The Bandiagara Escarpment is a sandstone cliff 150 kilometres long in central Mali, standing up to 500 metres over the Séno Plain, and the highest ledges on it are full of graves. The Tellem put their granaries and their dead into hollows near the top between about the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, so high on bare rock that you had to pick them out from the paths below with binoculars raised against the glare. Dogon tradition says the Tellem could fly. The old bones and carved wooden figures are still up there. The Dogon came afterwards and took the lower rock, and their villages of mud and stone hold the base of the cliff, flat roofs against the stone, conical granaries in rows. They still hoist their own dead up the face on ropes. Every village has a togu na, a low open shelter of carved wooden posts under a thick millet-stalk roof, where the men's council meets. The roof is deliberately too low to stand up under, so a debate that heats up stays seated.
The walk between the cliff-base villages was the trip people came for. Days on sandy paths past baobabs, millet fields and ochre altars, with a local guide reading the rock and the customs for you, and nights on flat mud rooftops with the plain going dark below. From the top the Séno Plain dropped away 500 metres below you, flat to the horizon and dotted with baobabs and the round roofs of distant villages. None of it is walked now. Central Mali is an active conflict zone, no guide will take you along the cliff base, and the plateau roads are shut. The villages are living through it without visitors. The cliff keeps its own calendar regardless. The Dogon's greatest ceremony, the Sigui, comes once every sixty years and rolls from village to village over several years of masked processions, and the current cycle is building toward 2027. Its centrepiece, a serpent mask carved several metres long, waits out the decades hidden in a cave.