The Dent de Man is a twin-pointed tooth of granite standing 881 metres over the town of Man, in the Tonkpi region of western Ivory Coast, the City of 18 Mountains, and it is climbed on roots and bare hands up the last stretch of rock, in the country of the Dan people, whose villages own bridges woven from lianas and whose masks dance on stilts. The path leaves a village eight kilometres out of town, crosses farm plots and enters forest before the last stretch turns into a hands-and-roots scramble on bare granite to the notch between the two points, three hours up; in August and September the rain runs close to 280 millimetres a month, which greases the granite and hides the points in cloud, so the climb is a dry-season one, from November to April. The mountains around Man are the western highlands of the country, granite domes rising out of forest and coffee, and the town is the base for all of them.
The Dan bridges are the region's other wonder. Not a nail or a strand of steel goes into them: they are woven from forest lianas, hung across the rivers and rewoven by the villages that own them as the vines rot, and Dan tradition holds that a bridge is not built but thrown across in a single night, the work of spirits helped by a sacred spider that weaves the cables; the crossing sways underfoot with the river below. Three kilometres out of town on the Mont Tonkoui road the river comes down a broad staircase of granite ledges at Zadepleu into a shaded pool, loud after rain and a thin curtain in the dry months, and a sacred grove at Gbêpleu shelters a troop of green monkeys that Dan tradition protects. The best-known Dan mask, the gué gblin, dances several metres up on stilts in acrobatics that look impossible at that height. The Dent de Man is a tooth of granite climbed by hand, and the country around it is held together by vines.