Skeletons On The Zahara (29 page)

Wednoon and the Atlas

On the morning of October 19, three days after seeing the ocean, Riley, Savage, Horace, Clark, and Burns were roused from a brief, lethargic slumber. They had traveled fifty miles the previous day and through most of the night. Shortly after dawn they set out again, forcing their cold, weary bodies back into motion. Their path lay between the first and second banks from the sea, stone-pocked dunes sheltering a sloping groove of sand.

North of the Draa, they had entered Souss, on the shoulders of the Sahara, where the Anti-Atlas Mountains reached down from the northeast tentatively, like fingers touching a stove. In 1815, not only were Moulay Sulayman and the makhzen, or ruling class of Morocco, unable to control the Sahara, they were defied by this southern region of their would-be kingdom.1 Two independent city states, Tazeroualt and Wednoon, had sprung up on the cusp of the great void, thriving on lawlessness, extortion of travelers, and the ransoming of Christian slaves who shipwrecked there or came up from the Sahara. The two states had also come to control the lucrative caravan traffic to the interior. Joseph Dupuis, who served as British vice-consul and agent for the United States in Swearah before the War of 1812, called the natives of Souss “more bigoted and cruel than even the remoter inhabitants of the Desert” (Robert Adams, p. 130).

As horizontal rays of sun spiked across the rocky eastern horizon, the five sailors made out vague saturnine shapes above the plain. With guarded enthusiasm, they nudged and whispered to one another. Unless this was another cruel illusion, the looming contours appeared to be proper hills, not dunes.

The sun climbed in the sky, and the sailors' imaginations brimmed. What lay behind those hills? Why not streams of icy running water? Fruit trees and onion fields that rivaled Wethersfield's? Civilized people?

Their path gave evidence of steady camel traffic. Around noon, they saw to the northeast the black tops of mountains. The sight bolstered their burgeoning confidence at a critical time. They had not slept for more than four hours in the past thirty. By this point, they had each lost more than half their original body mass. Riley, the biggest of them, would later find that he weighed less than 120 pounds. Savage, in particular, was barely hanging on.

Before nightfall they entered a deep valley heading south through bare black hills and then turned southeast in another valley on a well-trod path. They soon came to the banks of a river, where bullrushes and bushes resembling dwarf alders flourished, but the bright green water in the stream, which was about thirty feet wide and two deep, was brackish and undrinkable.2

Across the river, in another stream, a troop of men watered several dozen remarkably fine horses and a few camels. Hamet and his companions hailed these men and then crossed the briny stream to the good one, where fish surfaced and splashed. While the sailors eyed the fish hungrily, the Bou Sbaa ignored them. The horse riders bolted south along the river. After they had watered their camels, Hamet and Hassar led their group toward the sea, where Hassar's women pitched tents in the sand. Having traveled nearly ninety miles in two days, they cooked a goat and ate voraciously.

They left the sea the following day around noon and climbed up a path in a ravine between two slopes at the foot of what Riley described as “high mountains.” As rough as the terrain still was, the sailors rejoiced at seeing the solid slopes of hillsides, with nooks and crannies where plants and trees grew. However, a growing sense of uneasiness pervaded the Arabs now that they had left the desert proper. When one of Hassar's young sons found a three-gallon earthen pot used for boiling and started lashing it to his camel as they might do with any found item on the desert, Hassar and Hamet rebuked him harshly and made him leave it. They had entered a zone where it was dangerous to give or even suggest offense.

That evening they camped in a farm clearing next to a heap of barley straw, a sight wondrous to the sailors in its very ordinariness. They had reached cultivated land at last. They celebrated by roasting a slab of goat that had been hanging from one of the camels for four days. “Some of my comrades, as if their taste had become depraved by the rage of hunger, declared that putrid meat was far preferable to fresh; that it wanted neither salt nor pepper to give it a relish, and that if ever they got home again, they should prefer such food,” Riley wrote, granting that the aged meat was tender and flavorful. After eating, they made beds of fresh straw. Having slept on hardpan or sand for so long, resting their heads on nothing but their bony arms, they found the straw “softer and sweeter than a bed of down strewn over with the most odoriferous flowers.”

