Skeletons On The Zahara (39 page)

Three of the sailors mounted the mules, whose shuffling gait they preferred to the pounding of the camels. Covered by straw-filled blankets, with bulky panniers made of palm leaves slung across their backs, the mules offered a broad seat best for sidesaddle riding. But the mules' easy pace lulled the exhausted sailors toward a sleep they could not afford. When Burns drifted off, he toppled from his mule, struck his head on the rocky path, and lay unconscious. It was the second time in a matter of days that he had been knocked out, and try as he might, Riley could not fully revive him this time. The muleteers lost patience. Burns, semiconscious, was hoisted onto a mule, and a muleteer mounted behind him to hold him on. They continued as fast as they could through the night.

Agadir marks the southern end of a coastal strip where the High Atlas joins the sea. Swearah, their destination, marks the northern end. In between lies a spiky stretch rougher than anything they had seen since the desert: gullies, boulder-strewn riverbeds, craggy mountainsides, cliffs. James Grey Jackson said it was a three-day journey from Swearah to Agadir. Lempriere commented wryly that while a seventy-six-mile journey generally should not take three days, the way was not over the “level turnpikes of England” (p. 413).

In the cold night mist rising from the sea, the Commerces and their guides traveled numbly toward Cape Ghir, only eighteen miles by sea northwest of Agadir but twice that on the tortuous land route. The path took them along the coast, sometimes dropping onto the beach. Where a strip of sand ended, they climbed nearly vertical faces on what Riley described as “a winding kind of zigzag road that seemed to have been cut in the rock in many places by art.” The route descended into deep valleys with these broad natural stone stairs covered in tricky scree, demanding all the concentration of beast and rider. Rocky bluffs pinned them to the coast.1

Slowly up and slowly down, the sailors clung to their mules, thankful to no longer be pounded by the camels but now beaten by their own profound drowsiness. As their nodding heads jolted them awake again and again and their arms and legs flailed reflexively to help them regain equilibrium, they feared they might hit the ground like poor Burns or, worse, tumble to the sea.

Dawn broke on a dramatic panorama. The sailors could see the Atlas foothills on one side of them and the sea on the other. Towering inland, Jebel Tazenakht, nearly 4,430 feet high, fifteen miles east of Cape Ghir, marked the western end of the Atlas chain. They were northing another milestone.

At dawn, Sheik Ali nearly stumbled over Rais bel Cossim, asleep at his threshold. Unaware that he had been outmaneuvered, Ali suggested that they pay their respects to the governor. Bel Cossim insisted disingenuously that first he would have Riley make them coffee. Ali agreed.

When they entered the place where the sailors had slept and discovered them missing, bel Cossim feigned shock. He erupted in rage, accusing Ali of having stolen the slaves during the night. “I will have you arrested and sent before the governor,” he shouted, “and you will be condemned by the laws of Islam.”

Awakened by the shouting, Moulay Ibrahim, who knew of bel Cossim's deception and had, in fact, watched over the sleeping Ali the previous night as bel Cossim sent the sailors off, rushed in, and joined bel Cossim in castigating Ali. “I can no longer hold friendship with a man who is capable of committing such an act,” he declared. “This is one of the worst breaches of faith that ever disgraced a man of your supposed high character!”

The tactics put Ali uncharacteristically on the defensive. He admitted that the night before he had discussed having the party detained until the matter could be settled but insisted that he had had no part in the disappearance of the slaves. He begged not to be denounced to the governor, urging bel Cossim, instead, to leave a small gift for the governor and to proceed immediately to the north, the direction in which the slaves must surely have escaped.

“I am in your power, and will go on with you and my friend Moulay Ibrahim, without any attendants, to prove to you that I am innocent,” Ali conceded, “and that I place the greatest confidence in your friendship.”

They rode north together, bel Cossim and Ibrahim trusting that the sailors' seven-hour head start was enough to put them beyond reach of their search. Not long after they had arrived on the plateau to the north of Agadir, they encountered Sidi Hamet's party traveling south. Sheik Ali now resorted to righteous indignation, accusing Hamet of reneging on his lawful debts. He and Seid owed him four hundred dollars, he declared, which they were obligated to pay him upon their return from the desert. They had, instead, passed three days through his territory without informing him of their return, “without even calling on me to eat bread,” he complained, bitterly. This was disrespectful and dishonorable. He was their patron and would have accompanied them with a guard safely through Sidi Hashem's territory. “But you wished to cheat me of my money, as you did of my daughter,” he accused Hamet.

