Lost Grotto of the Tellem

The other night at camp we worked over our notes, processed our photographs, and tilled the fields of our experience for the fruit of our labors. When it came time to call in to Microsoft via the sat-phone, we decided a greeting from the Dogon would be preferable to our own.

The following morning, we set out over Yougou mountain, our guides addressing anyone we passed

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with a lengthy series of questions: "How are you? How is your wife? How are your goats? How are your fields? How is your grandfather?" Each question elicited the local equivalent of our own standard reply: "Fine." It made for an evocative aural greeting, and it was this that we called in via satellite—a ritual exchange of pleasantries between the Dogon and the outside world.

Today, after sweet coffee and stale French bread (the air is so dry, the baguettes turn to chalk as soon as they are sliced), we follow our guides to a nearby village. It is said to be a secret place. If Yougoudougou is the original village of the Dogon, we are told, what we are about to see is the original village of the Tellem, the place where the Tellem first made peace with the spirit of the Bandiagara Escarpment at least a thousand years ago.

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Our guides Dogu and Dogu lead us along the steep path, over boulders and scree, up the mountainside. Though the path is worn, it is difficult to tell where it is going. We see no signs of the village. Then, as we crest a shelf, we come upon small sorghum plots scrapped out of the dirt, and broken water pots, and we spy the distinctive roof of a Dogon granary. Like the sorghum baskets, the granary replicates the cosmos. A square foundation supports the 12-foot-high building, whose peaked thatch roof is circular in shape—earth below, rising to the heavens.

When we enter the village, time seems to stand still. Doorways and windows are locked with ancient carved wood panels that have served them season after season. Goats eye us nervously and scamper away. Children following the goats abandon their herds and press in toward us, while the adults greet us with their singsong formalities. No doubt our large pale bodies, festooned with technologies, present quite a spectacle. But the people regard us casually. It is as if we have landed here from another era, but we are all in this one together.

From the village we look down to the plain below. We can make out our Land Rover, almost lost in the grass and sorghum, and John, who is perhaps finishing off the bread. But we know he cannot see us. For hundreds of years, it was through the clever placement of their villages

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that the Dogon remained isolated from the advances of the Muslims, of the French, and even of the tourists: there are doubtless villages as yet unvisited even by the most hardy travelers.

We hike on, climbing above the village over the mountain to yet another secret destination even more remote. I cannot tell you how long it takes us to reach it. I cannot tell you the name. There is a bit of semitechnical climbing, and at one point my wrist brushes against a rock and my watch falls to the ground. I pick it up and put it in my pocket, like another colorful stone or broken shard along the way, to be puzzled over and appreciated but given little weight.

As we descend into a chasm, where the light casts us in an orange glow, Dogu the Dogon (dressed in his yellow woven gown) starts to sing, his gentle voice echoing in the cavern. We do not know the words, and no one bothers to translate. Like the cooing of the pigeons, it grows out of the moment, organic, complete.

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Around a sheer wall we climb and suddenly find ourselves in a red cavern pressed into the escarpment, surrounded by the ruins of a Tellem sanctuary. Granaries—some square, some circular—reach from floor to ceiling, their walls crumbling. Stacks of ancient terra-cotta surround the structures, antelope horns litter the floors, animal skulls and decayed skins hang from the walls, the wood carvings of spirits stand in doorways and reach to support the sky or to touch the heavens. And inside the walls, behind the fallen boulders that once blocked them from the light, the bones of the dead lay scattered.

You see the skulls first, their domelike craniums emblems of our humanity. Then you notice the femurs, the pelvis, the fingers strewn about in the dark grotto, the residue of existence. One of the guides climbs inside to search among the bones and decaying shrouds for relics. There is no memory of these people or who they once were. Tellem, after all, means "ancient," or "they

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who have gone," rather than any particular tribe or clan. Even a Dogon wouldn't think of disturbing the grave of someone they knew or someone who still lives in memory. But beyond the limits of memory, what is there? Nothing—no personalities, no names, no spirits survive beyond the awareness of the living.

I take notes and shoot pictures and pan across the sacred grotto with a sense of irony, even whimsy. Our documentation of them does not touch the spirit of the dead. Even my dispatch is comprised of bits and bytes of electrons that hang together as information only as long as we know the code to understand it. When that is lost, the images evaporate like lost memories. It's all vaporware.

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