In the morning, Riley, Savage, Clark, Burns, Horace, and their masters approached Oued Noun from the south. Although Moulay Sulayman, like many sultans before him, could not claim to control this region, the 550-mile river rising in the mighty Atlas Mountains east of Marrakech and terminating at the Atlantic did mark the southern frontier of his realm, as he perceived it, and of civilization, as he defined it.

The sailors had no expectations of what the Noun should look like and thus no disappointment upon reaching a shallow, fifteen-foot-wide stream. Nor did they care that the famous river, drained of strength by drought, petered out somewhere to the west, not in the Atlantic but in a dead-end dune. They had reached the end of the desert at a place where the pebble-bottomed Noun curled through a cultivated valley lined with date trees and blooming shrubs. Cows, sheep, and donkeys grazed on green grass, and the sailors reveled in sights that two months before they would not even have noticed. They plunged their heads into the cool northwest-flowing stream and drank until their bellies swelled. Afterward they sought the shade of the fig trees and slept for two hours.

They had almost reached Wednoon, a town on the wadi forty miles inland; in theory, they were just a week's travel from Swearah. Moreover, Sidi Hamet was now on familiar turf. His wife was from Wednoon, and he had twice journeyed from there to Tombuctoo. Wednoon was a magnet for northbound travelers off the Sahara, a place where the long deprived found provisions and the pleasures of society, where the naïve lost their djellabas, and even the wise were often outmaneuvered by the wise and also powerful. Many Christians being carried north for ransom had suffered heartbreak and a protracted stay at Wednoon after being bought by local middlemen or powerbrokers, who often worked the men until they were nearly dead before selling them for head money.

After roaming the desert in captivity for two years, Robert Adams of the Charles had reached the town in August 1812. His hopes of continuing on to Swearah ended when an Arab named Abdallah bel Cossim bought him and put him to work in his fields.3 When Adams struck bel Cossim's cruel son, Hameda, in self-defense, he was beaten until blood dripped from his ears. When he refused to kiss Hameda's feet in apology, his master shackled him and barely fed him for two months. Bel Cossim finally sold Adams to keep from losing his investment to starvation. During his captivity in Wednoon, Adams saw one sailor-slave stabbed in the chest and murdered by his master. Two others lost hope and converted to Islam, the mark of circumcision changing their lives forever.

Hamet knew that if his presence were made known in the town, he would risk being coerced into selling the Christians to Sheik Ali, his father-in-law, or to Sheik Beyrouk, the ruler of Wednoon. Thus he decided to bypass Wednoon. In the late afternoon he woke the sailors and took them to a nearby hut, where he had bought a honeycomb. Hassar's hungry men had caught wind of the meal and loitered around, hoping to share in it. Balancing a bowl containing the hive on his knees, Hamet distributed sections to the sailors with one hand while holding his gun in the other in case Hassar's men abandoned their tenuous hold on self-restraint. The sailors attacked their portions like bears, swallowing along with the rich honeycomb the tender young bees that filled it. Tears rolled down their hollow cheeks as they ate the calorie-laden gold. They were so sated that they fell asleep again under a palm tree until dark.

At night, after the Americans had gathered the firewood as usual, the Arabs fed them a pudding made with argan oil, a dietary staple in Souss, the only place where the argan tree grows and where it was not unusual to see goats sitting in the branches of trees, like so many overgrown crows, eating the oblong green fruit. The goats passed the fruit's pits, which were obtained in this way, Riley observed, by the women and children, who cracked the shells with stones and pressed the meat inside for oil. Except for Riley, who was too full from the honey to eat again, the sailors downed this pungent food, which they found delicious, preferring argan oil even to butter. They slept outside the thornbush hedge surrounding a whitewashed and domed saint house, the mausoleum of an Islamic holy man. Riley mentioned only that they had “found a good shelter,” unaware of the significance of saint houses to the inhabitants of the region, who left kura, round stones, on the ground around them to absorb the baraka, blessings from God, of the holy man. The Kura were later fetched when needed and applied to various body parts for healing. If the sailors heard the hooting of an owl that night, it came, according to local Berber belief, from the pained soul of someone who had not fulfilled his religious duties during life. A bee or a fly could be a soul leaving a body and heading for heaven, and a bird, a creature never shot near a cemetery, a soul returning to the tomb.

