A Long Day's
Journey Into Myth

If the writings of French anthropologist Marcel Griault have revealed the mysteries of the Dogon, you wouldn't know it to visit here. There's nothing mysterious about Campement Sanga, built near Griault's own encampment of 40 years ago. The rooms are hot and dark; the plumbing doesn't work because someone forgot to turn on the pump. Yet the hostel's manager is inexplicably dressed in a suit and tie—the first such getup we've seen since leaving the airport in Paris.

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The sun has yet to crest the cliffs as we depart and head down the road toward the lowlands, where most of the more traditional Dogon live. It is here that Alberto's tenure transporting trucks across the Sahara comes in handy. The road down from Sanga switchbacks along the face of the Bandiagara Escarpment over sandy washes and steep pitches. Alberto's 1988 Land Rover takes it all with aplomb. Today Alberto is wearing his safari shirt and a Tuareg-blue burnoose wrapped around his head. Every day he looks more the part of the bush guide, as stubble comes out and we get farther from the saving graces of civilization. I'm sporting a yellow-and-white batik shirt, new shades (bought in Mopti for $6), black nylon pants, running shoes, and white socks. Denise refuses to photograph me, preferring instead to focus on our Dogon guides, the villages, and the landscape. I can't blame her.

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Once we reach our destination, three men and a boy accompany us up a rocky trail to the Dogon village of Yougoupi, as our eight-hour trek begins. Yougoupi sits on the west side of Yougou Mountain and is imbued with the artifacts, architecture, and aromas of the Dogon. It literally reeks of authenticity, as well it should—the women labor constantly, the men bound about as if they've got important business somewhere (when they're not napping in the cool shadow of the men's house), and the children either stare and run away or stare and run up to us. Our guides are two guys named Dogu, one a French-speaking translator who is partially dressed in European clothes; the other a very traditional-looking Dogon with a felt hat and handwoven jacket. A third Dogon, known only as the Hunter, is also along for the day, armed with a shotgun made here in Pays Dogon. It's a tool of practicality, and before the day ends he bags a desert rat (or a ferret of some kind—it's unfamiliar, even upon a close post-mortem).

We walk slowly through Yougoupi, built from the scree of a red-rock cliff whose steeper walls are filled with still more ancient cliff-dwellings. These look almost stone-for-stone like those of Mesa Verde or Canyon de Chelly, and it's an eerie feeling to see them here, on the other side of the globe. But no Anasazi lived here—though "ancient ones" could serve as translation for both the Southwest's most famous mystery and the Tellem as well.

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The Tellem were predecessor to the Dogon in this arid, difficult landscape, and legends about them abound. Some say they were pygmies left behind by the retreat of the rain forests 4,000 years ago. Some say they were simply the ones whom the Dogon kicked out or absorbed when the Dogon came on the scene about 600 years ago. The Dogon say the Tellem were magical beings who could fly, levitate, or simply will themselves up to the impossible shelves where their relics remain. (Archaeologists postulate an even earlier population, the Toloy, who originally built the mortuary caves.) Whatever their origin—or their fate—it's a fact that their cliff-side mortuaries are miraculous achievements. Many of them have been visited and pillaged for artifacts; not a few have resisted the efforts of world-class climbers to reach them.

Then again, the Dogon themselves are a bit of a mystery. As Griault portrayed them, their world view is richly imaginative, highly symbolic, and exceedingly complex. Their origin myths are dense, postulating not one but two separate geneses; everything is bifurcated into opposites, or fours, or eights; they even have 12 constellations, like the Egyptians. And if that isn't enough, they have an apparent understanding that Sirius, the Dog Star, is a

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binary star—an observation impossible until just a few decades ago. Some theorize the Dogon came to this region from Egypt itself, refugees like the Jews from the heavy hands of the pharaohs. Some theories are more extraterrestrial.

What is most striking about this dazzling plethora of possibilities is how remote they all seem from the earthen, practical, hardscrabble world the Dogon inhabit. It's a world of chickens in the yard and goats in the pasture, of baskets of millet harvested year-round from five separate strains; of toothless old women with drained teats and young children with swollen bellies. Even the trail to the initiation grotto, where the teenage boys undergo circumcision in three-year cycles, doubles as the public waste facility, for those strong or patient enough to use it. Touring Dogon Country is not for everyone, and maybe that's a good thing.

As we continue our trek, we rise above the village and head up to the mountain's stony summit. Our passage takes us past the house of the hogon, the ceremonial head of Dogon. The hogon is usually the oldest man in the village, to whom matters of social controversy are brought. But the hogon is also close to the heavens, due to both his age and his wisdom. Hence, his house is above the village, midway between the Dogon and the dramatic cliff-side ruins of the Tellem. The mortuaries, where the bodies are encrypted in the cliffs, are also found here. Thus, the segue from daily life to the realm of the spirits and ancestors is continuous, yet vertical: we are here below, heaven is up toward the stars, and the sacred lies between. What matters most is the permeability between the realms and their interdependence. The ancient ones survive in the very landscape.

We clamber up the ringing boulders past the hogon, past the Tellem, past the Toloy, onto the roof of the mountain. A windstorm the previous evening has filled the air with dust, and visibility is limited. The maps show the dramatic escarpment of Bandiagara about two miles to the west, but we can't see it. The wind still blows as we wander across the mountain, occasionally flushing pigeons from the crevasses that bisect it. One of the Dogu disappears into a cleft and emerges 10 minutes later with a dead bird, which he apparently stunned with a rock before dispatching it with his knife.

On the east side of the mountain we climb down one of the canyons into a red-washed narrows, where a creek trickles into a pool. The two Dogu and the Hunter wait for us while we continue on up the other side. We are about to enter a Tellem sanctuary, but it isn't their village, and they are unwilling to join us. Stepping as quietly as we can, whispering our

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amazement, we enter the ancient cavern. Mud and stone granaries crumble, the rotted skins of animals hang from dried wood beams, faded drawings in the three primary colors of the Dogon—red and black and white—cover the walls. Beneath our feet, the crumbled shards of a thousand pots crunch into terra-cotta dust. Mounted in the mud walls, baboon and monkey skulls stare blindly across the centuries.

After an hour or so we rejoin our guides and hike into the village below. This is Yougoudougou, one of the most important sites of the Dogon. Every 60 years or so the Sigui ceremony takes place here, the grandest of masked dances when the founder of speech and death is celebrated throughout Pays Dogon. Sigui is apparently based on astronomical observations of the cycle of Sirius and its invisible companion. With its location facing eastward, toward the rising sun and stars, Yougoudougou is in a position to recognize the passing of a cosmic cycle—the end of a generation and the beginning of a new one.

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We pay a visit to the village hogon, an ancient man seated in an alcove just inside his compound's door. He is too frail to rise without the aid of a rope hanging from the rafters above; his eyelids are white, though his eyes still see. Claiming he is 134 years old, he says he remembers two Sigui. He admits to four children, all of them now old men like himself. Every now and then he feebly gestures with a horsetail flyswatter but patiently allows us to photograph him and ask pointless questions.

On a lark I ask him if he remembers Mungo Park, or the first white man to visit the region. He tosses his head indifferently; one remembers what lives in the heart, he says, not what is of no consequence.

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