Driss and Ismael’s attempt to sell fossils

Driss and Ismael’s attempt to sell fossils was a roadside venture shaped by poverty, hope of escape, and a misreading of a passing car. Carrying Psychopyge specimens toward Midelt, they planned to sell to a dealer or directly to wealthy travelers. The encounter with a foreign couple who slowed but did not stop became the hinge of the attempt; its later retelling also exposed how fossil trading offered young diggers a tempting, uncertain route out of a life they feared would never change.

Background and Purpose

The journey is described retrospectively during a conversation after Driss’s funeral. Abdellah asks Ismael to tell him everything, and Ismael explains that he and Driss left together carrying Psychopyge specimens wrapped in paper. They were headed to Midelt, where a German dealer named Meissner might buy them. Abdellah recognizes the dealer and calls him a crook, but the prospect of a buyer was enough to make the trip worthwhile to the two young men.

The sale was not limited to a shop or a planned meeting. Ismael says they were hitching rides and sometimes tried to sell fossils from the road. They had heard that a large party was taking place at the home of wealthy foreigners, and reasoned that many rich visitors would be driving past. In their calculation, travelers inside cars might pay far more than the specimens were worth. The road itself therefore became a market: the pair could seek a ride, approach passing vehicles, and try to turn the traffic of affluent visitors into an opportunity.

The Roadside Attempt

When Abdellah presses Ismael about whether they were waiting for cars, Ismael avoids answering at first, looking down at his ankles. Under further questioning, he says that a foreign couple drove up and slowed. The pair ran toward the vehicle. They could see a European man driving and believed he had noticed both them and the boxes of fossils they were holding up for sale.

Ismael recounts their response as excited and immediate: seeing the car slow, they thought its occupants were interested and expected the driver to lower his window and pay many times the proper price. They held up the Psychopyge specimens, hoping to catch the travelers’ attention and make a sale. But, as Ismael admits, they had misjudged the moment. The man did not stop. Abdellah suggests that the foreigners recognized the fossils as demonic, while Ismael declines to endorse that explanation; whatever the travelers thought, they continued on without buying anything.

Ismael’s Account and Its Limits

The account reaches the reader through Ismael’s answers to Abdellah, rather than through an independently narrated view of the roadside encounter. Abdellah knows Ismael as a habitual liar and suspects him of minor theft, and he studies the boy’s evasive expression by lamplight. Yet Ismael is also the only surviving witness available to question: Abdellah believes no one else was there besides David. The scene consequently holds two things together—the practical need to hear Ismael and the difficulty of taking his version as uncomplicated testimony.

Ismael does provide specific details about the intended sale and the car’s brief hesitation, but his silence when asked directly whether they were waiting for vehicles leaves a small gap in the account. His later explanation presents the approach as a reasonable effort to sell fossils to passing foreigners, not as a fuller account of everything that happened on the road. The distinction matters: the attempt is reconstructed through a witness whom Abdellah distrusts, while the failed sale itself is plain in Ismael’s admission that the car did not stop.

The Wider Fossil Economy

Abdellah’s later discussion of another fossil helps explain the pressures surrounding Driss’s journey without making it the same specimen as the Psychopyge pieces. He shows David a rare fossil known to dealers as an Elvis, wrapped in newspaper and marked Devonian. Abdellah does not know its technical name; he says that only three specimens had been found in the Sahara and that dealers had given it its celebrity nickname. Driss had stolen this specimen from his father and gone off hoping to sell it.

Abdellah describes young diggers as frustrated by a future spent digging, with little hope of going anywhere and no wish to live as their fathers had. He says an Elvis might sell for ten thousand dollars in the United States, or for a thousand euros in Midelt—enough, in his account, for Driss to go to Casablanca and seek another life. Abdellah says he understood the theft and had even wished Driss luck; the fossil was only a lump of rock to him, and he would have been glad if Driss had sold it for a few hundred. His grief gives the commercial calculation a devastating counterfactual: if a buyer had stopped for the fossil, Driss might have gone to Casablanca instead of ending up on the open road.

Significance

The attempted sale joins two sharply different valuations of fossils. To Driss and Ismael, specimens are potential money, transport, and escape from a constrained future. To the foreign buyers Abdellah addresses, they are desirable objects for which they may pay; to some local believers, he says, they resemble the forms of dead demons. The specimens are thus at once commodities and charged remains, while the young men’s hoped-for income depends on the very outsiders whose wealth they expect to exploit.

The car’s brief slowing makes that imbalance concrete. The boys read it as an opening and rush forward with fossils in their hands; the driver’s failure to stop closes the chance before it becomes a transaction. Abdellah’s recollection of the Elvis intensifies the irony: he could accept Driss’s attempt to sell the stolen fossil, and even imagine a modest sale giving his son a chance elsewhere, but the road offered no such escape. The journey toward Midelt is therefore both a practical bid for money and part of the chain of desperate choices surrounding Driss’s final days.