to this reasoning. He fell to his knees and begged Hamet to buy Savage and Clark, but this time he had gone too far. “Skute. Ferknâ ferknêe!” Hamet roared. Shut up. Leave me alone! He swatted Riley with the flat of his scimitar blade as a warning.

The following morning, however, Riley, like a bulldog, pursued Hamet again. He recited the names of all his crew, even those whose whereabouts were unknown, urging the trader to inquire about them. This time, Hamet insisted only that he would not buy Clark, who, he said, would die within three days. Riley swore he would pay the same amount for Clark even if he died along the way.

That seemed likely. Though he had rebounded slightly from dehydration, Clark's sun-scalded scalp had cracked open in raw, oozing sores. Hamet and Seid pushed his matted hair apart with sticks and prodded his patchy flesh. This led to a closer inspection of Riley as well and muttered conversation between the brothers. Seid was not convinced that they should buy any of the sailors. They were emaciated, and their skin was as riddled as a tent in its fifth year.

Realizing that the starving sailors had to be fed before the journey, Hamet bought a worn-out jmel, or male camel, from Sideullah for just a blanket. In the desert there was no such thing as a bargain. Both men knew that the old beast, which could no longer keep up with the drove, was fit only for slaughter, and since by Islamic custom meals were communal among desert dwellers, anyone who could get there had a right to join in. In reality, Hamet had traded not for a whole camel but for the right to play host: to control the time and place of the slaughter, to feed his slaves, and to keep anything left over, which he would dry for the journey ahead. Even the withered jmel, with its flaccid hump, would produce several hundred pounds of rich blood, marrow, flesh, and organs, an abundance of food to the nomads, who were accustomed to living off camel's milk, water, and roots for weeks or months on end. That is not to say that Hamet would not try to keep the slaughter preparations as quiet as possible.

At midnight, he roused Riley and Clark by clucking. He had bought Clark for a pittance and had also bought but not yet taken possession of Savage. Hamet directed the two men to bring the brush and camel dung they had collected. In the light of the moon and stars, he, Seid, and Sideullah led them and the camel wordlessly to a secluded gully, where they forced the beast to its knees. Seid tied a noose, looped it under the jmel's fat jaw, and pulled its head around until its snout reached its rump. He lashed the free end of the rope to the firm base of its tail. Hamet placed a copper kettle under the camel's neck about a foot from its chest. The aged bull strained briefly as Hamet drew his scimitar through its flesh, opening a vein on the right side of its neck near its shoulders. A dark stream thrummed inside the kettle, the melancholy sound echoing on the silent dunes, as Riley watched a flame of sticks and dung sputter to life and grow, crackling and sending sparks into the night, like fireflies.

When the kettle held about a gallon and a half, Hamet and Sideullah set it on the fire. Riley squatted in the orange glow of the blaze, warming his shins, which were raw to the bone, as the traders stirred the simmering blood.

The smell drifted over the hill to the tents, waking the hungry nomads, who poured across the dune. At first they made a show of helping with the butchery, but by the time Hamet set the pot in front of the captain, saying “Kul, Riley,”— Eat, Riley— they had crowded around like hyenas. Riley and Clark dug into the steaming blood with their bare hands. The mob surged forward. Hamet and Seid attempted to fend them off, but there were too many. The two sailors devoured the congealed blood, now as thick as calf's liver, as fast as they could, while the nomads battered them, snatching handfuls of the rich food. When the blood was gone, the frenzy abated as quickly as it had started. The nomads turned their attention to stripping the hide and dressing the camel. They placed the small intestines, with their contents still inside, in the kettle, along with the liver and lungs. One man slit open the camel's rumen— its first and largest stomach, where it partly digests its food before regurgitating it as cud— reached inside with a bowl, and scooped out some of the chunky green liquid. Soon the concoction bubbled on the fire.

At no time were fewer than half a dozen Bou Sbaa working on the carcass. The ones who arrived first warded off those who came up afterward. Then they disappeared with their loot and were replaced. In the dark of the early morning, they managed to carry off more than half the camel's hide, bones, and flesh. Hamet and Seid worked and kept watch. While their presence limited the thievery, they avoided confrontations that might start an out-and-out battle, which they could not win.

