The Source des Poissons is a water site near Azna whose appearances connect lavish visitor entertainment with the grief and deprivation surrounding Driss’s death. For guests, it becomes a picturesque stop on an organized picnic; to Abdellah, looking at it after the burial preparations, it is pitiful yet bitterly desirable. That contrast makes the place more than scenery: it registers how differently the same landscape is experienced by those who can arrange leisure and those living with loss.

Setting and Access

The source belongs to the landscape of the valley and desert around Azna. From the ruined section of the ksour wall, the view runs over the valley and the road toward the white edge of the Sahara; the source is part of the wider terrain that the estate’s visitors traverse. The evidence identifies it as a place where guests bathe, but does not provide a detailed physical description of the water or its surroundings.

A Destination in the Picnic Circuit

The Source des Poissons features in the annual picnic organized by Dally Rogers Margolis. He arranges four jeeps at the gate and poses for a Times Style photographer, whose caption presents the outing as a fashionable attraction in the remote ksour of Azna. It describes a guest bathing at the source in a sixteenth-century Berber cup nearby, while the picnic party drives toward Hadda waterfall. The source is thus folded into a composed itinerary: an excursion, a photographic setting, and part of the guests’ advertised experience of the desert.

The elaborate hospitality surrounding these outings depends on planning and labor. Dally worries over details such as strawberries in frosted cups, crème fraîche, parasols carried by boys in white gloves, and dust settling on the food. Guests arrive in swimsuits, sun hats, and clogs, while Hamid is asked to move them smoothly into the cars in the heat. At another gathering, staff struggle to string lights in tamarisk trees as guests arrive for music, food, and festivities. Against these details, the source’s use as a bathing stop belongs to a larger conversion of the local landscape into an orchestrated leisure experience.

Leisure, Display, and Local Presence

The picnic is not simply an unmediated encounter with the desert. Dally poses for the photographer, and the projected caption describes the gathering as a celebrated party east of Marrakech, complete with hash brownies at breakfast and bemused villagers looking on as the vehicles head to the waterfall. The source’s appearance in this publicity-minded scene places local geography within the visitors’ performance of stylish remoteness. The villagers are visible in the account, but principally as onlookers to an event designed and consumed by outsiders.

Abdellah’s Different View

After the preparations to take Driss’s body for burial, Abdellah casts a dry, scornful look at the pitiful Source des Poissons. The scorn does not settle the matter: deep down, he envies it, bitterly. The passage offers no explanation of exactly what the water represents to him, but its movement from contempt to covetousness makes the source an image of want within his grief. Elsewhere it is framed as a refreshing stop for affluent picnickers; in Abdellah’s gaze, it is an object of painful desire. The contrast draws the place into the novel’s unequal worlds without turning his bereavement into a simple symbol.