Skeletons On The Zahara (26 page)

As Hamet had feared, trouble was not long in coming. Seid and Abdallah drew water from the well and filled a selaï. One of the other cameleers led his beast to it. Seid told the stranger to take his camel away. The man glared at him brazenly and declared that his camel would drink from their bowl. “Keep filling it,” he added.

Seid dropped the bucket, leaped at the stranger, and punched him squarely in the face. The man staggered but did not go down. He drew his scimitar and slashed at Seid. Seid dodged, but the thrust grazed his chest, throwing him off balance. The man lunged forward, with the scimitar ready to strike again, but found himself looking down the twin barrels of Hamet's musket. Others quickly moved in, pulled the man away, and ushered him to the other side of the well. There they watered his camel and sent him on his way, muttering curses.

Hamet decided to push on. An hour's ride to the east, they reached two more wells. Recently dug and even saltier than the one they had just left, these wells had also attracted a mass of camels, but they belonged to a single owner. Hamet talked to this man and then told Riley to help with the watering of his drove. “Their owner is a good man,” he said. “He will give us food.” They worked until dusk and then followed the drove east three miles through the valley. The wealthy man, however, spurned them, and for once Hamet's persuasiveness failed him. They had nothing to eat.

A strong gale blew that night. The men rose early, cold and stiff and hungry, and continued on unnourished. They pushed the well-fed and watered camels harder now, keeping them at a brisk walk across fifty miles of hammada. They rode on until well after dark, finding little inducement to stop. When they did break, they did not stay long, rising before dawn to move on.

Around noon the next day, they encountered an abrupt rift in the plain, which they entered on a natural ramp to a deep, sand-covered riverbed and floodplain. They had reached the famed Saguia el-Hamra, a wadi stretching 210 miles across the desert like a neatly sewn scar from the slopes of the Anti-Atlas Mountains to the coast. There its mouth is dammed by a profusion of fused crescent dunes, sculpted by the trade winds, the Sahara's proof that sand trumps water. Widening to two and a half miles in places, the Saguia el-Hamra, or “red channel”— named for its clay walls, or for the blood they have absorbed during centuries of turf wars— was the area's cradle of civilization, a blooming oasis when water filled its riverbanks or, as when Hamet's party arrived there, the last stronghold of desert plants for grazing after years of drought.

The men rode due east on a firm shelf above the bed for two more hours before the Bou Sbaa announced that they saw camels. The sailors could not see them for some time; indeed, it took another four hours riding at a fast trot and kicking up dust like ghazu raiders before they reached the unattended drove. They searched for the owners, but whoever they were, they had seen the Bou Sbaa and sailors coming and had either hidden or gone for help. Hamet decided to avoid any sort of confrontation and ride on. At the end of the tongue of land they were on, they dropped into the powdery riverbed, kicking up the pale dust of sandstone, marl, and limestone laid down by the sea more than 50 million years earlier. In the distance, in the fading light, Riley saw what looked like an island in a lake. They reached it around ten o'clock, having traveled, Riley estimated, seventy miles that long day. But the desert had fooled him and his shipmates again. The lake turned out to be an oasis of bushes and stunted trees, argans and white-spine acacias with trunks twisted by the winds. The water was all underground. The Bou Sbaa cautioned the sailors not to make a noise as they entered the oasis.

They encountered no one as they silently made their way to a clearing in the center of the copse. Still, they did not risk lighting a fire. The sailors, like the Arabs, had nothing to eat that night, but at least they were protected from the wind. They slept soundly in the shelter of the oasis and in the morning had to be roused from their dreams.

At daylight on October 14, the group watered the camels and filled a goatskin at a brackish well near the bushes. Riley and his men tried eating some of the leaves but found them too salty. The Bou Sbaa brusquely urged them onto the trail again.

Before long, they dropped down a steep bank into the lowest part of the wadi, where each step of the camels broke through a crust of salt. Riley gazed in awe at the view in front of him. They had entered what appeared to be a vast, ancient bay, with embankments rising hundreds of feet in places and signs that it had once been filled nearly to the top with water.

