David accompanies Driss’s body to Tafal’aalt

David accompanies Driss’s body from Azna to Tafal’aalt, joining the return journey required of him after Driss’s death. The trip ends in a burial and places David inside the bereaved family’s mourning, but it does not settle his responsibility: for Abdellah, the decisive question afterward is whether David will tell him truthfully how his son died.

Departure from Azna

At the departure, Richard sees David and Jo off with minted lemonade, while a third boy carries David’s two bags. Richard supplies a sleeping bag for the journey, anticipating the stone floors ahead. The farewell remains awkward and inadequate: the host’s gestures cannot make the journey less grave, and David’s visible apprehension contrasts with Jo’s surprising energy.

Jo takes David’s hand and kisses him at length. The Aït Kebbash turn away and return to their vehicle; the gesture marks the end of the discussions and delays. The practical urgency is explicit: Driss must be buried without delay, since postponement would violate the requirements of the holy texts. The kiss and the couple’s marital affection are momentary beside that obligation.

The vehicle itself bears traces of the work and poverty surrounding the journey. A crude yellow trilobite is painted on its side, and newspapers and fossil-preparing tools lie across the floor. Anouar, wearing a lime-green sweater, opens the passenger door for David. The Aït Kebbash crowd into the vehicle, while Jo and Richard remain at the broken window to say farewell. David leaves with his neatly packed bags, separated from the familiar world he is leaving behind.

The road to Tafal’aalt

As the vehicle descends toward the road, Anouar offers David a cigarette. He explains that Abdellah insists on driving, despite the discomfort this causes the others. David accepts the cigarette, and Anouar lights it for him. Their exchange is courteous rather than openly hostile: Anouar also compliments Jo’s appearance and speaks of hoping one day to have a gazelle like her. The brief conversation offers a human, almost light note before the journey enters the dark, empty road.

The six men smoke as the vehicle travels at close to eighty miles an hour. David recognizes features of the road from the recent past: white, box-shaped guardhouses beside ditches and scattered thorn trees. In the darkness, the slopes and ravines seem altered, and the familiar route feels newly weighty. This recognition links the return journey to the events that brought David into the Aït Kebbash family’s hands: he is not an uninvolved visitor, but the Englishman whose actions are bound to Driss’s death.

Beyond La’gaaft, Abdellah stops to inspect the tires. David sees the north face of Jbel Issomour above the villages, marked by caves with ropes and ladders. At La’gaaft, a boy waves a white cloth from a ledge. The villages on the route share cement domed houses and metal doors painted with trilobites; residents come out to greet the travelers. At Tabrikt, a man carrying a basket and ropes calls Abdellah by name and greets another passenger, Moulay. These encounters place the trip within a connected local landscape, rather than an empty passage across the desert.

Arrival and mourning

Tafal’aalt, the last village before the open desert, is Driss’s home. David sees about two dozen domed houses, vegetable plots enclosed by low stone walls, and date palms. The shadow of Jbel Issomour reaches toward the gardens. Abdellah parks and knocks at a metal door painted with blue trilobites; David is brought out of the vehicle with the travel bags Jo packed for him.

Three women emerge from the house in black robes. Their faces and hands bear delicate tattooed markings, and they run toward the vehicle lamenting. The men had anticipated this moment and respond in silence. The women’s grief makes the family’s loss immediate, while David, present because of his connection to Driss’s death, watches without sharing their place in the family.

Inside, Abdellah, Anouar, David, and another man move through a dim cement house into a bare chamber. A gas burner heats a kettle; mint and a block of sugar are set out for tea. Abdellah breaks off pieces of the sugar with a small chisel, while Anouar prepares the mint. Outside the room, the lamentation grows louder. David hears Driss’s body being carried into the house through a different door. Abdellah drinks several small cups of tea before Anouar asks what should be done with the foreigner. Abdellah directs him to take David to Driss’s room, then signals that he has another task for him.

Burial and the question of truth

David sleeps, and the burial passes while he is asleep. When he wakes at dusk, he believes the ceremony has already taken place; the narration confirms that it has. The burial ground is a plot of gravestones in the desert. Driss’s mother had died years earlier, so aunts and cousins mourn him, while the men stand silent. The difference in their outward responses does not diminish the grief: the men have absorbed it inwardly.

Driss’s body is lowered into its grave and prayers are said. Abdellah remembers his son as a ten-year-old, when he took him prospecting across the mountain. He recalls Driss’s young face and the Dicranurus the two of them found by the trenches. Driss had kept that fossil in his room. The memory ties the funeral to their shared history and to the fossil landscape that shaped their lives; the object remains in the room after Driss himself has been buried.

After the burial, Abdellah waits for Anouar and considers what to do about David. He has not decided on vengeance or any other response. Instead, he focuses on whether David will tell him the truth about how Driss died. Abdellah distinguishes an accident from a deliberate lie: in his judgment, a lie would be a personal act of wrongdoing and worse than the original accident. The burial therefore concludes the urgent physical return of Driss’s body but leaves the moral reckoning open. David’s presence at the funeral is not absolution; what happens next depends on whether he speaks honestly to the father who has just buried his son.