The cliff is 270 kilometers long and there are settlements all along it. The Dogon came to the area in the 14th century, fleeing the Islamic warriors who had come to convert their neighbors to the south. The oral histories say that they found the cliff was already occupied by a pygmy group, the Tellem, who used special chants to be able to climb up to their caves like spiders. The Dogon prevailed and drove the Tellem out, and today they use the ancient caverns, some of which are 30 meters deep, as burial chambers. Bodies are hoisted up using simple pulley systems.

Funerals are quite elaborate; when a person dies the Dogon believe their spirit hangs around for a while afterwards, and the big ritual occurs a year or two after the death, when it is decided that the spirit needs to move on. This ceremony is the famous Dogon mask dance that the young men of Songha and other tourist towns perform on demand for paying visitors. The masks represent the Dogon community, including both wildlife and people: there are Kanaga masks (the Dogon symbol for the world), rabbits, antelopes, monkeys, women, Peul, Dogon, Bambara, even ethnographer and doctor masks, adopted after the arrival of white anthropologists and explorers in the 1930’s. A lot of research has been done recently on the effect anthropologists have had on the region as far as influencing the evolution of the dances. Some of the Dogon feel that the newer "white" masks aren’t traditional or authentic, and have stopped including them in the dances, despite the fact that the Dogon have always made masks depicting newcomers (Peuls, for example).

The Dogon were and still are viewed as a culture that had remained pre-industrial, and over the years swarms of researchers studying everything from mythology to agriculture to reproductive habits have lived among the Dogon, recording their habits and their stories.

The cliff itself is maybe 300 meters tall, and we descended on foot through a crevasse (visible above). As we went down dozens of Dogon men bearing French tourists’ backpacks and luggage on their heads were going up, many of them barefoot. At the bottom of the cliff we could get good views of the cliff dwellings, tiny holes not larger than your average American window, and sometimes what looked like molded cylindrical houses. At strategic points along the route there were gift shops: wood carvings, masks, walking staffs, granary doors, cotton indigo hats and skirts and blankets, and children accompanied us where ever we went, asking for gifts or money or candy.