Riley and his men now stood in what the Scottish trader Donald Mackenzie would describe in 1875 as a channel connecting the “Great Mouth,” on the coast near Cape Juby, to the “great depression called El Juf” (now called the Tindouf Depression), which he claimed was five hundred miles long and reached nearly to Tombuctoo. Mackenzie proposed clearing the sandbar that blocked the mouth, thus allowing the Atlantic Ocean to flood El Juf and create a shipping lane into the heart of Africa. In this way, Britain could advance trade with the interior, generating hundreds of thousands of pounds of profits while eliminating the dangerous and costly trans-Saharan caravan. Mackenzie's grandiose scheme was embraced by London's newspapers, which relished the vision of steamships running from Liverpool to Tombuctoo, “sending civilized influence into the interior of this vast continent” and returning with ivory, gold, and gum. However, it never came to pass.

Victorian England's fantasy for this place could hardly have contrasted more with reality. After traveling several hours through the wasteland, Hamet and his group spotted two men driving camels down the sand slopes. It was quickly grasped by every man in the party that whatever food those riders possessed, the group had to partake of. Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah rode off to intercept them while the sailors waited behind. From a distance, they watched the meeting. The two riders then continued on their way with Abdallah while Hamet and Seid returned.

“There are goats there,” Hamet announced, pointing to the east-southeast. “We shall have meat soon.” With threats and harsh words, Hamet and Seid drove the sailors up the most direct route, a hot, two-mile climb over steep sand hills. Coho stumbled on his lame leg, rising slowly. A little later, he toppled again. The brothers cursed the poor beast, summarily pronounced it foonta, and, without hesitating, left it behind. Driven to extremes by heat, hunger, and trail weariness, they seemed dangerous now, Riley thought, like “madmen.”

Hamet, frustrated by the pace, pushed ahead alone. The sailors continued up the incline under the watch of Seid. At a peculiar cavity in the sand, Seid sniffed the ground like a dog and announced that the entrails of a camel had been cooked. As they emerged from the Saguia onto the desert plain again, they heard a gun fire, then saw Hamet driving a frightened shepherd and his flock of goats toward them.

Seid waded into the flock, culled out four stout goats, and drove them to Riley, who later wryly noted that the two Bou Sbaa “considered possession as a very important preliminary” to making a deal. What they did not realize was that the frightened shepherd was not alone. Like the great Bou Sbaa patriarch summoning the lions to defend his flock, the shepherd produced, out of nowhere, a wife. She was as defiant as her husband was cowed, scolding the bully brothers with contempt: “I will not part with any of the goats, even if my husband will. What is your name?”

Taken aback, Hamet told her.

“Sidi Hamet,” she crowed, “how can you be such a coward as to rob an unarmed man? The whole country will ring with your infamous name and actions, Sidi Hamet!”

Seeing the ugly looks on Hamet's and Seid's starving faces, the shepherd begged her to be quiet, but to no avail. Eyes bulging, she continued to rant: “I will find a man who will avenge this injustice, Sidi Hamet!”

What the shepherd could not accomplish, Seid's musket raised to his eye and trained on her chest did. He warned her that if she said another word he would fire.

Hamet took advantage of the sudden hush to tell her that not far back they had left a good camel that had tired and that they would trade for the goats. Although she plainly did not believe him, and her mistrust would be borne out if she managed to find Coho, she had little choice but to accept. She insisted on swapping a different goat for one of the ones that Seid had selected, and the deal was done. Hamet and Seid roped the four goats together by their necks, turned them over to Riley, and then rode ahead to find the best passage back to their trail.

As hunger, thirst, the oppressive midday heat, and the yielding sand all conspired to sap their wills, Riley pressed his men to keep up the pace. Spiky euphorbias, bulbous gray plants hoarding their moisture in poisonous latex that not even the thirstiest animal would attempt to drink, studded their path. Savage, unable to resist temptation any longer, picked the leaves of a short green weed that grew among the euphorbias. “It's delicious,” he announced, in a demented voice, “as sweet as honey.”

“Savage, do not swallow it,” Riley urged. “It might be poisonous. Wait and let me ask Sidi Hamet if it's safe.”

Savage ignored him. He found more of the weed and ate it. Riley examined some and warned him that he thought it looked like Indian tobacco, better known as gagroot. Over the next two hours as Riley, Horace, and Savage, all on foot, tried to keep up with the goats and with Burns and Clark on the camels, Savage's stomach convulsed in spells until he was heaving blood. His pace slowed to a crawl. Soon the camels had disappeared over the horizon. Riley now made a calculated decision, which he later stated unapologetically: “I could not wait for him.”

