Devonian

The Devonian is the geological period named on fossils that David Henniger examines in Tafal’aalt. In these scenes, it connects an immense and unsettling prehistoric past to the present-day work, commerce, and desperate hopes concentrated in the village’s fossil trade.

Fossils and Deep Time

Among the fossils wrapped in newspaper, David sees armored, spined trilobites, including a Dicranurus trilobite described as spiderlike, with splayed legs and two curled horns. He handles a small Comura trilobite whose row of articulated spines is finely preserved, and studies other specimens with ridged eyes and extravagant spines. Their labels carry scientific names, including Psychopyge and Asaphus, that seem to him like spells. The fossils make geological time tangible: the Sahara, now a desert, had once been a vast ocean teeming with life.

That realization unsettles David. The trilobites appear fierce and alien, and their forms lead him to think of the ancient world as a nightmare. The resemblance between their strange bodies and the demonic remains invoked in local superstition makes that belief seem less improbable to him. The Devonian thus marks not only an age far removed from human life but also the deep past as David imagines it: a world whose surviving creatures can still provoke fear.

The Devonian Label and the Fossil Trade

A particularly valuable specimen Abdellah shows David is labeled simply Devonian. Abdellah does not know its technical name; he explains that only three specimens have been found in the Sahara, and that dealers call it an Elvis fossil. The label therefore identifies its geological period, while the nickname gives it a marketable identity. Its rarity and striking form make it valuable to buyers far beyond the place where it was dug up.

The specimen also embodies the economic pressures surrounding fossil work. Driss had stolen it from his father and set out to sell it. Abdellah says he understood why young men wanted to escape a miserable life spent digging, and would have been glad if Driss had sold the fossil. He estimates that it could bring ten thousand dollars in the United States or a thousand euros in Midelt. The latter sum, Abdellah says, might have enabled Driss to go to Casablanca and imagine a different life.

A Prehistoric Object in a Present-Day Tragedy

For David, the fossils are first objects of uneasy contemplation: he looks at specimens Driss spent years extracting and preparing, and recognizes how thoroughly that labor occupied his life. Their polished surfaces and elaborate features reveal both careful work and the distant buyers who assign them prices. The contrast is stark: geological time is immense, but the economic value attached to a single fossil can shape an individual’s immediate prospects.

The Devonian-labeled Elvis fossil acquires an especially painful significance when Abdellah links Driss’s theft and flight to the circumstances that followed. He imagines that, if David had stopped to buy it, David would have returned to Azna with his wife while Driss went to Casablanca. Instead, the fossil’s appeal helped send Driss onto the open road, where events ended in his death. Abdellah insists the impulse was not simply greed but bedazzlement. The period name on the label consequently sits at the intersection of deep time and a sharply local tragedy: the ancient fossil survives, while the hopes attached to its sale do not.