Driss and Ismael’s conspiracy to rob passing motorists

Driss and Ismael’s conspiracy to rob passing motorists is a plan made in the desert and completed after its instigator is dead. The two young men expect passing guests from Azna to be carrying cash, dismiss the travelers as weak because they are outsiders, and imagine that they can escape to the city before the police catch them. Driss defines the scheme’s terms; Ismael, though repeatedly called a coward, is promised the decisive role of shooter. When Ismael later confronts David Henniger and Jo Henniger on the same road, the intended robbery has become an armed ambush, and the conspiracy persists beyond Driss’s life.

The Plan on the Hillside

Driss and Ismael had reached the roadside after hitching a lift from Erfoud with an Elvis fossil and other specimens. They got off at the foot of the hill where a cement truck left them, then waited for cars. The party at Azna was widely known about, and they expected its guests to drive through carrying money. The scheme grows from that specific opportunity: the two men do not select an abstract target but watch for travelers returning from a nearby gathering.

Driss proposes stopping the first car, reasoning that its occupants will be wealthy and will not resist. When Ismael asks what they will do if someone does resist, Driss ridicules the question and treats the travelers’ outsider status as a reason not to care what happens to them. His argument replaces caution with contempt: the people in the car are reduced to a category, and their vulnerability is treated as permission. The plan’s violence is already present in the assumption that resistance is not worth considering.

The pair eat sardines with their hands while waiting by the road. Driss repeats that drivers usually stop and instructs Ismael not to be a coward when the moment comes. Ismael answers that he has promised to act, but Driss turns the exchange into a test of masculinity, insisting that fear is part of Ismael’s character. Their partnership is therefore not simply a shared decision: Driss presses, challenges, and assigns, while Ismael’s assent is accompanied by an evident need to prove himself.

Risk, Escape, and Initiation

Ismael raises the practical danger that they will be wanted by the police after the robbery. Driss responds that he does not care. Ismael, by contrast, has imagined an escape: they will be in the city by the following morning. His answer does not stop the plan; it supplies a way to picture its aftermath. The exchange exposes their unequal relationship to risk. Driss waves away consequences, while Ismael acknowledges them but believes movement toward the city can put them beyond reach.

Driss makes the division of labor explicit when he says he will leave the shooting to Ismael and calls it his initiation. Violence is framed as a threshold Ismael must cross, not merely a contingency of the robbery. His promise to Driss and his insistence that he is not afraid sit beside Driss’s repeated taunt that he is always afraid. The scheme thus binds the two men through pressure and anticipated action: Driss sets the standard, and Ismael is expected to demonstrate loyalty by meeting it.

The plan is recounted later through Ismael’s memory of the Friday night when he and Driss waited together. By then Driss is dead, and Ismael remembers him as a magnificent warrior who was alive only days earlier. That elegiac recollection does not erase the coercive edge of their conversation. Instead, the contrast between the remembered companion and the absent one gives the old instructions new force: Ismael is left holding a role Driss had assigned him, with no partner beside him to carry out the attack.

The Conspiracy Repeated

When Ismael eventually waits for a car on the stony hill, he occupies the same position where the earlier plan was made. He has spent much of the day watching for the two travelers he seeks, and at night he prepares a heavy pistol given to him by Abdellah. The setting repeats the first ambush’s essential conditions: a roadside wait, an approaching car, and an expectation that its occupants will stop. Ismael’s persistence makes the conspiracy more than a memory of Driss; it becomes a course of action he continues alone.

He approaches David Henniger and Jo Henniger with a small Psychopyge trilobite in one hand and the revolver in the other. He drops the fossil before raising the weapon. The object that had accompanied Driss and Ismael on their earlier journey now helps Ismael approach the car as a seller rather than an attacker. David and Jo stop; Jo looks toward him with sympathy, and David turns off the engine. Ismael recognizes that the trusting response contradicts Driss’s expectation that the travelers would be foolish and weak. Yet their trust makes them easier to approach, not safer.

Ismael greets them before moving around the car and catching David as he opens the door. In that moment he remembers David burying Driss’s identification card in a small hole. The memory sharpens his cruelty toward the man in front of him, although the scene does not reduce their encounter to a simple, declared motive. The earlier scheme’s language of outsiders and indifference has become personal: Ismael identifies David with the act he remembers, while David recognizes Ismael and understands what is happening.

A Plan Outliving Its Author

Driss’s death does not end the conspiracy. Its original division of roles survives in Ismael’s actions: he still waits for a car, uses a fossil to draw its occupants into contact, and carries the weapon Driss had designated for him. What began as a proposed robbery of passing guests becomes an attack on David and Jo, with Ismael acting alone. The change is consequential: Driss’s confidence and taunts no longer need to be spoken aloud because Ismael has taken the plan into his own hands.

The conspiracy also exposes how the men’s shared language conceals their different responses. Driss treats the police as an irrelevant future and the travelers as people whose lives need not constrain the plan. Ismael thinks about escape and remembers Driss, but those reservations do not prevent him from continuing. At the roadside, the scheme’s logic is both repeated and altered: the travelers’ willingness to stop confirms their trust, while Ismael’s memory of the buried identification card makes the encounter intimate and lethal. The plan that once depended on two men ends with Ismael alone, carrying out the role Driss had called his initiation.