Skeletons On The Zahara (23 page)

Inside, wearing the remnants of an old coat and trousers hacked off at the knees, was Porter, who greeted Robbins like a lost brother, elated to learn that he was not alone and that another had survived. Robust by nature, Porter was less beaten down than the others. But they had barely exchanged more than a greeting when Ganus had called “Robbinis!” and they had moved on.

The next day, frustration and hopelessness consumed Robbins again. Porter, his closest mate among the crew, was just a valley back, but he might never see him again. Porter had told him that Hogan and Deslisle were in the valley where Robbins now lay, but he could not make himself get up to look for them. The sounds of camp, of the women's careless voices as they combed and braided one another's hair— to “divest it of the vermin that generally colonize it”— taunted him. He could not understand their complacence. On occasion they spun wool or wove, but usually, he complained, they were “listless, inactive, and stupid.” In his rage over their cruelty and his desperation, it did not occur to Robbins that the Sahrawis might have chosen this way of life for a love of the desert, despite its hardships, or that they were amazingly well adapted to it. He cursed their world. He cursed their God, and his God. He rued the day he was born.

Near midday, from where he lay muttering to himself, Robbins caught a glimpse of a shuffling, stooped figure wearing a small animal skin and a piece of sail. “Hogan?” he called out. John Hogan looked up and walked over. “Robbins, how are you?” he croaked.

Staring at Hogan's gaunt face, Robbins could not produce words. The Portlander's mouth had contorted into a lopsided scowl that made him look demented. Burned and cracked, his eyelids were merely retractable scabs, his eyes the fresh part of a wound. Robbins felt his empty stomach convulse. He embraced his shipmate, the strong and audacious youth who on a stormy night— ages ago, it now seemed— had led the way down the hawser from the wrecked brig to shore.

Robbins took Hogan back to his tent and begged his mistress to allow them to enter. At first she refused. Then, taking a look at Hogan, she relented. Inside, the sailors exchanged news. Hogan told Robbins how on that recent fateful day the traders had bought him from Mohammed and then returned him when a dispute broke out with Porter's master. The feud had raged on afterward until the two came to blows. Ever since, Mohammed had treated him worse, feeding him even less and forbidding him to sleep inside the tent. Mohammed also owned Deslisle, who tended his camels from dawn to dusk. The cook ate better than Hogan did but was often beaten by their master.

Robbins related his own near miss with the traders and his news of Porter and shared the rest of the three-day-old camel blood with him. Hogan gratefully swallowed the rich morsel down. Sarah gave them zrig, and Hogan remarked that compared with his mistress, she was an “angel of mercy.” The two sailors remained together mending each other's spirits into the evening. They made plans to hunt for food together the next day, and Robbins urged Hogan to bring Deslisle with him. Hogan replied that Mohammed would never allow it.

In the morning, Robbins rose with the family at dawn. They went outside to the sand in front of the tent, and the few who had them slipped off their camel-skin slippers. Facing east, they dropped to their knees, with what Robbins deemed “peculiar solemnity,” for the first of their five daily prayers.2 Robbins knew that after their morning worship, the women would remove the reed baskets that covered the camels' udders so that the young animals could nurse. The women would milk what was left over and share it with the others who had prayed. All he had to do was join them.

“My master Ganus bade me follow his motions,” Robbins recounted. Ganus and the others knelt and rubbed sand on their hands, arms, and faces, their ablutions in the absence of water. “I did the same,” confessed Robbins. Always facing east, Ganus rose up and loudly exclaimed the call to prayer, which Robbins recorded as “Sheda el la lah, Hi Allah— Sheda Mahommed— Rah sool Allah.” Robbins repeated the words, not knowing what they meant, and continued to follow his master's example. Ganus was delighted.

In the desolate canyon far to the east, Riley and his men reveled in water as pure as a Connecticut creek. They drank and drank, so much so that they grew giddy and water-drunk. Even as Riley admonished them not to consume too much too fast, he continued to guzzle himself. Their stomachs twisted like Turk's heads, they bent double, and still they heedlessly drank more. Just as they had at the well the first day, they fouled themselves like infants while the Bou Sbaa, who were fastidious in such matters, looked on in disgust.

