Skeletons On The Zahara (36 page)

In the early afternoon, about twenty miles from Sidi Mohammed's village, the men were brought up short by a ghastly sight.2 Not far from the path, around the breached walls of a silent village, the intermingled corpses of dozens of villagers and raiders lay sprawled on the ground. Most were little more than small heaps of dried bones picked clean by dogs and birds and bleaching in the sun.

Side by side, Muslim and Christian gazed out on a staggering scene of violent death beneath groves of unkempt date and pomegranate trees. No caretaker remained to prune their shaggy branches. No guard would ever again open the village's heavy wooden gate, which was still locked in its stone arch. Riley did not detail the futility he felt standing there on a plain before a medieval scene an ocean away from his family and home, his withered shipmates too exhausted to climb down off their kneeling camels. There were no words for it. Although Europe had been embroiled in two decades of bloody war and the British had recently burned Washington, this small-scale scene of annihilation, so far from the tracks of history and where so little— not even a grave— was to be gained by the ruin and suffering, felt even more tragic.

Finally, Sidi Mohammed broke the silence to tell the tale of his neighboring village, with bel Cossim translating his words into Spanish. Under Omar el Milliah (Omar the Good), a friend and benefactor of Mohammed's, the village of Widnah, built in 1775, had thrived. Upon Omar's death in 1813, his son Ismael had assumed control of the town. Ismael was a hedonist who put more effort into expanding his harem than governing and defending his subjects. Finally he grew so depraved that he snatched the betrothed wife of his own brother, Kesh-bah. Enraged, Kesh-bah fled south to the mountains and sought the aid of Sheik Sulmin, an old enemy of his father's, who lived there. Sulmin, eager to avenge past defeats, gathered an army of Arabs from the fringe of the desert with the promise of spoils of livestock, sacks of grain, clothing, virgins, and slaves.

The raiders had wheeled their siege machines right up to Widnah's unguarded fifteen-foot stone-and-mud walls without raising alarm. These two battering machines still stood next to the village's west wall, and Riley, whose profession was to command the most complex transportation machine of his day, examined them with a connoisseur's eye. Each machine consisted of a scaffolding built of tree trunks and logs and bound together by massive ropes made of braided thongs of camels' hide. From this, the attackers had suspended a boulder of several tons, which many men together pulled back with ropes, pendulum-fashion, and then sent crashing into the wall.

After they broke through, the carnage was great on both sides. The surprised villagers fought bravely, but the attackers, bloodthirsty and frenzied, prevailed, slaughtering every man and boy but two, who escaped carrying the alarm to the neighboring villages, and all the women and children, except for two hundred girls, whom they took alive.

Sidi Mohammed had been among those who had chased the fleeing attackers and caught up with them in the mountains the next morning. Sulmin sent his spoils on under heavy guard and fought the pursuit in a steep narrow pass, rolling boulders down the path on them. In a bloody, desperate fight, his wild men murdered or wounded half of those who had followed them. Mohammed pulled open his djellaba and showed a large scar where a musket ball had gouged his chest. Eventually the raiders dispersed on the Sahara, vanishing like the wind.

By the time the hunt for the enemy had been abandoned, Mohammed explained, the dead were too decomposed to approach and bury. “They had offended the Almighty by their pride, and none could be found to save them,” he reasoned, trying to make sense of the tragedy with the fatalism endemic to the desert. “Thus perished Widnah and its haughty inhabitants.”

Silently, the men headed east, mulling over the savage yet eerily tranquil scene. After three hours they reached a crooked northwest-flowing river in a five-mile-wide valley. As far as the eye could see, domed white sanctuaries garrisoned the arid banks of the river Riley mistakenly identified as Woed Sehlem.

In reality, it was probably Oued Massa, the area's only major northwest-flowing river, albeit reduced by five years of drought to a miserable trickle. At its broad, now empty mouth lay the town of Massa on what bel Cossim, a merchant captain in the grain trade with Europe, told Riley was the best harbor on the coast. It was five miles wide at the mouth and superior even to that at Cadiz, Spain's famous southern seaport. Bel Cossim had seen near Massa the ruins of a Christian town, which had been sacked long ago. Pieces of its walls protruded from the sand like gravestones.