Throughout the next day the Bou Sbaa socialized with the Arabs and Moors who passed through camp, rough strangers engaging in demonstrative conversations and open fellowship— sharing food and drink, embracing heartily— in the way of the Sahara. Droves of camels rose up from the desert, while others with sacks of barley and salt, iron, and other goods headed toward the dunes. Bands of long-bearded soldiers on Arabian horses and armed with scimitars in silver-plated scabbards and ivory-inlaid muskets came and went. With all, Hamet acted as if he had nothing to hide and no one to fear; any other behavior would have invited suspicion and contempt. He did not shy away from exhibiting his sailors and recounting their tale of shipwreck and suffering. Riley pleased the proud horsemen by lauding their horses, saddles, and weapons.

One garrulous old man, who spoke fragmented Spanish and was traveling to Swearah by mule, questioned Riley about his alleged friend, assuring the captain that he knew all the consuls there: Renshaw, Josef, Estevan, and Corte. Figuring that Renshaw was the Englishman, Riley acknowledged him as his friend. The old man believed him and told Hamet that he would be willing to deliver a note from Riley to the consul. It would take him ten days to get there on the mule. The idea was shelved, however, when they could not find even a scrap of paper to write on.

Hamet was determined to strengthen his sailors before starting the strenuous and treacherous crossing of Souss, but he could afford them only one full day of rest, in addition to the calorie-rich meals. Before they set off, he purchased another beehive for the sailors. This time, Hassar's men played it smarter. Acting nonchalant at first, they rushed Hamet as he divided up the dripping hive, grabbed it, and gobbled it down. Furious but intent on keeping the unit together for safety, Hamet subdued his anger. He negotiated for one of the remaining but inferior hives and, with the help of the beekeeper and some strangers, managed to feed the sailors three pounds of honeycomb.

Together with Hassar's escort, the group now had to pass through territory guarded by Sidi Hashem, the notorious Berber who ruled the small state of Tazeroualt, north of Wednoon, and was an ally of Sheik Beyrouk's against Moulay Sulayman. Hashem drew his authority from the memory of his father, Sidi Ahmet ou Moussa, a marabout— a devout, saintly Muslim— revered for his justice and piety. Hashem's passion, however, was for lucre. From his seat in the town of Illigh, he controlled a narrow lane of north-south traffic between the Atlas and the sea and had grown wealthy and powerful by demanding tribute from traders and investing it in the caravan trade with the south. While his father's tomb attracted devout Muslims from all over Souss and the Sahara, Hashem's state was a renowned refuge for Moorish cutthroats and runaway slaves, particularly those fleeing from the makhzen. All who agreed to serve in his guard, some six hundred strong, lived in his state as free men off the spoils of war and banditry.

It was in one of Hashem's caravans to Tombuctoo that Hamet and Seid had nearly perished, expanding their bad luck on the Sahara.

By now, Hamet and Hassar knew, word of their company fresh off the desert with five Christian slaves had gone before them. The two clever Arabs divvied up their conspicuous company into three groups. Two men took the women and children and drove half the camels east on the well-traveled valley route. Hassar and all but two of the rest of his men drove the remaining camels, including all of Hamet's, off on a path to the northeast. Hassar's remaining pair, plus Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah, led the sailors on foot north along the bank of the Noun and then, to avoid being robbed of their slaves, ascended into the mountains to the east. They struggled up tortuous, steep slopes for four hours, hoisting one another over the most severe crags. From the top, they could see Hassar below, guiding the camels along an easier but longer and less secure route.

All day they climbed up and over ridges, eluding watchful eyes in the valleys and leaving no trail on the rocks. Hassar and his men shadowed them below, a simple band of traders for all to see, until near nightfall, when they rose up and joined Hamet's party below the ridgetops. In a small opening on a plateau, they discovered the fires of a camp with a dozen tents pitched in a semicircle. Hassar and Hamet's party approached to within about a hundred yards and sat down with their backs to the largest tent. Soon a bedouin woman from the camp brought them a bowl of water, followed by a bowl of fresh, slightly green dates. Hamet gave them directly to the sailors, bypassing his Arab compatriots. Hassar, Seid, and Abdallah indignantly grabbed handfuls. Though at that time they did not know what they were eating, the sailors found the dates delicious.