The Issomour cliffs are a stark landmark in the novel’s desert landscape, where rock, darkness, and the first light reveal traces of ancient life. Their significance lies both in a fossil encounter that changes David’s attention from escape to wonder and in their recurring presence along journeys shadowed by loss.

Terrain and the Fossil Shelf

As David follows a fossil digger away from a fire, the wind rises and wails around them while they cross the oueds and a broad expanse of flat, blue-tinted stones. After a few hundred yards, the man kneels beside a sloping shelf of rock, set among pockets of hardened sand. The formation becomes visible when the first light broadens behind the edge of Issomour. Its surface is crowded with subtle fossil forms, including a huge fish with a beaked mouth and claw-like fins, described as an Ichthyosaur and a Devonian mermaid.

The shelf joins the cliffs’ physical setting to the novel’s interest in deep time. The creature’s shape is strange, but the fossil’s completeness gives David a tangible sign that life existed long before the people standing over it. A landscape that had been crossed in darkness becomes, with the arrival of light, a record of vanished life.

David’s Encounter at the Cliffs

The digger smooths his hands over the fossil and offers to hack it out for David. He calls the fossils flamingos and suggests that the slab could become a kitchen table that would please David’s wife. The offer treats an ancient trace as both saleable material and household furnishing; David, however, refuses to have it cut out.

Their exchange grows physically and emotionally charged. The man circles David, tapping the fossil’s scales and tailbones with his stick and probing for the truth behind what he sees as an unbeliever’s façade. David’s resistance weakens: he crouches, covers his eyes, then reaches out to run his hand along the creature’s spine. What holds him is not the promise of a useful object but the magnificence of the fossil’s completeness. The cliffs thus become the setting for a brief shift in attention, from resisting the encounter to recognizing what the rock preserves.

The interruption arrives by way of sound and movement. Abdellah’s jeep travels along the edge of an oued before its headlights come on, and the engine echoes along the bottom of the cliff. David looks up and sees a small child climbing one of the knotted ropes. The digger calls out that they are looking for David, then stands and waves, bringing the solitary encounter back into the orbit of the people searching for him.

A Landmark on Journeys of Loss

Issomour also marks the route David travels with Anouar toward Alnif. In their pause, the massif’s shadow crosses their path with a deep blue menace. Anouar has just disclosed his plan to emigrate to France and leave Tafal’aalt; David then tells him he is sorry about Abdellah. Anouar says they could tell David was sorry and that this was why Abdellah let him go. The shadow falls across a conversation in which departure, bereavement, and David’s release remain closely joined.

Elsewhere, David and Jo retrace the road where they hit Driss. The familiar whitewashed posts and abandoned buildings return in the headlights as they climb toward the place of the collision. The passage identifies that hilltop as the site of the crash, not as the fossil shelf itself; across these journeys, however, the cliffs and the returning road give the landscape a recurring presence in David’s struggle with what has happened. Issomour is at once a visible feature of the terrain and a landmark within a narrative where movement through the desert does not leave the past behind.