Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

by Dean King

  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.

  “I have argued the matter every way, but all to no purpose,” bel Cossim told Riley. “I promised to deliver them six hundred dollars as soon as we get to Agadir in the sultan’s dominion. I agreed to proceed in company with the prince and sheik and to wait there for the return of Sidi Hamet, but they will not listen to reason.”

  The news came as a heavy blow to Riley. “It bereft me of my fortitude,” he later reflected. “The fair prospects I had entertained of a speedy liberation from slavery, particularly for the last two days, were now suddenly darkened.” He could not bear to relay it to his sodden men. Shaking him even further, bel Cossim said he had to leave them now and go to Willshire for instructions. He would be gone six days. “May the Almightly preserve you in the meantime from their evil machinations,” bel Cossim beseeched.

  As bel Cossim mounted his mule and prepared to depart, Sidi Mohammed brought him more bad news: “Moulay Ibrahim and Sheik Ali have determined that you shall not go to Swearah,” he announced. “They fear you will cause a war to break out between them and the sultan.” Mohammed volunteered to go in bel Cossim’s stead, to carry letters to Willshire and remain
as a hostage if need be. He promised Riley that because of his two wives, seven children, and property, he was an even more valuable hostage than Hamet. He also reassured him that Hamet, “your friend,” would come down directly to help. “Allah is great and good,” said Mohammed, who had embraced Hamet’s belief in Riley’s blessings, “and will restore you to your family.”

  Riley took the old man’s hand and kissed it, addressing him, “Father, I hope the Almighty will reward you for your benevolence.”

  Before leaving, Mohammed joined the renewed debate over the sailors. The parties faced each other now in a ring outside the village gate. Supported by his elders, Moulay Ibrahim, himself seventy years old, a ruler enriched by nearby copper and silver deposits, listened as bel Cossim restated his position: He was the rightful owner of the Christians, for whom he had already paid an agreed-upon sum of his own money. Neither the prince nor the sheik had a right to stop him. This was a violation of the rules of hospitality and an affront to their religion, since they were all brothers under Allah.

  Ali countered that Hamet and Seid both owed him a great deal of money, that he had an unquestionable right to their joint property and a responsibility to all three parties not to jeopardize that property or to let it be sold for less than its value. He was within his rights, he maintained, to hold the slaves in his territory until he was repaid. Ibrahim, a man Riley described as having a fairer complexion and softer features than many of the tough men of Souss, also listened patiently to the testimony of Sidi Mohammed and Bo-Mohammed, who supported bel Cossim.

  Both principals prudently concluded by lavishing praise on Ibrahim, acknowledging his justice and virtue and agreeing—at least for now—that he should adjudicate the matter. Ibrahim’s reply was swift and firm: “You, Sheik Ali, my old friend, and Rais bel Cossim, both of you claim these five Christian slaves as your own property, and each of you has some reason on your side. Yet, as it is not in my power to decide whose claim is the best founded, I am resolved, with a strict regard to justice, and without going into further evidence, to keep the slaves in my own city, carefully guarded, until messengers can be sent to Swearah, who shall bring down Sidi Hamet. It is only then that a just decision can be made regarding all the claims. Bel Cossim, you will be as a guest, not a prisoner, for as long as you stay in this city.”

  It was now dark out. Honoring their word that they would abide by Ibrahim’s decision, Ali and bel Cossim swallowed their mutual loathing and ceased their recriminations. They were then ushered, Arabs and slaves alike, into the freshly scoured streets of the town.

  chapter 18

  From the Mouth of a Moor

  Bel Cossim and Sheik Ali and his men took up quarters in a building next to Moulay Ibrahim’s house. Joined by Ibrahim, they sat on a mat at one end of a large room and carried on a lively discourse through the night. At the other end, the sailors, vexed by dysentery, painful hemorrhoids, and lice, huddled in a corner among the saddlebags and luggage. Sentinels armed with muskets and scimitars attended the doors to the room and the building as well as the town gates. The sailors ate couscous out of a common bowl and, by Riley’s admission, succumbed to their physical and mental distress: they sobbed like children.

  In the morning, bel Cossim brought Riley a pen, ink, and paper. The captain scrawled a second note to William Willshire, apprising him of their arrival in the town of Shtuka and their current trouble. Bel Cossim, who could not write, dictated a note to a scribe. With these, Seid, Sidi Mohammed, and Bo-Mohammed set off for Swearah.

  Vowing to return in four days, Sheik Ali also departed, giving Riley and his men some breathing room to recover their wits and their strength. After coming so close to regaining their freedom, the wait was excruciating. They could do little to help themselves but rest. Bel Cossim tried to buoy their flagging spirits. When Riley complained to him that he doubted he would live long enough to see freedom, as he was “extremely feeble and must soon perish,” bel Cossim admonished him: “What! Dare you distrust the power of that God who has preserved you so long by miracles?” And he cajoled: “No, my friend, the God of Heaven and of earth is your friend and will not forsake you; but in his own good time restore you to your liberty and to the embraces of your family.

