The Dent de Man is a twin-pointed tooth of granite standing 881 metres over the town of Man, in western Ivory Coast, known as the City of 18 Mountains. The block of crust beneath the town is named for it, the Man Shield. Granite this hard wears down far more slowly than the ground beside it, so the Tooth stood clear while the land around it was lowered by rain. The climb starts at a village eight kilometres out. You cross farm plots and go into forest, and the last stretch is a hands-and-roots scramble on bare granite, with no rail and no fixed rope. Five to six hours there and back. Dry, the rock grips like sandpaper; within minutes of a shower the same slab will not hold your boot.
Everything else here is remade by hand. Not a nail or a strand of steel goes into the Dan bridges. They are woven from forest lianas and hung across the rivers, and the deck sways under every step you take, with children from the village swimming in the pools below. Dan tradition holds that a bridge is not built but thrown across in a single night, the work of spirits helped by a sacred spider that spins the cables. The practical version is nearly as strange. Initiates cut and stack the lianas along the bank days ahead; the villagers leave food out for them and go straight home, because staying to watch is said to invite punishment. Three kilometres out on the Mont Tonkoui road, at Zadepleu, the river comes down a staircase of granite ledges into a shaded pool, a thin white curtain when dry and loud after rain. In a sacred grove at Gbêpleu green monkeys have never been hunted, so they come down the trunks and take fruit from your hand. The bridges have to be rewoven as the vines rot, and the weaving is taught only within the initiated. Fewer men are learning it, so the crossings are thinning out.