Massa was also where British merchant James Grey Jackson once saw a pair of colossal whale jawbones arching up from the sand. A local informed him that they had always been there and that, when the whale had beached, a man named Jonah had emerged from its belly. Jackson laughed at the tale. His earnest informant responded only that “nobody but a Christian would doubt the fact.”

Inland from the town where the patron saint of lost-luck sailors had allegedly been spewed from the whale, the Commerces discovered two fortified villages on the riverbanks. When the party paused to rest near an outlying house surrounded by vegetable gardens and ringed in dry thornbush, the hungry sailors furtively stole some of the prickly pears from limbs cascading over the thornbush. Fearful of being caught, they popped the fruit into their mouths whole. The punishment for this transgression was swift and excruciating. The needled skin of the fruit adhered to their tongues and the roofs of their mouths. The fine shafts broke off and their bases had to be painstakingly extracted, one by one.

The men crossed the shallow river where it was easily accessible for the camels and where villagers filled vessels and watered livestock. As the party carried on toward the coast, the riverbed broadened, and they began to see bright green pools of stagnant water where the ocean tide had filled deep bends before being choked off by the sand. All was blighted by the lengthy drought and locust infestation, until they came to a village Riley identified as Sehlemah. Here, ditches from a hillside irrigated dark fields and borders of grapevines and date, fig, and pomegranate trees. Men and boys harvested corn and barley in the fields, filling sacks and baskets and loading them onto camels and mules, which they drove inside the village walls. Trailing the harvesters, the villagers' thin and scruffy livestock, including oxen, cleaned up the chaff.

At dusk, Rais bel Cossim's party entered the village, which stretched for three hundred yards along the river. They made their way to a blacksmith shop near the gate. In one corner, a man worked large bellows made out of animal skins and attached to a charcoal-burning forge. Nearby sat a massive anvil, so squat that the smiths had to bend down to hammer on it. The sailors were given space on the shop floor while Sidi Mohammed and bel Cossim visited the village chief and asked for permission to remain overnight.

With Widnah still fresh in their minds, the sailors watched as the field hands filed in through the gates, bringing in their livestock and the pack animals with the day's last load of crops. The village's one-story flat-roofed houses featured ungainly iron locks on sturdy wooden doors, and each had only one small square window to let in light. Finally, the gates clashed shut, and guards secured them for the night with large wooden bars before mounting the massive twenty-foot walls to keep watch.

Bel Cossim gave the sailors dates for their supper. They ate while the village men and boys came and gawked and asked questions about their homes and their reason for coming there. Several villagers even spoke to Riley in Spanish, repeating “vile oaths and execrations,” the meaning of which they clearly did not understand.

The following morning, October 30, the sailors and their escorts arose in the dark. A slender waning crescent moon on the eastern horizon sliced the inky night near the blazing planets Venus and Jupiter, marking the end of the lunar cycle. The travelers departed Sehlemah at dawn when the gates were opened. The Atlas Mountains loomed in the distance, delineating another world, and there was an urgency to their riding that stemmed from a variety of motivations. The sailors longed for a bath, a real bed, and a regular diet, but most of all an end to the pounding of the trail. Bel Cossim had sworn to deliver them to Willshire and was eager to do so.

Sheik Ali, on the other hand, had devised a plan for taking possession of the sailors. They would not reach Swearah if he had anything to do with it.

Unlike the day before, Ali was in a gregarious mood. He maneuvered alongside Riley and began an unctuous pitch: “Come with me, Captain Riley, to the mountains in the south, and I will make you a chief in my nation. You will marry one of my daughters.” Ali was used to seeing his persuasive arts succeed, and finding Riley unmoved by his offers, he forced the group to stop several times while he pressed his case.

Near a copse of thorny argan trees, sagging under the weight of their ripe orbs, Riley, frustrated by the delays, picked up what he thought was a date from the ground. When he bit into it, however, he discovered that it was argan fruit. He spat out the bitter pulp, reminded that in this strange land little was as it appeared to be on the surface.

