Summer

Summer is the season in which the novel’s desert heat, organized hospitality, and fossil labor become sharply visible together. At Azna, affluent visitors encounter a curated world of music, food, and spectacle; beyond it, the heat governs when quarry workers leave the trenches and when they can return. Summer thus marks both conspicuous leisure and the environmental limits shaping local work.

Heat and Seasonal Rhythm

The heat is not merely a backdrop. At Azna, Jo waits on a porch as staff light mosquito tapers in air she imagines is too scorching even for mosquitoes. Champagne cocktails and carefully presented fruit arrive in the same oppressive warmth, while the young workers in tarbouches handle the guests’ drinks with evident uncertainty. The scene makes summer palpable through the contrast between a polished evening service and the conditions in which it takes place.

The season also structures the labor cycle around Jbel Issomour massif. In the hot season, fossil workers leave their trenches and travel to the Atlas Mountains to find a gentler living. Tool kits and camping gear remain beside the excavations until winter, when the workers return and find their belongings undisturbed. The apparently empty trenches therefore hold a seasonal pause rather than an end to work: the heat temporarily interrupts the search for fossils.

Summer at Azna

At Azna, summer hospitality is presented as an elaborate production. Staff hang fairy lights in tamarisk trees and struggle with a failing electrical supply; cattle egrets crowd the trees as the workers beat them away. Small tangerines wrapped in silver foil are added to the decorations. When the lights finally come on, the staff applaud, and the gathering takes on the air of a celebration assembled through their labor.

The social program extends from evening parties to excursions. Guests gather among Gnawa musicians, fruit punch, iced rose water, figs, and locally sourced honey. At another celebration, Richard and Dally make marijuana-laced snacks and rolled cigarettes readily available, while fireworks illuminate an outdoor disco decorated with imitation silver palms and rose-colored lights. Summer leisure is therefore not spontaneous: it is provisioned and arranged, with the hosts’ abundance resting on the work of the staff and the use of the surrounding village as a setting for visitors.

Picnics, Performance, and the Desert

Dally’s annual picnic turns the landscape into part of the event. He arranges four jeeps and poses for a Times Style photographer in a djellaba; the imagined caption frames the outing as an exclusive party in a remote setting, while villagers look on as the guests travel toward Hadda waterfall. Dally’s attention to details such as strawberries, crème fraîche, parasols, and dust shows how much effort goes into making the excursion appear effortless. The desert is at once a lived environment and a carefully composed image for visitors.

That staged abundance contrasts with the open country beyond the organized gatherings. On the way toward Jbel Issomour massif, fossil trenches cut into dark, broken rock. A boy in indigo cloth tends camels across the burned plain, and the vastness of the landscape unsettles David’s familiar sense of space. Summer’s desert is consequently more than an attractive setting: it contains working ground, seasonal routes, and forms of life that the guests’ managed entertainments only partly register.

The Season’s Contrasts

Summer joins two sharply unequal experiences of the same place. Visitors at Azna move between catered meals, music, photography, and excursions; fossil workers leave the heat-struck trenches for the Atlas Mountains, and children appear among those handling tools at Mirzan quarry. The season exposes how leisure and labor depend on different access to shelter, mobility, and resources.

Its recurring images hold celebration and strain together: fairy lights fail before they shine, fireworks briefly mark the night, and abandoned tools wait beside the trenches for winter. Summer makes Azna’s festivities possible, but it also determines the limits of work beyond them. The season’s significance lies in this juxtaposition of a desert marketed as an experience and a desert whose heat shapes the daily and seasonal conditions of those who live and labor there.