Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

by Dean King

  The sailors trudged behind Hamet’s large camel at a frustratingly slow pace over the hilly terrain, “for,” Riley said, “we were worn to the bones by our various and complicated sufferings.” Suddenly, Seid ordered the men to stop.

  Glaring at his brother, Hamet told them to continue. They listened to Hamet and kept walking.

  Furious, Seid dismounted. His resentment had been growing ever since they had arrived in Souss. Unnerved by already having faced two guards of the local warlords, he insisted again that he alone owned Horace and Savage. Now all his complaints and doubts boiled to the surface. He did not believe the miserable slave Riley had a friend in Swearah to ransom him. Seid had decided to take his slaves and dispose of them as he pleased, not according to his brother’s overly ambitious plan. He seized Horace and Savage.

  Hamet vaulted from his camel. Not only had Seid toyed with offers for the two Christians on several occasions, he had squabbled with Hamet over other things as well. Hamet had been forced to humor and coax him; now he rushed upon his younger brother, pulling him away from the two sailors. The brothers grappled, trying to throw each other to the ground. After a struggle, they fell down in a bitter embrace. Seid, larger and heavier than Hamet, was on top, but Hamet, who was quicker and more active, struggled with the intensity of an older brother who would rather die than lose to his junior sibling. He fought himself free. They both sprang to their feet and went for their guns. Each retired a few paces, unsheathed his musket, and furiously primed and cocked it. Almost at the same time, they raised them and aimed them at each other’s chest. “They were not more than ten yards asunder,” Riley recalled, “and both must have fallen dead, had they fired.”

  Bo-Mohammed of Shtuka

  (from Sequel to Riley’s Narrative, 1851)

  Riley himself froze. He could not force himself to scramble to safety. “My God, have mercy on these unfortunate brothers, I pray thee, for our sakes,” he cried out. “Suffer them not to spill each other’s blood.” As he shouted this, Hamet pulled the triggers of his double-barreled musket.

  He fired into the air. Then he tossed down his gun and pulled open his haik, baring his chest. “I am unarmed,” he called defiantly. “Fire! Your brother’s heart is ready to receive your shot; take your vengeance on your protector.”

  Instead, Seid turned on Horace and Savage, who were quivering nearby. “Move and I will kill you,” he threatened.

  Hamet rushed over to Horace and sent him toward Riley. Hamet offered Clark to Seid in the boy’s place. Seid refused, at the same time pushing Savage to the ground, clamping him there with a foot on his thigh. “Take Burns too,” Hamet said. “Two men for one.” Hamet ordered Riley to take Horace and follow the camels. “Savage, go too,” he barked. Seid leveled his gun at Savage’s head, telling him he would blow it off. Hamet ignored his brother. “Go, Savage,” he said, pointing toward the others, who were already moving to the south.

  Savage rolled free and bolted. When the second mate reached Horace and Riley, Hamet commanded them to stop. The brothers sat down on the ground. Hamet again proposed giving Burns and Clark to Seid for Horace. Seid shook his head. He would keep the slaves he had bought. “You will not separate him from his father,” Hamet stated. “I have sworn to it.”

  “Then I will kill him,” Seid vowed angrily, rising up and seizing Horace. Before Hamet could react, Seid lifted the boy into the air by his chest as easily as if he were a sack of grain. In a single motion, he flipped him over and threw him headfirst onto the ground. The crack of Horace’s skull broke the silence like gunfire.

  Believing the blow had killed the boy, Riley sank to the ground. “Go, Riley,” Hamet bellowed, waving him away from Seid, who glowered nearby. Weak and disoriented, Riley rose, his emotions out of control. “I cannot leave the boy,” he said. Then he staggered on a few steps.

  His rage over, Seid backed away, believing he had foolishly destroyed his own property. Hamet rushed to Horace and gently pulled him to a sitting position. In a tender tone, he said to him, “Go to Riley.” But Horace could neither speak nor get up. Riley went to the boy and held him in his arms. Horace’s breath came fast and shallow. He moaned. Riley examined the ground around him, which was covered in stones, except where Horace’s head had struck.

