Dent de Man — the Tooth of Man — is a bare granite fang that breaks into two points 881 metres above sea level, over a town so hemmed in by summits that Ivorians call it the City of 18 Mountains. The rock is a hard core of granite left standing while the softer ground around it wore away. The crust beneath it is among the oldest on Earth, and geologists named this block of the West African craton after the town: they call it the Man Shield, and its basement rock is counted in billions of years. Behind the Tooth the ridges keep climbing to Mont Tonkoui, the country's second-highest peak, where a road reaches the summit and the forest opens onto ridgeline after ridgeline — and, when the air is clean, the hills of Guinea and Liberia.
There is no road up the Tooth, and no railing. A path leaves the village at its foot, about eight kilometres from Man, climbs through farm plots into forest and turns into a hands-and-roots scramble near the top; five to six hours there and back. The granite grips like sandpaper when it is dry and goes greasy within minutes of a shower, which is why guides steer people to the dry months. This is Dan country, and the district around the peak holds things you will not find elsewhere: river crossings woven entirely from forest lianas, renewed by the villages that own them; the granite staircase of the Zadepleu falls; green monkeys sharing a sacred grove with the families who guard it. The west was a front line during the country's long crisis, and Man is calm again — but visitors are still few, and most days the Tooth belongs to the farmers whose plots run up to the treeline.