Riley had never seen anything like it and later expressed his dismay: “Though our masters saw the natives in the very act of stealing and carrying off their meat, they could not prevent them, fearing worse consequences than losing it: it being a standing maxim among the Arabs to feed the hungry if in their power, and give them drink, even if the owner of the provisions be obliged to rob himself and his own family to do it.”

Wilfred Thesiger, the famed British explorer of Arabia's Empty Quarter in the 1940s, was equally perturbed by this practice. “I . . . knew from bitter experience that while we were in inhabited country every Bedu for miles around would come to feed at our expense,” he wrote. “It would be impossible to refuse them food: in the desert one may never turn a guest away, however unwanted he may be” (p. 79). T. E. Lawrence observed that “the desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more” (p. 84).

While Riley found the custom barbaric, Hamet understood the realities of the desert and was not aggrieved. Fair or not, the Sahrawis shared in one another's fate, the strong providing for the weak, including children, the elderly, and slaves. This social pact allowed them to exist on the harshest terrain on earth. In accordance with the teachings of the Quran, Hamet expected nothing in return and received nothing. When the entrails were cooked, he and Seid fought for their own share.

Outside the circle of light, Riley and Clark dozed fitfully. As their dehydrated bodies struggled to digest the congealed blood, they became overheated, and a craving for water vexed them. In the buff morning light, Riley saw a teenage boy plunge his head into the camel's gaping rumen and drink. Hamet, seeing Riley's interest, told him to remove the boy and take his place.

Riley scooped the nauseating cavity with a bowl and poured the ropy green fluid down his throat. What he swallowed could not have been more refreshing had it been the springwater he once dreamed of turning into a spa. “Though its taste was exceedingly strong,” he later wrote with his usual equanimity, “yet it was not salt, and it allayed my thirst.”4 Clark followed suit.

As Hamet, Seid, and their tenacious helpers continued to butcher the camel and spread the meat out to dry in the sun, the other nomads and their children hovered around, wheedling, begging, and pilfering. The result was as inevitable as the irifi. By nightfall, Hamet had less than fifteen pounds of meat left. Any hope of having a full stomach for the duration of the journey was shot.

The notoriety of Hamet's feast did have a positive result for the sailors, however. As word spread through the tribe that the traders were preparing to depart and that they were buying the sailors, other owners of Commerce crewmen scrambled to reach them. Around noon, Horace was delivered by his former master, who had stopped feeding him after being forced to sell him. In three days, he had drunk little and eaten nothing but a few snails, miserable provisions even by Saharan standards. Hamet had saved him some boiled camel meat and entrails, and Riley brought him a bowl of rumen water to wash it down.

While the boy had been expected, Burns had not. Shortly after Horace arrived, an Arab showed up with the worn-out seaman, dressed in rags. Hamet asked Riley if he was one of his men. Riley nodded yes. “He is old and good for nothing, but I can buy him for just this blanket,” Hamet told Riley, holding up one inferior to that swapped for the old jmel. Riley assured him that he would pay as much for Burns as for any of the men. Despite his appearance, Burns still had spirit. His joy at exchanging his miserable isolation for the company of his shipmates, plus a meal of offal and the hope of freedom, was infectious and boosted their morale.

The next Oulad Brahim to arrive was Mohammed, Riley's former master, the first to claim them at Cape Barbas. He had Hogan with him. Hamet negotiated for the Portlander and bought him for a fine blanket. But as Riley congratulated Hogan and Hamet fed him, another Arab showed up and began to argue with Mohammed, claiming to be a half owner of Hogan. After a heated discussion, he and Mohammed turned to Hamet and demanded another blanket. Hamet was outraged. Their dispute was none of his business. But the two Oulad Brahim pressed their case. “He is a stout fellow,” they claimed. Soon all three were shouting. Their hands felt for the hilts of their weapons, but with Seid nearby, neither side had a decisive advantage. No one drew. In the pregnant moment, Riley intervened, pleading for Hogan, but the Brahim and the trader had dug in their heels. It was now a matter of pride, and neither side would back down.

