As we pressed on, we passed groups of adolescent boys congregating at the roadside, dressed in green tunics and pointed wizard hats and shaking wooden rattles. Tounkara explained that they had recently been circumcised and were looking for gifts to commemorate their entry into manhood. He made a joke about the blacksmith having done the operation. I noticed that I was the only one laughing and realized that it wasn't a joke. The blacksmith really did do it. We pulled over and gladly emptied our pockets into their outstretched hands.

I had heard that although illegal, female circumcision is still common in Mali, performed in secret by the women elders of the village. Tounkara cheerfully told me that both of his teenage daughters had been circumcised. Reading my look of horror, he went on to explain that rather than rely on the old women, he had taken them to a local féticheur, or sorcerer. She had picked up a lemon, sliced pieces off it, and miraculously caused his daughters' clitorises to fall off. "C'était incroyable," he exclaimed, and I couldn't argue with his choice of words.

The next day we would be in Dogon Country, the spectacular terrain of honeycombed hill dwellings that appears in all the travel posters. Here, too, is the spiritual home of the animist beliefs that, I was learning, govern the private practices of Malians as assiduously as Islam dictates public life. But now we had literally come to the end of our road. Beneath a flaming indigo sky, we paused on the banks of the Bani River, the main tributary of the Niger. The sunset had softened the surrounding landscape into a warm, milky residue of receding silhouettes. Here, finally, was a place where one could imagine living, where a life might outstrip the hardships of survival. From across the river chugged a ferry, no more than an iron raft with a pair of outboard motors welded to it, to carry us back to the marooned island town of Djenné.

Once an important trading post in the Mali Empire, Djenné was sequentially invaded and abandoned for the next five hundred years. What remains is an untouched picture of a centuries-old life, of open squares and dusty backstreets, of houses built in an ornamented Moroccan style, and then, around the corner, the inscrutable facades of Sudanese-style village homes. In the dancing half-light of the late evening, it felt as if we had landed in some kind of multicultural magic kingdom. By day, Djenné transforms into a market and tourist town, the main attraction being the massive mosque at its center. Describing it as the largest mud structure in the world, as guidebooks tend to, doesn't quite honor its baroque splendor. Though only a hundred years old (and in a constant state of refurbishment), it looks like a prehistoric palace, or perhaps the outcome of a fevered surrealist dream. Non-Muslims have been excluded from entering for the past decade—ever since, as a local guide explained, a group of Italians took "terrible pornographic pictures" inside (this turns out to have been a fashion shoot).