Driss's fatal road accident binds David Henniger and Jo Henniger to Driss's death, exposing the gap between their responsibility and David's efforts to deny it. The collision becomes more than a past event: Jo's confession, David's self-justification, and a later return to the roadside successively reshape what the characters—and the reader—understand about that night.

Background and Circumstances

Before the collision, Driss and Ismael had reached the hill after hitching a lift from Erfoud with the Elvis fossil and other specimens. A cement truck dropped them at the bottom of the hill, where they waited together for a passing car. Driss was in a dark mood after quarrelling with his father, Abdellah, and proposed stopping the first car they saw because he expected its occupants to be carrying cash and to offer little resistance. Ismael's recollection establishes that the two young men were not simply selling fossils when they came to the road that night: they were preparing to rob motorists.

Responsibility and Denial

Jo later tells Richard Galloway that she and David were both drinkers, while distinguishing her drinking from David's much heavier drinking. She identifies alcohol as the reason David drove so badly and accepts responsibility on behalf of them both. In her account, Driss did nothing wrong except step into the road and try to make them slow down; she calls the collision entirely their fault. Her confession makes explicit the culpability that David resists acknowledging.

David's own account to himself reverses that moral emphasis. He regards the accident as not his fault and frames his actions as an attempt to protect Jo from what he calls roadside depravity. In the same reflection, he thinks that his experience has shown him the Berbers as they really are and revises his expectations of their greed, particularly after his time with Abdellah. That shift in his view of the people he encountered does not amount to an acceptance of responsibility for Driss's death: his language continues to defend himself even as Jo's admission makes the cause of the collision plain.

Return to the Roadside

Later, David and Jo drive back along the road. Jo studies the map by the glove-compartment light, memorizes the route, and turns the light off; the high beams pick out the whitewashed posts and abandoned buildings they had passed on the night of the collision. As they climb the long hill, they approach the place where they hit Driss. Jo quietly asks to stop, turning the return into a direct encounter with the site rather than a mere passage through it.

The roadside retains visible traces of the event: a police ribbon is still tied between two plastic posts. A stony, cactus-dotted hill rises beside the road, the same terrain from which Ismael later descends to confront the Hennigers. The landscape thus links the couple's return to Ismael's earlier vigil and to the plans he and Driss made there.

Narrative Significance

The accident's meaning emerges through incompatible and incomplete accounts. Jo names the shared drinking and their fault; David's private reasoning converts culpability into self-defense; Ismael's memory supplies the criminal plan that preceded the encounter without undoing Jo's account of Driss's innocence in the road. The collision therefore joins two strands of responsibility: the Hennigers' role in Driss's death and the danger Driss and Ismael had themselves intended to impose on passing drivers. Returning to the hill does not erase either strand; it brings the concealed circumstances and the physical site of the death into the same view.