The Bandiagara Escarpment is a sandstone cliff 150 kilometres long in central Mali, rising up to 500 metres above the Séno Plain, and along its base and on its top live the Dogon, whose villages of mud and stone stand under the cliff with the granaries and burial caves of an earlier people, the Tellem, set in hollows near the clifftop above them. The Tellem lived here before the Dogon arrived around the fifteenth century, and their small mud-plastered openings sit on bare rock so high that Dogon legend says they were reached by people who could fly; the Dogon still hoist their own dead up to caves in the cliff on ropes. The classic Dogon-country trip was the walk between the cliff-base villages, days on sandy paths past baobabs, millet fields and ochre altars, with a local guide reading the rock and the customs, sleeping on village rooftops under the stars. From the clifftop the Séno Plain drops away flat to the horizon, dotted with baobabs and the round roofs of distant villages.
Every village has a togu na, a low shelter of carved wooden posts and a thick millet-straw roof where the men's council meets, its roof made deliberately too low to stand up under, so that no argument can come to blows. The Dogon are known for their masks, tall carved and painted faces worn in dances that tell the story of the world, and for the Sigui, their greatest ceremony, which comes only once every sixty years and rolls from village to village over several years as a wave of masked processions; the last began in 1967, and the next is due in 2027. The cliff has been on the World Heritage list since 1989 and on the danger list since the conflict in Mali closed the region to visitors in 2012. Bandiagara is a wall with two peoples' homes in it, and the Dogon are still waiting for the world to come back.