Diosso Gorge is an amphitheatre a hundred metres deep, walled in ochre, pink and cream, and none of it is rock. The cliffs are sand and clay that come away in your hand. They are cut into the coastal plateau twenty kilometres north of Pointe-Noire, in the Republic of the Congo, with forest on the floor. Worn paths trace the lip, and what you see changes at every bend as another band of colour swings round. The village counts three bowls here, not one, and calls two Marseille and Libya. When the walls show that colour is the odd part. A cold current offshore holds a lid of low cloud over this coast through the dry months. The season with the least rain is also the one with the least sun, and the cliffs go pale. The colour arrives with the rain: from December to April the sun is out five hours a day between downpours, and low afternoon light sets the iron in those walls burning crimson.
Going down inside is the village's business. Guides from Diosso take you in on ladders and cut steps a youth association there built and keeps in repair. From the floor the scale lands: eighty metres of crumbling colour over your head, and a face close enough to read the flood layers in it. A longer trail leaves the rim and follows the gorge all the way to the Atlantic, ninety minutes down and harder coming back. The rains that turn those red paths to mud, over two hundred millimetres in the heaviest month, gouge fresh gullies into the ground. The village on the high ground was Bwali, capital of the Kingdom of Loango, whose kings ruled this coast from about 1550 for three centuries. They lie in a mausoleum a few minutes from the drop, beside the palace of the last king, now the Ma Loango museum. The bay below became one of the busiest embarkation points of the Atlantic slave trade. The ground all of it stands on is still moving: the amphitheatre is wider every year than it was.