Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  Whether or not they meant to do so, the ancients had built here a lasting monument to their fugitive civilization. From a single piece of wood, Barlow was later able to retrieve a radiocarbon date. The stunning double granary, it turns out, was built before Shakespeare lived, before Giotto painted, before church choirs intoned their plainsong. The wood sample gave a date of around 1000 AD.

  If any of their works was devised to outlive the centuries, it might have been the hallucinatory petroglyphs and pictographs the Anasazi carved and painted all over the Southwest. What else might the art have been for? Yet there are good reasons to doubt such an apparently reasonable conclusion. Aboriginal rock art from northern Australia abounds in layers of images superimposed one upon the next. Such wanton obliteration of many a masterly frieze seems to hint at a nihilistic revisionism—“our art is so much better than that of the old guys who preceded us.” Yet living informants who stood at the tail end of the Aboriginal legacy told scholars that the art was meant not to be seen, only performed. Though not so pervasively as in Australia, the rock art of the Southwest teems with superimposition.

  Under glass in a museum in Arizona, one of the finest specimens of a widespread ancient artifactual tradition resides. The object is called a split-twig figurine. To create it, the craftsman took a single slender willow branch, sliced it from end to end, and wove the twin pieces into a striking effigy of a bighorn sheep. If the museum figurine were unique, scholars today would regard it as the creation of a single inspired genius. Yet hundreds of split-twig figurines, all of them woven from a single piece of wood and nearly all of them shaped to conjure up bighorn sheep, have been found across the Southwest.

  It is hard today not to see the museum figurine as an objet d’art. Yet it was left by the culture that crafted it in one of the most obscure nooks of the Grand Canyon. Once again, radiocarbon wizardry unlocks its age. The figurine is far older than Shakespeare and Giotto. It was shaped by a loving hand before the ancient Romans rose and fell. It was already centuries old by the time the anonymous oral bards concocted the Iliad and the Odyssey. It dates from somewhere around 1500 BC.

  Nor was it left on display. It was discovered in the twentieth century deep inside a gloomy alcove in the Redwall limestone band of cliffs—the hardest of all the Grand Canyon bands to climb. And as if that were not concealment enough, the figurine had been placed under a flat rock.

  No, it was not meant to be seen. It was hidden away to perform its arcane task, whatever that may have been (hunting magic?), as far from human eyes as its keepers could place it. The figurine communed not with human posterity, but with the invisible forces than ran the universe.

  Once I had fully embraced the virtuosic strangeness of Anasazi climbing, I began to wonder: Was it unique? Or were there other examples of non-Western, preliterate peoples pulling out all the stops of radical ascent around the world, and if so, what were they all about?

  One day in the 1980s, as I was reading Danseuse de Roc, the autobiography of France’s top female climber, Catherine Destivelle, I came across a photo that left me speechless. It showed an alcove high in a steep sandstone cliff that was filled nearly to the roof with human bones—the utterly jumbled remains, I later learned, of three thousand individuals. The burial cave was in the West African country of Mali. The cliff was called the Bandiagara Escarpment. It stretches 150 miles from east to west at the edge of a desert 150 miles south of Tombouctou. The vertical precipice ranges up to 500 feet high. The inhabitants of the region today are the Dogon, but the necropolis was the work of a vanished prehistoric people called the Tellem. Destivelle gave only the faintest clues as to who the Tellem were. I was afire to find out more.

  The Tellem, it turned out, were little understood. Only a single Dutch team of archaeologists had ever studied them. From radiocarbon and tree-ring dating, the Dutch determined that the Tellem had flourished from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries AD. Several months after I had found the photo, I landed my first assignment for National Geographic magazine.

  In November 1988, four of us (a photographer, myself, and a climbing partner each) flew to Bamako, the capital of Mali, rented two vehicles, hired a pair of savvy guide/drivers, and drove to the Dogon country, where we hired a local man as interpreter. We spent a month pushing our way across sand dunes along the Bandiagara. To this day, that month remains one of the truly enchanted episodes of my life.