Faced with being left behind, Savage found reserves he did not know he still had. Over and over he stopped to retch and then ran to catch up. Riley, focused on tending to the goats and not losing sight of the camels, encouraged him but did not slow down. As he and Horace crested the summit of a hill, they stopped and scanned the terrain to find the camels, but they were nowhere to be seen. They searched further on the horizon, but all they saw was a narrow dark stripe shimmering between dune and sky. At first they did not know what it was. Riley took it to be an “extensive ridge of high woodland.” Horace disagreed. “It's too dark and too smooth for land,” he said.

Riley stared hard. The boy was right. It was the ocean. Riley clapped him joyfully on the back. For a moment they forgot hunger and thirst as they breathed deeply. They could smell the sea. They could taste it in their mouths. They laughed. It tasted, they thought, like freedom.

Riley found camel tracks near a breach in the face of the bluffs. He and Horace herded the goats over the edge and picked their way down the steep dunes, followed at a distance by Savage. They reached what he deemed a “tolerably inclined plane” of sand covered with lustrous egg-shaped stones in hues of ocher, charcoal, and maroon. The stones had been buffed as smooth as bone china by ancient seas, whose violent surf had once crashed there before receding to its present reach. Riley scanned the coast for the others but could neither see nor hear any sign of them. The flush rays of the sun setting across the sea gave horizontal surfaces a rosy brilliance, etched with deep shadows. To the north, cliff faces receded in what seemed to Riley like infinite regression, imbued with futility and loneliness. If the sight had not been so magnificent, it would have crushed him.

Suddenly, Hamet emerged from behind a knoll and called him. They were much closer than Riley would have thought possible. Behind the dune and under a tarp of skins, Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah sat with several families, while camels foraged around the hidden camp. The Arabs instructed the seamen, who had just walked thirty miles, to collect brush on the steep bank and to place it around the camp as a windscreen and for use in the fire.

Savage was still retching. Riley made him a bed and left him to rest. When he returned with an armful of brush, however, he found Seid beating him for not helping. Riley pleaded with him to leave Savage alone. He tried to convince him that he was too sick to work and that he himself would do Savage's chores. Seid grudgingly relented.

Hamet slaughtered a goat, severing its head and holding its neck over a bowl to catch the blood. He slashed its hide free of its legs and extracted the carcass from the skin through the neck cavity, preserving the skin in one piece. He butchered the meat and gave the intestines to the seamen to boil. They drank the resulting broth and shared a small piece of meat as well. Riley called the meal “a seasonable relief.”

In the night, the Arabs fed the men a barley pudding and camel's milk, but they refused to serve Savage, who was still ill. Riley kept a piece of meat for him and gave him some of his pudding. Hamet saved Savage's portion of pudding to give to him later, but in the morning, while they were preparing to break camp, Abdallah devoured it.

They now proceeded between the bluffs and the shore, along a plain of sandstone and lime-cemented sands, the seafloor of another age, filled with the fossils of fish and mollusks and littered with centuries' worth of bleached snail shells. Although there were now five goats to tend to, Hamet having bought two more from the nomads, Riley did not have to worry about losing his way if he lagged behind; he only needed to follow the coast. Savage had a long day ahead, but Riley was in a better position to help him now that everyone had eaten and the Bou Sbaa were less edgy.

At dusk they came upon an Arab encampment. Hamet and Seid ingratiated themselves with the leader, a man named Hassar. His band was also traveling north, and in the course of the evening Hamet and Hassar agreed that they should proceed together for the increased safety of all. Hassar had other motives as well. He was intrigued by the Christian slaves. As the hour grew later and the camaraderie warmer, he made an offer of camels and other goods for Horace. Seid, who claimed to personally own both the boy and Savage, began to haggle with Hassar.

This was an ominous and disturbing turn of events. When two Arabs begin negotiating, they expect to reach a deal. Asking the price of an item or making a counteroffer, as Seid did, commits one to a process in which two reasonable people acting in good faith should be able to arrive at an agreement. (This explains why a Westerner who casually asks the price of an object for sale in an Arab market often finds the merchant overly aggressive, and also why, when the Westerner suddenly breaks off a negotiation, the merchant is insulted.) Hassar now had a right to expect his offer to be either accepted or countered. When Riley realized what was taking place, he objected. Seid scoffed at him.