Jbel Issomour is the vast plateau and monumental cliff landscape through which David Henniger travels toward Tafal’aalt, Driss’s home. It gives the journey a physical scale beyond the road itself: a region of exposed rock, fossil workings, and villages lying beneath the mountain’s shadow, where the terrain and the lives sustained by it become inseparable.

Location and Terrain

The plateau lies close to the Algerian border. Atchana, whose name means “the thirsty one,” forms one corner of its broad rectangular expanse. As the party approaches, the road becomes less distinct and eventually gives way to open country. The ground is hard, dark, cracked rock rather than the sand David Henniger had expected, and the car pitches across it while acacias and their fallen thorns mark the route.

Man-made fossil trenches appear beside the track. In the hot season, workers leave their tools and camping equipment by the excavations and go to the Atlas Mountains for work; when temperatures fall, they return to collect what they left. This seasonal cycle makes the plateau both a geological landscape and a workplace, with activity organized around the conditions of the desert.

The Mountain and the Villages

At the northern side of Issomour, the mountain rises above the villages near La’gaaft. Its face is marked by man-made caves, with ropes and ladders hanging from them, and its shadow extends across the settlement. The villages along the route share cement dome-shaped houses and metal doors painted with trilobites. At Tabrikt, residents greet Abdellah and the men traveling with him; the settlements are inhabited places, not the empty wilderness that David Henniger’s expectations might suggest.

Tafal’aalt, the last village before the open desert, consists of roughly two dozen domed homes, with vegetable plots protected by low stone walls and date palms behind them. The mountain’s shadow reaches the gardens as well. The setting links the village to the plateau’s fossil landscape while also showing the limited cultivated ground on which local life depends.

Role in the Journey

Jbel Issomour forms the physical approach to Driss’s home and the burial journey’s increasingly remote setting. The contrast between the fading track, open rocky country, fossil trenches, and inhabited villages gives the route its changing character. As David Henniger nears Tafal’aalt, his revulsion at the village returns; the landscape is therefore presented both as a concrete place and through the wary, prejudiced perceptions he brings to it.