Seid and Abdallah drove the camels up switchbacks to within fifty yards of the spring. At the top, Riley filled a four-gallon goatskin and handed it down to his men, who were stationed in a line and carried it down to the selaï, the large bowl used for watering the camels. Even the intense griping of their stomachs and the cramps in their sides barely diminished their feeling of satisfaction as they went about the work.

The camels had not drunk for twenty days. Their dung had become so dry that as soon as the pellets dropped, they could be used as fuel for the fire. The sailors filled the goatskin fifteen times for Hamet's big one alone and grew more amazed with each delivery. “Is he not done yet?” they cried. “He alone will drink the spring dry!” Unlike the men, the big camel would retain with great efficiency the sixty gallons it absorbed.

The unusual ability of the camel to endure thirst would not be accurately explained by scientists until the twentieth century. When dehydrating, camels sustain their plasma volume, losing tissue fluid first and maintaining good circulation. Even as a camel's blood thickens, its small red blood cells circulate efficiently. When water becomes available, camels can drink great volumes because the liquid is absorbed very gradually from their stomachs and intestines, preventing osmotic distress, and, whereas the red blood cells of other species can swell with water to only 150 percent of their normal size, a camel's can grow to 240 percent.

When all the camels had finished, the men filled two skins with the chalky water that remained in the pool.3

Riley thanked God for Sidi Hamet's profound knowledge of the desert and for taking them out of the hands of the aimless nomads. How had Hamet discovered the hidden pools pinned to the side of the remote canyon? Riley had seen “not the smallest sign of their ever having overflowed their basons,” nor any other clue to their existence. He could not help but look at Hamet with greater respect.

On the desert again, dire reality soon prevailed. They were alive, and they had water, but they could feel their hunger the more severely, and the landscape was no more promising where they emerged from the canyon than where they had entered it. As far as they could see, the desert was empty, “no rising of the ground, nor any rock, tree, or shrub,” Riley wrote. “All was a dreary, solitary waste.” One crucial factor did change, however. They altered course, heading northwest.

They rode several hours as the sun dropped toward the horizon, momentarily a pleasant, glowing ghost of itself casting shadows behind them before leaving them in empty desolation. Finding no shelter, they finally stopped in the middle of the plain. Before lying down to sleep, they ate the last of the dried camel meat, about an ounce for each man. Since Hamet's camels produced no milk, they had no more nourishment. They would now have to forage. That night, the frigid north wind pummeled them like buntlines on a billowing canvas, and the next day the wind continued, gusting in their faces. The rejuvenated camels walked so briskly that those on foot had to trot to keep up. The sailors struggled with hunger and monotony until, in the afternoon, Hamet called out, “Riley, shift jmel”— I see a camel.

Riley searched the horizon. He saw nothing. The other sailors could not make out any sign of a rider either, but Hamet looked delighted as he altered their course to due east. Two hours later the sailors glimpsed the small outline of a camel on the horizon. By sunset, they had reached a large drove of camels and herders, who invited them to their camp. It was after dark when they reached four tents on the plain. They stopped at a distance and collected brush for the fire.

After traveling forty miles in fourteen hours without food or water, the sailors were in bad shape. Their wounds had reopened from the jolting, and their “various and complicated sufferings,” wrote Riley, caused them great discomfort. They were certainly feeling the effects of scurvy or some other form of malnutrition. They had no shelter to protect them from the wind and no sand to lie on, only the spiky hardpan. They had been promised food, but on the desert such promises, they knew, were fleeting. As the hours passed, they lost hope for anything but milk, which would be served around midnight, if at all.

An hour shy of that, Hamet called Riley over to the circle of light and handed him a bowl. Riley returned to his men and gleefully displayed its contents: boiled meat. They tore it into five portions, cast lots for them, and ate voraciously. The meat was tender and aromatic, not ashy or burned, just enough to fill their stomachs. As the sailors lay down again to sleep, the Arabs brought them a large bowl of zrig. “This was indeed,” Riley glowed, “sumptuous living.”

In the morning, one of these generous nomads proudly produced an acquisition he had made on the coast. It was shiny and new and, assuming from its appearance that it would fetch a vast sum, the Arab presented this novel and mysterious object to el rais to ask its value. It was the spyglass that Riley had bought in Gibraltar. He told the man it was worth about ten Spanish dollars, a not inconsiderable sum. Hamet wanted to buy it, but having only seven dollars, he was not able to.

