Driving across the Sahel between small villages the color of earth, we passed herds of goats and zebu as the dust

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kicked up a trail behind us. The experience was almost cinematic. Our soundtrack, Ali Farka Toure's The Source, was a tape I'd bought on the street in Bamako for two dollars. Emanating from the small speakers attached to a palm-sized cassette recorder, Ali Farka Toure became the music of our journey.

When we arrived at the Le Campement Djenné, however, a different scene awaited us. The stereo behind the bar played an endless loop of John Lee Hooker (to whom Ali Farka Toure is most frequently compared) while a black guitarist at a table plucked out the bass line of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say." Young European travelers sat around drinking beer and playing cards—the girls' hair in cornrows, the nervous young boys smoking cigarettes. It could have been anyplace on the hippie trail from Cuzco to Katmandu, and it showed that in some circles, Djenné has at last arrived.

Of course, Djenné has been here for some time. Situated on an island in the flood plains of the Bani River, the site makes an ideal trading nexus. Long prosperous, it endured a siege of seven years, seven months, and seven days (according to legend) in 1473, when the Songhai Empire tried to dominate it. René-Auguste Caillié visited on his journey to Timbuktu and found a healthy, well-educated, industrious population. At that time the city was surrounded by a fortified wall; when the French arrived the wall came down, but its crumbled remnants survive—mud-and-grass bricks exposed to the sun.

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Djenné's most famous feature is its mosque, said to be the largest clay building in the world. Its conical turrets of dried mud dominate the skyline of this low-slung town; the structure resembles an enormous sand castle, with towers drizzled by the hand of a playful Allah. Infidels like Alberto, Denise, and me are not allowed inside the mosque and haven't been since a French fashion photographer directed his models in artful poses on the hallowed grounds.

We collected our notes, processed our images, and washed the dust out of our hair. This night was a big one: we had been invited to a performance by a griotte, a woman of Mali's caste of musical historians and social commentators.

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Night had fallen heavily over Djenné by the time we made our way by flashlight between the town's narrow passages and into the courtyard of the house of the griotte. An entire clan was assembled. The griotte beat a rapid rhythm on the upturned calabash before her, while a shrouded man played a double-string kora. Across from them, backup musicians and a street choir clapped and sung in response to the griotte's patterned narrative.

At first the music was just strange enough to intrigue us, but as it progressed (and we had shot all the photos we needed), we too began to feel the ancient voice of the griotte and move to the persistent, complex rhythms of the instruments. At first the women were taken aback by our intense media scrutiny, but soon their performance became more relaxed.

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One of the women from the choir rose and boogied across the courtyard before disappearing into a door. I suppose there's a more accurate term for the step, but the effect was the same: hoots of enthusiasm greeted her, and she returned to dance some more, her long limbs moving beneath her bright yellow dress. She was joined by a woman in violet, and as they stamped their feet wildly to the accelerating beat, the atmosphere turned from reserve to celebration. Soon they were approaching us directly, eyes frank and bright.

I sat back from the swirl of the moment and looked around. We were in the heart of an ancient city in Africa, surrounded by people so dark their skin absorbed even our camera's flash. They were singing in a language completely alien to us, in rhythms foreign to our feet. But it was party time in any tongue, and when Denise got up to dance I knew we had in some way arrived at the heart of our journey. Before long we heard the word tubobu in the griotte's song—she had incorporated us into her litany. Perhaps our own visit had become a small part of the oral history of Djenné.

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