  On our first day along the Bandiagara, we decided to explore the cave of jumbled human bones. The Toloy Couloir, in which the alcove lies, is an overhanging precipice the summit of which can be easily gained by hiking up a series of ramps. On the rim just above the cave, we set up a belay, and I downclimbed and traversed to the right—climbing on solid rock that was about 5.6 in difficulty—and stepped inside the gloomy mausoleum. The chaos of bones filled the orifice almost to the roof, with only a narrow ramp across which I could tread without clambering over the human remains. Even so, I winced as I felt an ancient femur snap underfoot. I rationalized my profanation by remembering that the Dutch had spent days inside the alcove measuring and cataloguing the debris. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw dozens of skulls randomly strewn across a branchwork of ribs and fibulas. There were animal bones mixed with human, dusty pieces of cloth, and knotted skeins of rope scattered among the disarticulated skeletons. A musty, acrid odor fouled the air. After two hours inside the cave, I reattached my harness to the rope, swung back outside the entrance to the chamber, and was lowered by my partner 100 feet to the base of the cliff, the last 80 feet of it dangling in midair.

  The Dutch archaeologists, not being climbers, had invented their own bizarre contraption to gain access to the cave. They had brought to Mali a spherical aluminum cage, inside which one or two researchers huddled while teammates hauled the thing up the precipice, with helpers on the ground using trailing ropes to pull the “bathysphere” (as I had nicknamed it) tight against the overhanging wall. For two decades they had used this ingenious but anachronistic device to get to the more inaccessible alcoves they studied, which amounted to only a small fraction of the Tellem graveyards that dotted the cliffs up and down the Bandiagara. Because of this, they had no conception of how the ancients had first gotten to those eyries, nor how they had hauled their dead up the cliffs. In an offhand remark in their official monograph, the Dutch had insisted that none of the Tellem lairs would have posed a serious challenge to an expert rock climber today. This assertion, as we discovered day after day, was complete nonsense.

  Still, what was that talus pile of human bones all about? The Dutch speculated that in using the graveyard one generation after another, the Tellem had run out of space, and so had tossed aside the older dead to make room for the new. In my mind I added my own speculation: perhaps, like the ancient Egyptians and many another vanished civilization, one “dynasty” of Tellem after another had desecrated and grave-robbed its predecessors.

  A few days later, farther down the Toloy Couloir, we spent an exhausting sixteen hours concocting our own way to access alcoves the Dutch had never touched. From a bolted anchor, with three 160-foot ropes tied together end to end, I was lowered to a series of ledges, on each of which lay a Tellem necropolis. Here the cliff stretched an imposing 400 feet from top to bottom, relentlessly overhanging. Earlier we had spotted through binoculars from an opposite vantage point an assortment of Tellem structures on a ledge 100 feet below the rim.

  To reach it now, I made use of a clever contraption of our own manufacture—a long wooden stick with a metal hook taped onto the end. With this I was barely able to snag a bush and pull myself in to the ledge. I spent another two hours scrambling carefully from one structure to another. Here I found orderly graveyards, rows of skeletons wrapped in faded, decorated cloth shrouds, undisturbed during the previous five hundred years. Several of the structures, however, lay on a smaller ledge 20 feet above me. I could see no way to bridge the gap without risking a fatal fall, so I left those tantalizing biers unvisited. As my part
ners at the top of the cliff lowered me the rest of the way to the base, I came in view of one Tellem burial site after another. Several had clusters of intact ceramic pots neatly placed beside the orderly dead. By now I dangled so far out in space that there was no hope of landing on these lower ledges, even with the aid of my grappling hook. All I could do was gaze in astonishment.

  The Dutch had not tried to get to these alcoves farther down the Toloy Couloir. Nor had they deployed their “bathysphere” to visit any of the scores of really inaccessible gravesites that we discovered all along the Bandiagara during the subsequent weeks. The few that we ourselves were able to investigate up close, we reached only by rappelling.

  All during the month, as the four of us lingered over campfires in the sand dunes, we debated Tellem climbing technique. The why of the phenomenon seemed evident: the caves were the places the Tellem chose to house their dead. The Dutch agreed, adding the speculative corollary that perhaps the alcoves had also served as defensive refuges when the people were under attack. Who the attackers might have been is lost to history.