Finally, Mohammed flung Hamet's blanket back at him and seized Hogan. Grabbing the sailor's long hair, he thumped him across the back with his camel goad, a thin two-foot club, and drove him out of the camp.5 “My heart bled for him when I saw the blows fall on his emaciated and mangled frame, but I could not assist him,” Riley lamented. “All I could do was to turn round and hide my face, so as not to witness his further tortures.”

The next morning, the captain made another mark on his leg with the thorn he kept for that purpose. According to this crude calendar, it was September 27. After eighteen days away from a water source, the Oulad Brahim planned to set off the following dawn for a well two days to the northwest— the same well where Riley and his men had tasted their first life-saving drink on the desert. Hamet, wishing to avoid this gathering place, would head east instead, to another well he knew, and then turn northwest from there.

Riley both longed for and dreaded the departure. The five of them— Riley, Burns, Clark, Horace, and Savage— would be leaving behind six shipmates. He had not seen Williams, Barrett, or Deslisle in days and doubted Williams was alive. Riley had not come across Porter since the well, nor Robbins since the council the next day. And, of course, now Hogan was gone too.

That morning, Hamet took Riley aside and told him that he was now in charge of their possessions, the camels, and the sailors. As a sign of his trust, he gave him a small knife, hanging it in a case around his neck. The captain soon felt the burden of his new responsibilities. Hamet expected him to delegate chores, but his men were mostly incapable of strenuous work. The previous day's optimism at their new chances had withered in the noontime heat. Facing what seemed an impossible journey, they were nearly as moribund as before. Riley coped with his troubles the way he did at sea. He worked tirelessly, tending to their chores and even to minor details, none of which alone seemed overly important, though in sum they might mean the difference between life and death. He repaired his and Clark's meager clothing with camel-hair threads filched from the tent; he cleaned their drinking bowls with sand; he drained the blisters on their feet; and he prayed.

Among the preparations Hamet and Seid made that day for the journey was to drain about two gallons of liquid from the camel's paunch into a goatskin. Using their fingers as sieves, they strained out the thickest filth from what would be, for a week, their only source of fluid other than camel urine. They made sandals for the barefoot sailors out of the camel's hide, giving Riley and Horace the best, with two layers of skin, while those for Burns and Clark contained a single layer.

That evening Hamet called Riley over and informed him that Savage would soon arrive and that he had now risked everything he owned for the captain and his men. He could buy no one else, he said. Hamet confided in him his hope that the ransom money would allow him to repay his father-in-law for his losses in a Tombuctoo caravan that had gone awry. Lowering his voice, he said he needed Riley's help not just for external threats: “Seid is a bad man,” he warned. Then he called over his brother, who remained contemptuous of the sailors and wary of the scheme. “Riley, repeat your vow,” Hamet demanded.

Riley said that his friend in Swearah would pay the ransom. “If I am lying,” he assured them, “you may cut my throat.”

Savage's arrival late that night should have lifted their spirits, especially Riley's. As the son of one of the brig's co-owners and the second mate, Savage was the captain's nearest equal and most likely confidant in the crew, but while the others had exulted, at least briefly, in rejoining their shipmates, Savage sulked. He had divined the presence of the traders over the past week from rumor, but his young master, Abdallah, had remained silent about them; Savage had tormented himself with the belief that his shipmates had left him behind. The prospect of freedom and the camel's intestines that Hamet had saved for him to eat did little to cheer him up. Angry and fearful, possibly on the verge of insanity, Savage had turned surly. The humiliation of captivity was magnified for him by his strict Baptist upbringing. His mother's brand of religion brooked no compromise and, as she once wrote in a sermonizing letter to his father at sea, tolerated no one “friendly of Babilon [sic] or AntiChristians.” Nodding at Hamet and Seid, he snarled, “I do not believe a word these wretches say.” He as much as accused Riley of fabricating their prospects of liberation. “I can understand nothing they say,” he grumbled, “and I do not believe the captain can either.”