Perhaps four hundred years ago, perhaps more, a small riverside village fell under a reign of terror. The fiend who caused the people such fear was a ravenous beast who made the life-giving river a place of panic. According to prophecy, only a future king could rid the town of the evil curse.

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As the legend goes, a great hunter named Diamoussadian Niaré came to the rescue and killed the giant reptile in an epic struggle. Thus the Niaré dynasty began, and the town became known as crocodile river, Bamako.

By the time Mungo Park straggled through here in 1796, a month after reaching the waters of the Niger at Ségou, Bamako had grown to 6,000 inhabitants—a city by the standards of the day. The city was far from hospitable: natives chased him as if he were a stray dog, and bandits stripped him of his valuables, leaving him with only his shirt, trousers, and hat (within which were hidden the notes of his future book, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa).

Mercifully, our own arrival in Bamako wasn't nearly as dramatic. In fact it was almost comfortable—rooms with showers, working electric lights, powerful coffee at "petit déjeuner." (French is still the official language within the former West African colony of French Sudan.) But there is no disguising the very essence of Bamako, its binding force, and that element is earth. Most of the city's streets are unpaved; the early harmattan winds have thickened the sky with dust, a terra-cotta film covers everything. Even the buildings are clay, constructed of handmade, dried mud adobe bricks. The people are swarthy, black, unblended as they are in Europe and the Americas. There is absolutely no doubt we are in Africa.

Yet despite the proliferation of all this earth, the eye is bedazzled by the array of color. With our guide Alberto Nicheli, we explore the small hardware shops in the downtown market as we look for electronic adapters. Many of the local men wear bobos, long gowns that proclaim their Islamic faith, while the women wear bright dresses bursting with vibrant floral designs. There is no obvious reason for this love of color—it's as if the instinct for self-identity erupts out of the very soil. "The force that though the green fuse drives the flower," as Dylan Thomas said, is obvious both at work and at play in Bamako.

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Alberto is one of those classic ex-pats who clutter the pages of fiction and nonfiction alike. After college in Milan, he hitchhiked across North Africa, too penniless to go to India along with the rest of his generation. He was drawn back to Africa again and again, developing a respect for the native people and a love of the desert. He began driving trucks across the Sahara and then organizing informal tours for friends in Italy. For the past 11 years, he has lived in Togo, running Afrique Excursions and supplying adventure throughout West Africa.

Since we plan to follow a course recreating Park's pilgrimages across Mali for this trip, Alberto is the perfect fit for our capricious excursions. He suggests an afternoon drive down the road to Koulikoro, based solely on a reference in Mungo Park's book. We're relegated to only a French edition of the book since no English version was available before our departure from Seattle. I have to translate Park's recollections of this journey as we drive the Land Rover down the dirt track to Koulikoro.

It's a large town that follows the arc of the Niger as it bends eastward toward Ségou, Mopti, and Timbuktu. Slender pinasse boats are shouldered onto the banks, where women and children bathe. It is our first good look at the river that led Mungo and many others to an early grave. It is broad—almost silver in the afternoon light—with green-fringed islands populating its course and muddy black boulders lining its shallows. Last night we vaulted the black mirror of the river's surface as we crossed a long bridge on our drive from the airport after our arrival; the river maintained an aura of mystery. But today the Niger is splendidly open to the skies, exposing all its secrets.

We stop for a cold soda in Koulikoro and stretch our legs. Denise Rocco has the Kodak DCS 420, a digital camera married to a Nikon body; I have the much smaller DC 50, an electronic

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point-and-shoot. She wanders across the narrow street to befriend an elderly man seated on a stool beneath a tamarind tree, and I photograph her while she takes his picture. Then she focuses in on a pair of young girls in identical dresses who freeze like deer before headlights in front of her lens. Within minutes everyone is giggling. Rocco leads the way by photographing the entire family as they lean outside their doors watching the action.

Dusk approaches; we drive back into the sun toward Bamako. But when we spot a reference in Mungo's book to a town called Marabou, we pull over at a small gathering of houses. We're in Mouribabougou—meaning village of the Marabou in the Bambara language—and we have little doubt that this is the town Park described in his book. The reference to this town in the book carried with it a burden of irony. At the time of Mungo's visit, the headman in the town was known for his great generosity; he played host to all needy travelers regardless of their ability to reward him. Park found this timely hospitality memorable, ignoring the fact that the host gained his wealth from the profits of the slave trade.

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The sun is cremated on a burnt, orange horizon, the sky thick with the combined dust of the harmattan and the village fires. We return to Bamako, where dark forms flit across the narrow road between cars and trucks with burning yellow headlamps that look like huge cat eyes. We turn off the main highway in search of our hotel along the Niger. We bounce blindly and aimlessly through the rubble-strewn, craterlike passages. Our guide is lost, and tomorrow we head out in search of Mungo Park.

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