  Seid and Hamet renewed the quarrel. Before it could heat up again properly, some strangers came into sight. The two brothers were suddenly brought to their senses. If they fought each other, they agreed, they would surely lose all. Hurrying on to avoid the strangers, the brothers decided to find a village where they could rest and seek a solution to their dispute. Riley cradled Horace on a camel as they went. At the top of a rise, they spotted a walled village and made for it. Entering through the open gate, they passed nearly to the other side before meeting an old man, an olive-skinned Moor who spoke some Spanish and whom Riley described as “respectable looking.” The Moor welcomed the two Arabs while examining the ragged sailors. He could see that the boy was in need of care. Directing the visitors to a shady spot by a wall, the old man ordered his women to prepare food.

  Two large bowls of boiled barley lhasa were soon set before them, one for the brothers and one for the sailors. “Kul, Rais,” the old man said to Riley. Eating with their hands, the sailors filled their stomachs as fast as they could. Not until World War II, when concentration camp victims were nursed back to health, did scientists and doctors learn that the rapid intake of even normal amounts of food can incapacitate or even kill people who have long been kept on starvation diets. Contrary to popular belief, it is not the stomach but the small intestine that shrinks and must be allowed to reconstitute itself slowly by handling limited amounts of food. The sailors gobbled as much as they could as fast as they could, and they would pay for it later.

  Afterward, on the Moor’s advice, Hamet hired a guide, a sturdy young man named Bo-Mohammed with broad cheeks, hooded eyes, and a closely cropped beard to accompany them to another village. Not only would his familiarity with the terrain be helpful, Hamet hoped his presence would inspire the goodwill of his neighbors. He might also prove useful if Seid grew rebellious again.8

  On the way to the nearby village, they discovered two bubbling springs beneath a rock shelf. The sailors drank the water but again suffered from crippling stomach cramps. This time it was not only dysentery that tormented them. They had gorged with such greed on the lhasa that some of them could hardly breathe, especially Savage. The group stopped in the dunes, waiting for the cover of dusk to resume their trek as well as allowing the sailors time to recuperate. Then they continued on to the intended village, a geographical watershed of sorts: they had reached the end of the land of tents and would see no more.

  Amid the mud-walled houses, a pack of barking dogs besieged them until they were hushed by a stern-looking old man named Sidi Mohammed, who led the men to the walls of his compound. He told them to rest there while he gave orders for the preparation of supper. Then he had a mat placed near his walls and sat there beside Hamet and Seid. Soon he beckoned Riley to join them.

  Mohammed lit a lamp and placed the glare of the light on Riley so that he could study his face. The old man peppered the captain with the litany of questions he had come to expect, but here, answering made Riley tense. Before, he had been playing an unreal game, in an unreal place, under unimaginable conditions, where accountability was a moot point. Now they were approaching reality. Mohammed was a knowledgeable man who was familiar with Swearah and claimed to have visited the consuls. Riley worried that the old man would uncover his lie.

  The captain breathed a sigh of relief when the arrival of hot loaves of bread brought the interview to an end. The sailors had not tasted this staple since the wreck, but despite their enthusiasm, they found they could swallow only a few bites of the heavy barley loaves after eating so much lhasa earlier in the day. Following the meal, the brothers washed their hands and feet and continued to consult Mohammed. When they had agreed to a plan, they called Riley over; Hamet told him that in th
e morning Hamet and Mohammed would go to Swearah. By traveling rapidly on mules night and day, they would reach the town in three days. Seid and Bo-Mohammed would guard the sailors and provide them with as much khobs, bread, and lhasa as they could eat.

  “I have fought for you, have suffered hunger, thirst, and fatigue to restore you to your family, for I believe Allah is with you,” Hamet told Riley. “I have paid away all my money on your word alone.

  “Go and sleep till morning, and then you must write a letter to your friend, which we will carry,” he continued. “If your friend will fulfill your engagements and pay the money for you and your men, you shall be free; if not, you must die for having deceived me. Your men will be sold for what they will bring.”