Hamet did not take the bait. He could only lose a shouting match with the older, more powerful man. He replied calmly but firmly to the tirade, “It is better for us to settle our disputes than to quarrel. For the goods that you consigned to us to sell on the desert, Seid and I owe you exactly three hundred and sixty dollars, though, in fact, the merchandise was not worth half that much. To settle this matter, however, we agree to pay this amount, but no interest on it.”

After some discussion, Ali accepted these terms. Hamet counted out the required number of silver pieces from the ransom money that Willshire had sent and handed them to Ali, who agreed that the matter was settled. Rais bel Cossim presented Moulay Ibrahim with a gift for his hospitality and justice. They swore lifelong friendship and prayed together. Ibrahim, whose secret betrayal of Ali had gone undetected by the sheik, now returned to the south with him. Ibrahim could rest soundly knowing that he had done the right thing, averting a large-scale conflict and not materially harming the sheik. The rest of the party headed north again.

Around ten o'clock, Hamet, Seid, bel Cossim, and Bel Mooden caught up with the sailors. Riley asked bel Cossim what had happened to Sheik Ali and Moulay Ibrahim. “They have set out for their homes,” he replied. The group stopped nearly at sea level beside a well that gave them good water, and over a breakfast of biscuits and butter, bel Cossim told Riley about the meeting that had settled matters between Hamet and Ali.

With the recent arrivals and the muleteers and camel guides, the sailors were now in the hands of a strong, heavily armed company of men. The group again followed a path along the beach where there was enough firm sand and, where the beach terminated, headed up the bluffs on tight switchbacks. To reach Cape Ghir they faced either a lengthy inland trek around insurmountable peaks, which would take them through possibly hostile passes, or a direct route across an exposed cliff face. They chose to attempt the latter, on a narrow, storied ledge above the sea.

The Jews' Leap was a path so wanting that once you started on it with beasts, there was no turning around. Slightly less than a half mile long, it had earned its name when a chance meeting between six Jews heading north from Agadir met a company of Moors heading south, resulting in catastrophe. It was customary for travelers in both directions to make sure the path was clear by checking it from an outcropping at either end built for that purpose or by calling loudly and listening for an answer. But it was after dusk, and both parties, being in a hurry and assuming no one else would be crossing at that hour, failed to take the usual precautions.

The two groups of men, all mounted on mules or other beasts, met in the narrowest section about halfway across, where it was impossible to pass each other or to turn back. The Moors were outraged and threatened to throw the Jews down. The Jews, though by necessity submissive in Morocco, would not sacrifice their mounts without a fight. The Jewish leader vaulted carefully over the head of his mule with a large stick raised for fighting. The first Moor did the same but with a scimitar, forcing the Jew back and knocking his mule off the ledge. The Jew's stick was soon hacked to a nub. Faced with being stabbed or pushed off, he lunged for the Moor's arm, grabbed hold, and leaped over the side.

Another Moor and two more Jews followed, along with eight mules, before the rest could flee on foot. Eventually, relatives of the dead Moors hunted down and murdered the three remaining Jews, completing the tragedy.

In one stretch, the trail narrowed to just two feet. Any slip by mule or camel meant a hundred-foot plunge into the sea. “It is, indeed, enough to produce dizziness,” Riley observed, “even in the head of a sailor.”

They continued on to Cape Ghir, on a path undercut by the sea, so that huge chunks of the coast were lying in the churning surf below them. Riley was certain that where he stood would soon follow. Inland lay “an inclined plane . . . covered with pebbles and other round smooth stones that bore strong marks of having been tossed about and worn by the surf on a sea beach.” This was topped by “cliffs of craggy and broken rocks,” in all, a 1,200-foot promontory, around which mariners have frequently reported treacherous shifting winds.

North of the cape, the party stopped at a wadi, which Riley identified as “el wod Tensha” and is now called Oued Tamri. Not crossable for twenty miles inland during the rainy season, the wadi had been reduced to a stagnant pool. The company ate more biscuits and butter. Bel Mooden shared some dried figs, dates, and nuts. Then they crossed over the massive sand dam to the north bank of the Tamri.

