Later, back at camp, our resourceful director, Mr Davidson has investigated the culinary situation and decided that the licence-payers’ money is best spent on a freshly roasted goat. We’re also working on a theory that wine can be chilled by burying the bottle in the sand an hour or so before drinking.
Despite the threat of krim-krim, most of the evening is spent crawling around in the darkness, trying to find where we’ve put it.
Day Forty-Six
TlRELLI
This morning I’m invited to lunch with Dogolu, the headman. He lives, with two wives and thirty dependents, in a labyrinth of buildings surrounding a precipitous, rocky courtyard. Such is the verticality of Tirelli that one side of their house is about 20 feet higher than the other. Dogolu squats on a rock and talks as the women prepare the meal. Life is not as confined here as it appears to be. Of his nine children, some are studying in Bamako, while others are married and living separately.
The ingredients for lunch are certainly fresh. Most of them are still running around the yard when we arrive. Calabashes full of water are being brought up from the well and millet is being pounded by three girls working pestles taller than themselves. It can take an hour or more of backbreaking work before the millet grain is sufficiently pulverised and the girls ease the laborious process by working in time to a soft, rhythmic chant.
Because the shadow cast by the midday sun is so deep, and because my dinner with Dogolu is to be filmed, J-P asks if the meal can be served on the sunny side of the courtyard. The headman looks at us pityingly, and I soon know why.
What follows is the hottest, and one of the least comfortable, sequences I’ve ever filmed. John Pritchard clocks the temperature in the unshaded overhead sun at 55degC/131degF. Dogolu has managed to coerce an assortment of male relatives to crouch round the communal bowl with me. Fortunately, there’s only one course. It’s a millet porridge, in the centre of which is a bright green sauce made from the baobab leaf, and, mixed in with this, a mutton, aubergine and onion stew. They urge me to eat but every time I pick up a glob of the millet paste it is so hot that I have to release it almost immediately. Desperate not to offend my hosts’ hospitality, I try transferring smaller amounts, but it’s still an ordeal. Passing the food from fingers to lips to tongue to throat is like walking over hot coals.
Amadou grins broadly at my discomfort and points out that amongst the Dogon the ability to eat hot food is a sign of manly prowess. Giggles from the circle around the pot. I laugh too, slightly hysterically.
Later, at siesta, my dreams are a heady mix of fire and flame and vaguely erotic termite mounds.
In late afternoon, when the day is beginning to cool from its earlier rock-cracking heat, the men of Tirelli assemble on the only flat area in the village for a ceremonial dance that is to herald a week of funeral celebrations. Amadou says that celebrations on this scale only follow animist funerals. Animism, which attributes a living soul to all natural objects - trees, boulders, clouds, thunderstorms - remains the religion of the vast majority of Dogon.
Before proceedings begin, men with fly-whisks clear children from the dancing ground. Women can watch, but only from a distance. The masked dancers enter. Two drummers start the beat. Then others join in, striking curved hand-bells, and a piper adds the sound of a whistle to set up a persistent, repetitive rhythm. A chorus, of whom Amadou is one, urges on the dancers, who leap into the ring, dressed in raffia headdresses and skirts in bright yellow, pink and orange over baggy Dogon trousers. The most spectacular dance is performed by half a dozen men on painted stilts, wearing girl masks decorated with cowrie shells and false breasts made of baobab fruit. All the other dancers have elaborately decorated headdresses, which vary from horned antelope heads to likenesses of birds and the huge wooden mask called tiu that can be up to 18 feet long.
It is dazzling in its colour and energy, but I’m frustrated at not being able to comprehend more than the surface of this complex, expressive ritual.
The end of the dance does not mean the end of celebrations in Tirelli. The dancers are rewarded with a special brew of kojo, millet beer, and things really get going after we’ve gone.
As I lie in my tent, exhausted, as we all are, by another hot day of hard labour, the sound of partying carries across on the night air and, not for the first time in West Africa, I’m lulled to sleep by the distant sound of people having a much better time than me. And they’re at a funeral.
Day Forty-Seven
TlRELLI
Made my own minor anthropological discovery this morning. I was behind a bush having a pee in the usual way when I noticed two of the Malian cooks also relieving themselves close by. I was standing. They were kneeling, rendering themselves at once less conspicuous and less affected by the brisk morning breeze. Is this just a desert thing, I wonder? Answers on a postcard please.
Today we strike camp and return to Mopti. Which is probably just as well, as food and water are both running out. I’d been getting quite skilful at washing my entire body in one mug of water, but that’s the trouble with camping. Just as you’re getting used to it, it’s time to go home.
We drive down to Tirelli for the last time. Life goes on and there seems to be no evidence of a wild night. A man is stripping the bark of a baobab tree and slicing it into strips for binding thatch and tying wood. Others are at work on the onion field, vivid green in this bleached landscape. As the village’s only cash crop, it’s allowed precious supplies of extra water. A small market is set up amongst the trees.
Above these Thomas Hardyesque scenes rise the red-brown walls of the escarpment, protective and uncompromising at the same time.
As we clamber up into the village one last time I’m reminded of the severe beauty of the place. The proportions of the houses, the materials that match the surrounding rocks, the harmony of the village with its environment. The cliff is still, as it has been for 1000 years, a sanctuary, lacking cars and satellite dishes and overhead wires and things that seem to be everywhere in the world but here.
But it’s no use getting sentimental. As we load our gear, women climb slowly past us, carrying the never-ending shuttle of water up to the village. They ignore our awkward smiles. As our car finally pulls away, I reach for the outstretched hand of a boy who rushes up to the window. But he doesn’t want to shake my hand. He just wants a pen or a sweet or a coin.
We remain us. They remain them. For how long, I’m not sure.
One of the small pleasures of hard travel is the way basics can be transformed into luxuries. Tonight, back at the Kanaga Hotel in Mopti, the finest champagne in the world would be no match for the forbidden delights of running water.
The heat and dust of the Pays de Dogon have taken their toll. The plastic cap on my tube of travel wash has melted, my urine is the colour of mustard and it takes so long to strip away the layers of dust that I feel as if my body might have turned to mud.
Tomorrow we face the Niger, so it’s an early night. Lean over to switch off my light when a power cut kills it for me.
Day Forty-Eight
ON THE NIGER
Mopti is a changed place this morning as we head down to the waterfront in search of our transport to Timbuktu. The river is busy again. Slender pirogues, so weighed down with people that the boats themselves are hardly visible, are punted to and from the network of fuzzy green islands that lie revealed between the Bani and the Niger. The river bank heaves with activity. A group of women in scarves and long saris are bent over vegetable beds hastily planted to take advantage of the newly exposed mud, and nearer the port itself rows of earthenware pots wait to be loaded. Beside them, to my surprise, for I thought such things never existed outside of Bible stories, are tablets of salt. They’re slim, rectangular blocks, like large paving stones, bound with lengths of cloth, their grey crystalline surfaces glittering in the sunlight.