  On this matter, Riley did not doubt Sidi Hamet’s word.

  chapter 15

  Valley of the Locusts

  Archie Robbins supposed that marking the days with a knotted string had demonstrated some trifle of optimism. By it he knew at least roughly the date—it was the end of the first week in November—and the number of days of his captivity, fifty-nine. His crude calendar had served to remind him how long he had endured the ordeal but also that there would be an end to it. It had allowed him to live to a degree in the time frame of his former life, the one he had planned to return to just as soon as possible. But now, on the brooding, wind-whipped shore, time seemed to stand still. Living in the monotony and squalor of the seminomadic fishermen, his hopes of escape ceased, and he tossed his knotted string into the fire.

  In the desert, he had seen only flies and scorpions, but wildlife teemed on the littoral. As the clear, cold Atlantic waters, rich in minerals and phytoplankton, upwelled in the tropical sun near the coast, they exploded into life. Fish of every imaginable sort fed along the shores on the abundant sea plants and creatures. Dogfish even hurled themselves onto the beach to scoff sand crabs and then wriggled back to sea. Pelicans, cranes, flamingos, and hundreds of other bird species converged on the sand islands to feed on the fish.

  Compared with what was inland, the seaboard was a veritable garden, providing enough forage for the donkeys, mules, and goats, and an abundance of fish, or l’hoot, to eat or to trade with the Arabs, Berbers, and black Africans who came and went. Yet even with the traffic, it had a blind-alley feel about it, which terrified Robbins. With fish so plentiful they were even dried and used for firewood, this was a place one did not necessarily have to leave.

  This stretch of rocky capes, sandy spits, and islets, now the northwest corner of Mauritania, was once an estuary when the Atlantic covered part of the Sahara. When the water receded, it left a fluctuating shoreline of mudflats and seagrass meadows next to a seabed only ten feet deep for fifteen miles out. To sailors, these shallows, called the Arguin Banks, were an infamous navigational hazard. Plenty of seamen had perished on them. Few ever saw them as Robbins now did, from the inside looking out.

  “Stationary Arabs,” Imraguen, and others inhabited the coast and fished on a semipermanent basis, with the greatest number present from August to April, when the schools of mullet came close to shore to feed. The Arab nomads abhorred the sea, and the dominant tribes forced submissive ones—those who had been defeated in battle or who had sought protection from their enemies—to fish for them, exacting periodic tributes of roe, fish-head oil, and dried fish, as well as livestock. This was a life of drudgery, without honor, for these vassals were not allowed to keep camels, the measuring stick of the Arab nomad. Nor did they have tents, the other essential possession of the Arab nomad, or guns, which were forbidden them. Instead, they lived in immobile lean-tos, defended themselves with knives and scimitars, and kept goats and donkeys, which survived on the seaweed and ragged bushes along the bay shores. The goats gave them milk, and the donkeys allowed them to haul fresh water from their wells to their huts.

  They at least had the advantage of an ample food supply. Robbins’s owner, Meaarah, passed him around to various of these stationary Arabs, who employed him in fishing. The first fed him plenty of l’hoot, the size of “mackerel, nearly the colour of our salmon trouts, of the most delicious flavor, and very fat,” Robbins noted. For the first time since arriving on the desert, he found himself gaining rather than shedding pounds.

  Several days after leaving the fishing village, Meaarah returned and questioned Robbins. “Soo-mook entar?” he asked. What is your name? Like Ganus, Meaarah pronounced it “Robbinis.” “Where are you from?” Robbins claimed he was “Inglesis.” “Is Inglesis better than Fransah?” his master asked. Robbins answered that they were both “bono.”

  Meaarah asked if he had a father and mother, brothers and sisters, a wife and children. Lying, Robbins replied yes to each, hoping to play on Meaarah’s feelings, a feat that in the Arab world “cannot be more readily done,” according to Robbins, “than by talking of wives and children.”

  “We will go to Swearah,” Meaarah promised, but he did not say when.

  Meaarah now attached Robbins to a group of fishermen heading to what Robbins called the outer bay, formed by the cape that made the inner bay and an island in the ocean close to the shore. There the fishing was even better than near the village.

