The Sindou Peaks are a few kilometres of banded sandstone towers standing out of the farmland of southwestern Burkina Faso, and the people who live under them once hid inside them. There is no buffer zone and no fence. Villagers plough and harvest right up to the foot of the spires, so the rock wall rises straight out of a worked field, an alien skyline treated as ordinary ground. Once you are inside, the formation stops being a skyline at all. Passages squeeze between banded walls of rust, pink and grey, open into grassy clearings and close again, and it is genuinely easy to lose your bearings in there, so you walk it with a guide from the village. The shapes come from the way the stone is cracked: rain worked down the vertical joints here and left towers standing between the corridors it opened. Forty kilometres east at Fabédougou the same plateau weathered along its horizontal beds instead and rounded into stacked domes. Same rock, opposite sculpture.
The Senufo did not stumble on these towers. In the story they still tell, a group fleeing war in the Mali country five or six centuries ago followed a python south until it stopped here, and they read the rock as protection; a series of sacrifices then sealed the peace of the region. What that refuge left is still in among the spires — house remains, altars, and shelters once used for initiation. Red laterite tracks skirt the base, and a moto-taxi runs them to the far end with the whole ridge unrolling beside you, kilometres of pinnacles in a line above the scrub. Trails climb onto the rock itself, and from a lookout on top the towers you were walking between drop away into hundreds of separate pinnacles with green corridors threading among them, the savanna beyond running unbroken toward the Ivorian and Malian borders. Down in the maze your guide comes from a traditional family, and at one turning he will put out a hand and take you round instead. That altar is still in use.