Adventure Magazine Cover, December 10, 1922 — page 152: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

146 hat that the Arab vessels might not be contaminated by the lips of an infidel dog. The next day Ganus took Robbins about five miles on foot to a considerable encamp- ment where he found Captain Riley, Clarke, Burns and the boy Horace. While they sadly exchanged experiences, the Arabs held a council. Captain Riley tried to show the tribesman, by counting stones, how many dollars of ransom they could secure by taking his crew to Morocco, but nothing was settled, and in a little while Robbin’s master carried him back to his tents. Robbins feared that he had seen his ship- mates for the last time, and, in his own words, “‘He converted his eyes into pumps and in this way was partially relieved of the bilge-water of sorrow that was about to sink his shattered vessel forever.’ (@ 1815, and, for nearly two years, Robbins wandered over the desert of Sahara the slave and sport of the nomad tribes. Their wanderings seemed more or less aimless. At first, in seaman-like fashion, Robbins managed to deduce the latitude from the length, angle and direction of the shadows, and he kept a calendar by méans of knots in a piece of string. As the weary days succeeded, one like unto another, it seemed useless to keep track of them; and, as they shifted back and forth across the same sterile desert, he lost interest in his exact whereabouts. The country consisted either of sand, which, disturbed by the wind, filled eyes, ears and nostrils so that one could neither see, smell nor taste; or barren earth, baked like cement, upon which neither man nor beast nor insect could long exist. The journeys were from well to well at which they found water—green from stagnation, reddish with camel’s dung, rotten and stinking—but it was drink this or die. By day Robbins scorched and blistered beneath a blazing sun; at night, after he had procured. bushes and camel-dung for the camp-fire, he would be driven off to sleep shivering upon the dew-dampened. sand, from which he would awake stiff with cold. Robbins was constantly famished with hunger and parched by thirst. The com- forts of his captors were scanty enough and to him they vouchsafed barely the neces- sities of existence. He dug up and swal- lowed every edible root he could find. He THIS was on the oth of September, Adventure searched through thorn-bushes for snails, tearing the flesh from his naked arms to capture them; he gnawed old camel-bones which had first been scraped by the Arabs and then by their dogs. The Biblical locusts, but without any honey; rawhide rope; the uncleaned entrails of camels, for water was too precious to use for washing; and other matters best left unspecified all helped to keep a spark of life within him. The Arabs were callous enough toward his suffering, but they themselves fared little better. They lived chiefly on camel’s milk and meat, and, when they slaughtered an animal, retired to some private place that their neighbors might not force themselves upon the feast. One of Robbin’s masters, the most affluent, had one wife, one son, one daughter, sixty-eight camels and several relatives, in- cluding a teacher. This wise man strove mightily to convert Robbins, offering him wealth, wives-and power upon earth and eternal felicity in paradise, but Robbins felt that if Mahomedanism could offer no more in this world than the richest of his masters enjoyed, and if paradise was in proportion, he had no reason to be tempted. His privations reduced him almost to a skeleton. The irritation of his blanket- strip and his nights upon the hard ground wore the skin from his hips so that his very bones protruded. His Arab master became alarmed and, fearful that he might lose him, made him slightly more comfortable and tried to fatten him with milk. For a cloak he was given a square piece of the colors of the brig. “The first time, doubtless,’’ Robbins says, “that the American flag was raised on the desert of Sahara. Alas! It was more a corporeal than a spiritual protector!”’ From time to time Robbins met some of his shipmates as well as seamen from other wrecked vessels. Not less than six American ships were lost upon the coast between 1800 and 1815, to say nothing of the vessels of other nations. Robbins passed from one master to an- other until he finally fell into the hands of a trader who made it his business to ransom slaves. He was taken to Mogadore and released in April, 1817, arriving there in an old shirt for all apparel, with his hair and beard grown in every direction. For nearly two years he had heard nothing but Arabic spoken and at first he found it hard to frame = comicbooks: (E@)