  Neither the Imraguen nor the Arabs had boats. They fished, as their ancestors had, along the shore with nets made of twined seagrass. The men started at low tide, crossing over the spit of land to the outer water, carrying with them their gear, mainly nets, firewood for cooking, and a skin of water. Loaded with the gear, Robbins labored across seven miles of deep, soft sand to reach the spit of land. Frequently sinking to his knees and stopping to rest, he became, he recalled, “an object of their scorn.”

  Each fisherman had as his prized possession his own tightly meshed seine with floats on the top and weights on the bottom. Any number of these nets were attached together to make one big net. Six-foot poles were inserted through the meshes at the ends, and two men walked together into the water to their armpits, holding the poles. They then moved in opposite directions, letting out the net as they went.

  After they had extended the net fully, other men churned the water with threshing-poles, driving the fish into it as the two men holding the ends circled around and closed together. Their cohorts “then enter the circle made by the seine,” Robbins reported, “and continue to thresh the water, until they suppose they have gilled all the fish.” Afterward each man claimed his own net. The fish caught in it were his.

  As the sun set, the men retired to their camp on the beach, cooking and eating their fill of fish. Robbins refused to learn the work of a fisherman’s slave, feigning ignorance of the chores they tried to teach him, fumbling the tackle and tangling their nets. The fishermen despised him for his obstinacy and stupidity and “found,” according to Robbins, “that the small benefit they derived from my labor cost more than it would fetch.” As a result, he did not share fully in the mealtime bounty.

  Returning to camp after two days, Robbins carried a load of fish. When he and the fishermen he was with saw a party of Arabs approaching them, they hid the catch. As they neared one another, Robbins could see that there was also a white man among them. To his astonishment, Robbins soon found himself embraced by James Barrett.

  Both men had given up hope of ever seeing any more of their shipmates. Robbins was especially surprised at Barrett’s appearance: he too had managed to put on weight. For the last three weeks, Barrett explained, he had been living at a fishing outpost about seven miles up the coast and eating as much fish as he wanted. His master’s brother had stolen him and taken him out onto the desert, but he had now been reclaimed and was on his way back to his master’s village.

  Robbins was elated to hear from Barrett that Williams, who had been near death when Robbins last saw him, was still alive. He had recovered to a considerable degree and was in good spirits again. Barrett’s master also owned Williams, and, he told Robbins, despite his efforts, he was convinced their master would never sell either of them. “I cannot conceive why the cursed creature
s want to keep me,” he said. “I am not the least service to them.”

  “That is the great grounds of my hope too,” Robbins told Barrett. “Be as useless as possible, ignorant and obstinate. This only will induce them to carry us to Mogadore.”

  The meeting was over in a short time. Robbins bade farewell to Barrett. He would never see him again.

  Back at camp, the fish were slit open, gutted, “gashed . . . cross-wise,” and laid out to dry in the sun. In the arid heat of the Sahara, they needed neither salt nor smoke to preserve them. “The rays of the sun are so powerful,” Robbins reported, “that fresh meat and fresh fish are dried so suddenly that putrefaction is always prevented.”

  Robbins was no longer starving, but after five days in the fishing village, he was despondent. The thought of remaining a fisherman’s slave in the reek of drying mullet and the saline haze of seaside campfire smoke was more than he could bear. Worse, Meaarah was planning on leaving him again. Robbins pleaded with his master to take him with him. Meaarah agreed.

  The next day, Robbins helped Meaarah pack his camel with fish, and they set off to the southeast at dawn. They traveled all day on the camel, passing from the littoral dunes to the small inland ones with scruffy, sparse bushes. Sixty miles from the fish camp, they reached Meaarah’s tents. His family rushed out to greet them. His wife, Fatima, and daughters, Tilah and Murmooah, pawed Robbins affectionately, delighted that Meaarah had returned with a Christian slave. His son, Adullah, and brother, Mid-Mohamote, also tried to make Robbins feel welcome. Unlike the Bou Sbaa, these Arabs wore robes made of the finest cloth. The women’s hair was braided with beautiful shells and wrapped in blue turbans.