  During our nightly seminars, we agreed that the key piece of Tellem gear had been rope. Everywhere we looked, we found skeins and segments of inch-thick rope woven out of baobab bark. The other obviously crucial component of the ancients’ craft was an object the likes of which I had never seen anywhere else, and which had no affinity with Anasazi climbing. From the floor of nearly every alcove, a black stick made of ironwood (one of the heavier species of wood found in sub-Saharan Africa) protruded two or three feet out of the entrance over the void, cocked at an angle about twenty degrees from the horizontal. The other end of the stick was anchored under heavy stones mortared in place. The Dutch, whose scholarly papers were written in French, called these sticks boulins, a word that has no good English translation. Many of the boulins were deeply scored by rope grooves.

  It was clear, then, that ropes and boulins were the key to the Tellem achievement. A boulin served as a sort of yardarm by which materials of all kinds were raised to such a great height, including human bodies. This explanation, however, begged the question of how the initial climbers had gotten to the alcove. For various reasons, we concluded that the Tellem had not used their baobab ropes to rappel from the top of the cliff.

  The modern-day Dogon are expert climbers. Over the span of time since their advent in the Bandiagara in the sixteenth century, they had been able to get to many of the Tellem alcoves. One day a jovial fellow named Amadomion, the virtuoso of the village of Pégué, told us how he did it. From a lower ledge, he tied a piece of wood as ballast to the end of a very thin rope of his own manufacture, then repeatedly tossed the rope until it looped over the boulin above. With both ends of rope on the ledge, he then tied one end of his thin cord to a much stouter rope. Once he had hauled the heavy rope over the boulin and anchored it in place, he simply shinnied up the rope like a kid in a gym class. I asked, “But how did the Tellem get the boulin up there to begin with?”

  Amadomion shrugged and smiled. “They had a very strong magic.”

  The motive for the Dogon ascent was not to bury their own dead, nor to rob the graves of their predecessors. It was to gather the pigeon dung that coated the remote ledges, for that smelly stuff was a fertilizer without peer.

  In village after village, through our interpreter, Oumar, who translated from the native language into French, I asked the Dogon about the Tellem. We were usually told that the Tellem were dwarfs who lived in the high alcoves. When we asked what had happened to them, the Dogon often said that they had migrated to the Congo or Gabon, where they lived today as pygmies. The Dutch, however, demonstrated by measuring the skeletons that the Tellem were of normal African height, about the same stature as the Dogon. Nor did the Dutch find any evidence that the alcoves had been used for habitation. The Tellem buried their dead in them, and also built granaries to house their precious grain—chiefly millet. One of the team’s most valuable discoveries, obtained through DNA comparisons, was that the Tellem were related to no living peoples. They had in the truest sense died out.

  Tellem is a Dogon word meaning “we found them.” But when we asked our Dogon informants about their people’s first contact with their predecessors, the answers varied radically from village to village. Like the Tellem, the Dogon bury their dead in caves in the cliffs. It was tantalizing to learn that the Dogon often appropriated alcoves that had already served as Tellem cemeteries. We would have given anything to visit one of these graveyards, but they were strictly off limits to outsiders. To gain permission to visit even the purely Tellem alcoves, we had had to arrange a meeting with the village hogon, its chief official. This required an elaborate séance with Oumar as our go-between. It would have been the height of rudeness simply to pop the question; instead, the decorum required a tedious roundabout palaver, in which we solicitously inquired as to the hogon’s health, the welfare of the village, and the progress of that season’s harvest. Only after we offered a small “contribution” to the community in the form of Malian francs would the hogon grant us permission to visit the Tellem alcoves.

  After weeks of such negotiations, one day Oumar, my climbing partner Matt Hale, and I approached an alcove low in a cliff. We were 30 or 40 miles from Oumar’s home village, in country with which he was unfamiliar. From the look of the alcove, Oumar declared that it was a Tellem burial site. As far as we could tell, no Dogon village lay nearby. I urged our guide to shortcut the tedious ceremony of seeking out the nearest hogon, and we started hiking through tall grasses toward the foot of the cliff. All of a sudden, we heard shouts from the top of the cliff. A moment later, big stones started exploding all around us. A hasty glance revealed human hands launching these missiles from 300 feet above us, evidently with the intent to kill us. We turned and ran for our lives, until we were safely out of range.

