Rhumsiki Peak is the hardened core of an old volcano. Roughly 30 million years ago magma cooled and set hard in the throat of a volcano here; the softer cone around it then weathered away, leaving the plug standing bare — a blade of rock rising some 300 metres off the Kapsiki Plateau, to 1,224 metres above the sea. It is the sharpest of dozens of such necks left across this corner of Cameroon's Far North, the northern tip of the Cameroon Volcanic Line. From the plateau the plain reads like a drowned mountain range with only its spires above water, and the flat country past the last of them is already Nigeria. The French writer André Gide crossed here in 1926 and called this landscape among the most beautiful in the world — a line that made Rhumsiki's name abroad.
By local tradition the Kapsiki took to these rocks in the eighteenth century, retreating from raiders on the plain, and terraced what ground they had, holding millet and sorghum to the slope behind dry-stone walls. They quarry the same volcanic rock for their round, thatched houses. For a few minutes at each end of the day the needle turns from grey to a deep red-brown. The village blacksmith holds several roles at once: he is also the undertaker, the musician and the healer, and he tells fortunes. He shuts a freshwater crab into a covered pot that holds small tokens, then lifts the lid and reads your future from the way the crab has shifted them. Almost nobody comes to see any of it now. Boko Haram's insurgency reached the Far North in 2013, foreigners were kidnapped, the tour groups stopped, and the lodges below the peak have stood mostly empty since. Cameroon is lobbying European capitals to soften their warnings; Washington and London still tell their citizens not to travel to this region at all.