They rode fast toward the highlands in the east. Having passed no dwellings, only saint houses, since leaving Agadir, they now began to see hilltop casbahs again. For two hours, they climbed up one slope, reaching the top as dark fell, and traveling down through an ancient groove in the limestone, sometimes fifteen feet deep and wide enough for only one beast to pass at a time. In the narrowest stretch, they had to remove the mules' panniers. After descending for three hours, they reached a plain on which they rode until midnight. They camped on the flat roof of a long stone cistern outside a walled town. Barking dogs aroused the inhabitants, and a contingent emerged, greeting the strangers with the traditional “Salem alikoom, labez,” as if it were the middle of the day and they were expected. They fed the Muslims couscous, while the sailors ate dates and figs.

After traveling for twenty-four hours straight and not having slept for half again as long, the sailors were nearly delirious. “The night was damp and cold,” Riley recalled, “and this, with my fatigues, rendered it impossible for me to sleep.” Three hours after they got settled, the sun rose, and they set out again.

Even now that they were in the sultan's realm, they were not just any Westerners. Once relegated to slave status, Christians were at the mercy of the sultan, who could still detain them indefinitely if he so chose, waiting for gifts from government emissaries for his “hospitality.” At this point, though, the race to freedom was increasingly against physical and mental collapse. The men were so weak and run-down that they could barely stay on their mules. After sunrise, they could see that they had reached a richer land, though, like the rest of the region, stressed by the recent drought. They passed compounds, villages, and fields enclosed in stout walls of stone mortared with lime. The plowed fields awaited rain and barley seed. Cattle, horses, donkeys, and camels gnawed on shrubbery for want of grass, and the goats fed on the bitter shells of argan nuts.

Now they began to ascend once again. At the top of a hill, one of the Moors pointed out to the sailors their path. It lay over two mountains, the farther being twenty miles away. They climbed to the summit of the nearer of the two, where they had an expansive view of the awesome chain of snowcapped High Atlas peaks knifing through the clouds to the northeast. The mountain they stood upon marked the border with the region known as Haha. As they descended into the first valley of Haha, they passed camels and mules packed with salt and other goods. The men with them wore caftans under their haiks, turbans, and daggers or scimitars in scabbards, hanging on red wool cords from their shoulders.

Here again villages with lime-mortared walls and turreted casbahs, all designed to harbor livestock at night, occupied the knolls. As elsewhere, the valley's normally fertile fields had been devastated by drought and locusts. No one would sell the travelers barley for their animals. As they passed, whirring locusts scattered before them like a parting sea.

The men zigzagged up another slope beside a roaring stream that irrigated terraced fields, worked by men and boys, and then vanished into the sand before reaching the valley below. On a plateau near the summit, they discovered peaks of a different sort: heaps of salt. Standing in a patchwork of red clay pans, dozens of workers raked red-tinted crystals into great piles. “To see marine salt in such quantities on the top of a mountain, which I computed to stand at least fifteen hundred feet above the surface of the ocean,” Riley commented, “excited my wonder and curiosity.” It was the biggest salt operation in all of Morocco.2 A saline spring filled the pans, which gleamed like a mirror, until the sun evaporated the water, leaving salt. Hundreds of piles awaited loading onto four hundred donkeys, mules, and camels.

The party stopped near the operation, and bel Cossim paid off the camel guides, who had extended their escort this far in order to load up with salt to take back and trade in the south. Meanwhile, the curious salt mine workers broke to examine the Christians. They gave them raw turnips, which the sailors gladly accepted. Riley deemed them “the sweetest I had ever tasted, and very refreshing.”

After parting with the cameleers, the rest of the group descended the gentler north side of the mountain onto a level plain of argan groves. Shortly after dark they came to a walled village and entered a large livestock pen on the eastern side of it. The sound of the village men chanting evening prayers at a mosque on the north side of the village filled the plain as the travelers settled near one of the pen's stone walls for protection from the night wind. More weary than hungry, they gnawed on hard biscuits and drank water. According to Riley, they too “thanked God for his goodness” and then lay down and slept.