  My heart pumping with adrenaline, I begged that we regain our rented Land Cruiser and flee. But Oumar had lost face among his people, and now he demanded that we circle around the cliff and hike up to the village of the bombardiers, which turned out to be named Yawa. Half an hour later, as we entered the outskirts of the town, we met several Dogon men lounging on the rocks. They showed no trace of hostility. We shook hands with the men, while Oumar engaged in a long conversation.

  “What was that all about?” I asked Oumar as we left.

  “They said, yes, it was we who yelled at you, but it was the boys who threw the rocks.”

  “Why?”

  “They said they have to guard their tombs.” Apparently we had mistaken a Dogon cemetery for a Tellem one. “They have spies looking for them.”

  “But who are the spies?” I wondered.

  “Us,” said Oumar.

  Gradually over the month, we elicited bits and pieces of the Dogon take on the Tellem. There were many theories about the strong “magic” that had enabled the earlier inhabitants of the Bandiagara to get to alcoves as high as 200 feet up overhanging cliffs. As translated by Oumar, “The Tellem could climb a single thread. And they had a way of making the thread go up there and attach itself.” Some swore that the Tellem could fly, or that they could change themselves to giants, take a single step up to the caves, and change themselves back into dwarfs to live there. Some even swore that the Tellem were such powerful orators that they could talk themselves up to the caves.

  The dwarfs-to-giants story explained the Dogon belief that the Tellem lived on as the pygmies of the Congo and Gabon. The assertion that the Tellem lived in the alcoves may have arisen from the fact that were no signs elsewhere of Tellem habitations. Indeed, in twenty years of research, the Dutch had found no traces of even the most rudimentary Tellem village. The team hypothesized that all the Tellem villages lay underneath today’s Dogon towns. But it would have been the gravest transgression to dig a sample trench in even an abandoned Dogon village.

  The other Dogon theories about how the Tellem had reached the high alcoves arose from some deep knowledge of magic that we Westerne
rs would never penetrate.

  Near the end of our journey, in a town called Tireli Sud, Matt and I were granted our deepest insight into the oral tradition that embodied the Dogon grasp of their vanished predecessors. Walking through the narrow alleyways of the town, we came to its central courtyard, where four ancient elders lounged in the sun. One was blind, another held up a left hand that shook with palsy, and a third had a look of perpetual outrage on his fierce face.

  It took a while for us to break the ice. When we first asked these dignified oldsters what had happened to the Tellem, the blind man rejoined, “How do I know? I wasn’t here.” But slowly the men warmed to the inquiry. One of them teased another, “Tell them what you really know. Don’t go making up stories.” During long silences, the men spat in the dirt and shooed away noisy children.

  At last we were allowed to enter the outer chamber of their long-pondered knowledge of the ancient past. All four agreed that when the Dogon came, the Tellem had already departed from the cliff. They also agreed that the Tellem had lived in the alcoves: they were hunter-gatherers, not growers, and they knew how to find water in some of the caves. I asked how the ancients had gotten to the dizzying ledges that hung above Tireli Sud (craning our necks, we could turn our gaze from the courtyard to the Tellem alcoves that hovered almost directly above us). At first the elders said only that they had no idea how the Tellem had done it, but that magic was the key to their exploit. I played devil’s advocate: hadn’t the Dogon actually driven the Tellem away? A scornful sneer came over the blind man’s face. “How,” he said sternly, “could we have driven out people who had such powerful magic?”

  They had heard stories told by the sages of previous generations that the Tellem could ride horses straight up and down the cliff. They could even ride on the wind itself. Later the hogon of Tireli Sud pointed to a pair of boulins wedged in a crack above 40 feet of dead-vertical sandstone. Those, he said, were hitching posts the Tellem had used to tie off their horses.