For several days, the sailors had viewed from afar the Atlas, whose snowcapped peaks ripsawed the northeastern sky. As they drew closer, they felt the mountains' presence in cold, brooding clouds that scudded down the northeast ridges. Increasingly frigid gusts buffeted them, and they privately thanked Willshire for his foresight in sending down the cloaks and shoes. The camels, mules, and two donkeys moved at a slower clip now, and Seid, Bo-Mohammed, and bel Cossim took turns running to stay warm. Yet even as the gloom worsened, Riley felt buoyed by this atmosphere, which more closely resembled that of his native Connecticut than the desert. He felt in his bones that he was approaching the border of the Empire of Morocco, the crossing of which symbolized freedom for him just as surely as traversing the Mason and Dixon line would for black slaves in the near future in the United States.

Thomas Burns did not share his captain's elation. His circulation was not up to warding off the cold, and numbness was spreading through his limbs. Suddenly, he tumbled off the back of his camel. Landing on his head and shoulders, he blacked out and lay unconscious for some time. After a while and with, according to Riley, “much exertion . . . on our part,” he regained consciousness and was lifted back up onto the beast. He had no choice.

As they crossed the plain, they passed dozens of villages with increasingly sophisticated defenses that resembled old European castles. Crenellated walls, turrets, and sentry stations contrasted sharply with the wild Atlas foothills. In midafternoon, after traveling what Riley estimated to be fifty miles, they veered off the path and arrived at the turreted walls of Shtuka, a diamond-shaped town of about five thousand people.3 Hungry and thirsty, they dismounted at a well outside the gate, but there was no bucket with which to draw the water. Sheik Ali and Seid entered the town, Riley believed, to get provisions. They soon beckoned bel Cossim and Sidi Mohammed inside, leaving Bo-Mohammed and Ali's two men to watch the sailors.

Despite the cold wind and dark sky heavy with mountain moisture, a crowd of men and boys poured out through the gate to see the Christians. Clark and Burns were so weak that they could not sit up even when pride and dignity called for it most. Riley, Savage, and Horace were little better. The Arab boys spat on them and threw dirt and stones at them while the fathers laughed at their sons' pluck. One kind man, however, retrieved a bucket, drew water, and served the tired sailors. After this relief, Riley assessed his bedraggled men. He doubted even the strongest of them could go on riding until dark again. Burns, bruised and shaken from his fall, certainly could not, unless he was strapped to a camel. Riley tried to rally them with the news that they were now just a day's ride south of Agadir and Taroudant, the southernmost towns controlled by the Sultan of Morocco, where they would be “out of the reach of the rapacious Arabs.”

Riley need not have worried about whether his men could travel on, however. Ali had led them into a trap.

When the clouds burst, the crowd of Arabs prodded and pushed the Commerces to the town's rough-hewn stone gate. They sheltered beneath an arch in the walls, which rose twenty feet above and were five feet thick at the base. The rain, the first Riley and his four shipmates had seen in Africa, cascaded down. For two hours, they shivered in the damp chill across an alley from an uninviting warren of one-story pisé houses and wondered what was going on inside the town. To pass the time, Riley applied his engineer's mind to the architecture of the gate, noting that the opening was sealed by one stout door with “two folding leaves” and swung on the “ends of its back posts which are let into large stone sockets at the bottom and at the top.” Four heavy wooden bars secured the door at night.

Inside the walls of Shtuka, Sheik Ali had worked himself into a paroxysm of rage, bellowing so forcefully that the sailors could hear him. He was laying out his case to the town's ruler, Moulay Ibrahim, whom he had known for many years and considered an ally. Other, more sober voices, bel Cossim's among them, also drifted out from Ibrahim's house.

At last, a frustrated Rais bel Cossim stumbled out of Ibrahim's meeting room accompanied by a number of thugs. Riley could see that things had not gone well. Bel Cossim's usually bright face showed indignation and telegraphed the result: Ali had prevailed. The Moorish captain took Riley aside and in a hushed voice told him that Ali had claimed him and his men as his property, on the grounds that his son-in-law owed him more than the value of five Christian slaves. Ali had also declared that Hamet was held hostage by a Christian in Swearah and that the slaves should not be allowed to move north of Shtuka until Ali was paid $1,500, and Hamet, the husband of his daughter, was set free. Seid, of course, had supported Ali.