Rhumsiki Peak is a 300-metre blade of bare rock over a village in the Mandara mountains of northern Cameroon, one of a whole field of them. The classic view is not from the peak. It is from the low ridge across the valley, late in the day, when the towers behind Rhumsiki separate into ranks, each row paler than the one in front. Up close they are nothing like that silhouette: cracked, streaked, tufted with trees. Paths thread between them and along the terrace walls, and a day will go on them without you noticing. The dry-stone walls hold the fields to the slope and mark where one family's land ends, so you walk them with someone from the village. The one clear window is October and November: the harvest turns the terraces gold and the washed air stands the whole field of needles sharp to the horizon, until December's dust closes it. Almost nobody comes now; the insurgency in the Far North has ended the travel here.
The village is Kapsiki, and it is divided between farmers and smiths. The smiths are a caste apart: they marry among themselves, their wives are the potters, and their trade is iron but also medicine, music, burial and divination. So the farmers need them at every crisis — birth, sickness, death — and keep their distance the rest of the time. Under open thatch the men weave cotton in narrow strips on wooden looms pegged flat into the ground, to be sewn edge to edge into cloth later. You do it in a smith's compound, and it is done with a crab. You put your question; he fills a clay pot with sand, lays out sticks and shards of calabash for the people and places in it, drops the crab in and covers the pot. Then nothing happens for a quarter of an hour. When he lifts the lid he reads the new arrangement — and then puts the question again, four or five times over, each one narrower than the last.