Hamet's party left this company of nomads and continued traveling northwest on the hammada until late afternoon, when they met up with another party of Arabs whose camels wore selaïs on their sides like armor and lugged full waterskins. Another invitation was issued and accepted. They followed these men two hours to the southwest to reach their camp of fifty tents and the first sheep the sailors had seen on the Sahara. When they went out searching for firewood, a crowd gathered to see the pale blond-bearded men who had come from across the northern sea. They identified Riley as el rais and asked him questions about his ship, about the country they had come from and their families.

Hamet's group stayed with these nomads two more days, traveling fifteen miles north with them. The tribe treated both the Bou Sbaa and their captives as honored guests, erecting tents even for the Christians. Although their sheep were perishing, barely able to stand and graze on the brown moss, the Arabs lavished milk on their guests at night. Unsure when they would eat again, the sailors gorged until they vomited.

On October 5, they left this band of Arabs, who had impressed Riley and his crew with a generosity that was as liberal to the lowly slave as it was to the master. Hamet bought a sheep and traded his young camel for an old one and a calf. The old camel soon proved to be lame in the right forefoot. They called it Coho, “Lame,” and the calf Goyette, “Little Child,” though it was big enough to carry an emaciated sailor on its back.

Riley led the sheep with a rope tied around its neck until noon, when they reached a small valley with a bir sunk amid bushes with thick roots. This was no small find. Until recent times, Western Sahara, a region the size of Colorado, possessed only about a hundred known sources of potable water. Wells tapping them— categorized by their depth, a hassi being as deep as forty feet and a bir anything deeper— are so essential and the land otherwise so devoid of landmarks that even modern maps show their locations.

They pulled up bucket after bucket from the deep well, each man drinking as much as he wanted. After watering the camels and filling two goatskins, they slaughtered the sheep, which could not keep up. When Riley started to clean the entrails, the Bou Sbaa stopped him, put them, still intact, back inside the carcass, and slung it across a camel. They mounted again and continued northwest, driving riderless Coho on in front.

That night, the Bou Sbaa roasted and ate two of the mutton quarters while the sailors devoured the offal nomad-style— with its partially digested grain still inside. On the morning of October 6, they set off on foot, driving the camels on in front of them. Since leaving the chasm, Riley had noticed that Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah had more trouble navigating. Before, they had steered by the desert's landmarks. Now they seemed more concerned about their location, frequently checking the sun and the wind and dismounting at sandy patches on the hammada to smell the sand. By the middle of the morning, even the sailors began to notice signs of change. The sand that lay in small, loose heaps began to mount. The distant terrain took on an ominous, choppy look, like the sea under an approaching storm. By early afternoon, wind-borne grit stung their skin.

For another week, Ganus's family remained in Robbins's so-called Valley of the Shadow of Death, where, empty-handed, they searched farther and farther afield for sustenance and pushed the limits of tribal obligation, borrowing, cajoling, and filching from those who still had milk or a cache of food or water. One of Ganus's camels had gone dry, reducing their milk supply to four quarts a day.

Robbins and Hogan crossed the hill to the east into another valley, where they found snails. Robbins stashed his in his sailcloth satchel until they could take fire from a camp and roast them. So reduced were the Arabs that when the pair returned to Ganus's tent for zrig and Ganus discovered what they had found and eaten, he scolded them for not sharing. It was a fair rebuke, Robbins had to allow, since Ganus was always as generous as his circumstances permitted.

What Robbins could not abide was the Sahrawis' resignation in the face of starvation. As he put it, “to waste away and go down to the grave for the want of food was too much for the small portion of philosophy imparted to me to endure with fortitude.” How maddening it was to persist on the barren Sahara and not make an effort to leave it while they still had strength. What sailor becalmed in the horse latitudes would not make every effort to set his vessel in motion again? Unable to fill their stomachs on snails, Robbins and Hogan now investigated the refuse around the camps. A pile of decaying camel bones had already been gnawed by dogs, but the sun had softened them. Robbins dug into a crevice with his teeth for a bit of gristle and nearly dislocated his jaw.