  “We must say,” bel Cossim added philosophically, “ ‘his will be done,’ and be contented with our lot, for God knows best what is for our good. We are all children of the same heavenly Father, who watches over all our actions, whether we be Moor, or Christian, or Pagan, or of any other religion; we must perform his will.” The Moor’s tolerant thinking humbled Riley. “To hear such sentiments from the mouth of a Moor, whose nation I had been taught to consider the worst of barbarians,” he admitted, “filled my mind with awe and reverence, and I looked up to him as a kind of superior being.”

  Bel Cossim knew he must counterbalance Ali’s advantage of prior friendship with Moulay Ibrahim, so he invited Ibrahim to come for a private talk in the great room he was sharing with the Christians. In these more relaxed conditions, Riley admired the intelligence of the prince’s face and his mild but active character. Although he could not understand everything they said, he could tell from the Arabs’ expressions and the tenor of the conversation that bel Cossim was artfully flattering him. Bel Cossim inquired about his family. The prince had one wife, who had no children. “Does she have tea and sugar?” he asked.

  “No,” Ibrahim replied.

  After the meeting, bel Cossim quietly solicited the help of one of the prince’s young black slave girls in acquiring some wood and water. He built a fire and brewed tea. When Ibrahim was out, bel Cossim gave the girl a lump of sugar and sent her with a cup of very sweet tea to the prince’s wife.

  The girl soon returned. Her mistress, she told him, thanked him for the tea and said she would keep the lovely cup and saucer, the likes of which she had never seen before. She asked what she could do in return. “Tell your mistress,” bel Cossim said, “that I only want to be Moulay Ibrahim’s friend. If she could influence the prince in my favor, I would be most gratified.”

  An hour later, Moulay Ibrahim burst into the room and demanded to know what bel Cossim had been doing with his wife. With great deference, the Moor explained the harmless nature of his interaction with her and that he was only trying to do her the honor she deserved as his hostess and the wife of a great prince. “You had no need to curry favor through her,” Ibrahim responded. “You already have my friendship.”

  The maneuver was effective, even if Ibrahim saw through it. The two went to pray in the mosque, and when they returned hours later, Riley saw that they had grown more intimate. Now bel Cossim was truly being treated as a guest and not a quasi prisoner. Taking advantage of his liberty, bel Cossim dispatched a messenger to an old and wealthy friend, who lived within a day’s journey, asking him to come to Shtuka and bring money, not as much as Ali had demanded but enough, he believed, to appease him nonetheless.

  That evening, Moulay Ibrahim talked and prayed with bel Cossim. Afterward, the Moor told Riley that Ibrahim had given his “princely word that he will protect both me and my slaves.” He had even promised an escort into the sultan’s dominion.

  Early in the morning on November 3, according to Riley’s calendar, Moulay Ibrahim entered his guests’ chamber carrying eggs and salt for their breakfast. He left and soon returned with half a dozen chickens. Ibrahim himself even carried in firewood and water, as Riley marveled. The sailors boiled the eggs, salted them, and ate ravenously. Meanwhile, bel Cossim slaughtered the chickens, deftly clutching the birds’ wings in his left hand, turning to face the east, and crying “Besmillah!” as he cut their throats. The sailors cleaned four birds and put them in the pot with salt and the vegetables Ibrahim had also brought them: onions, green peppers, turnips, and miniature squash.

  Riley allowed that the resulting soup would have been thought savory in any country. In an unusual show of respect to a Christian, Moulay Ibrahim invited Riley to eat from the bowl that he and bel Cossim were s
haring.1 While they ate, he asked the captain about his family, and Riley told him of the wife and five children awaiting his return.

  From then on, Moulay Ibrahim made sure that the sailors received “all the relief and comfort in his power,” according to Riley. Bel Cossim provided for them too. Late in the afternoon, his friend arrived with two mules loaded with couscous, eggs, and chickens. He handed bel Cossim the five hundred Spanish silver dollars he had asked for, but bel Cossim was now confident that Moulay Ibrahim would not succumb to Ali’s reasoning or tricks. He told his old friend he did not need it. The old man insisted that he accept the food, and he agreed, he said, because it was a gift for Riley. The old man also stated that he would raise an army that day and use all of his influence to escort the sailors safely to Agadir, in the sultan’s dominion. Bel Cossim thanked him but told him he believed he could count on Moulay Ibrahim’s protection.

  For three days they lived as well as they could wish on the old man’s gifts. During that time, bel Cossim went to a fair in a nearby town. From there he proceeded to a shrine about fifteen miles outside Shtuka in honor of el Ajjh, “the pilgrim,” a sharif famed throughout the region for his supernatural powers and feared and obeyed by all. At the shrine, bel Cossim had a vision. He returned to the fair and bought a small fat bull of the best quality. The butcher cut it into two sides. Bel Cossim sent a messenger with one side loaded on a mule to el Ajjh. “When you deliver the side and el Ajjh asks you who sent it,” he told the messenger, “tell him a pious man who has lately come from Swearah, is now a guest with Moulay Ibrahim, and wishes to be remembered in his prayers.”

  Bel Cossim returned to Shtuka with the other half of the bull for the prince. Meeting Riley, he told him what he had done and that he was sure that if the sharif accepted his gift, he would visit them before sunset. Then he explained rather cryptically, “It is not so much the real value of the present that is important but the manner of giving it, which can put the receiver under such an obligation as to make him your friend forever.”