Free Skeletons On The Zahara by Dean King

they come ashore . . . they bury their money in the sand, as you yourself have done, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the true believers.”
    What they could use and carry from a shipwreck, the Sahrawis took. What they could not take, it was their custom to burn. To the victims who witnessed this destruction of their personal articles and the cargo of their vessel, it was often the last cruel blow before they assumed the life of a slave to some of the poorest people on earth, living in some of the harshest conditions imaginable.
    By the time the wild-looking man had come within a hundred yards of the Commerces, they could see that he was old, dark-skinned but not black, and that his hair looked, according to Riley, like “a pitch mop, sticking out every way six or eight inches from his head.” He approached them guardedly, poking at the clothing and the wreckage strewn along the beach, seizing anything he wanted. Robbins observed that he seemed “agitated by the mingled operations of joy and fear.”3
    Slowly, Riley began walking toward the stranger. When he got to within ten paces, the man motioned for him to stop.
    Riley was now close enough to get a good view of the man Robbins would later call “a slander upon our species.” He was about five foot seven and dressed in a crude woolen cloth from his chest to his knees. His red eyes glared out, according to the captain, from a weather-beaten “ourang-outang” face, covered in a matted beard curling to his bare chest. His mouth was wide like a jackal's.
    He was possibly an Imraguen, a dark-skinned people who predated the Berbers in the region, having arrived during Neolithic times, but more likely a Berber, whose ancestors first rolled onto the plains of the western Sahara in horse-drawn carts and chariots around 1000 B.C. and with their iron spears began to dislodge the Imraguen. In more recent centuries, waves of Arab invaders had Arabized or vassalized the Saharan Berbers. The Arabized Berbers called themselves Arabs and adopted bedouin life, using the camel to roam and dominate the Saharan plains; they stripped their defeated enemies of camels and firearms and banished them to the coast. In one of the supreme ironies of the Sahara, the shoreline— where it was easiest to sustain life by taking advantage of the rich sea and relatively abundant pasturage— was the domain of the degraded: tributary Imraguen and Berbers who caught fish for their masters.
    Portuguese sailors had long claimed that these coastal dwellers ate the livers and drank the blood of dead Europeans, and this belief was still current, at least among seamen. Nonetheless, Riley made signs of peace and friendship to this jackal of an old man. He waved at the wreckage on the beach and invited him to take some. According to Robbins, the Sahrawi helped himself, then quickly retreated with his spoils over the dunes, his intentions still unclear.
    Though they had not been attacked, this first encounter with a native was a blow to the sailors. He seemed as primitive and ill-looking as they had feared, and as inhospitable. They had no doubt that he would return with superior numbers. Morosely, they turned to setting up camp, building a tent out of broken spars, oars, and studding sails, and gathering in the salvaged provisions and water, which represented their only means of survival on the godforsaken coast.
    They had little time to fret, however, before the jackal returned with others. This time he showed no trace of the fear that Robbins had detected before, only insolence. But it was his two wives who most unnerved the sailors. With protruding eyeteeth, blazing eyes, and wrinkled folds on their faces and bare chests, they looked ancient, reptilian, every bit the primitive flesheaters of the sailors' imaginations. A bevy of frenetic naked youths danced around them, including a shapely, smooth-skinned teenage girl, whose disarming beauty was jarring in such a threatening horde. Among them