Bandiagara, Mali  - Beads of sweat broke out on the tour guide's brow, and not because of the heat. A tourist's rucksack had just struck one of the sandstones loosely stacked in the wall of an enclosure, causing it to wobble.

"For God's sake!" the guide cried. "If that stone had fallen, we'd have a discussion here lasting for hours. It would have been a serious breach of taboo."

Behind the wall lived the hogon of the Dogon village of Djigibombo, a kind of high priest. And the Dogon people of Mali, West Africa, believe that a fallen stone from the wall will bring misfortune on the village.

Said El Idrissi el Bechkaoui, a student tour guide and Islamic scholar from Munich, had laid down the ground rules before his group arrived at the first Dogon village: Never wander from the path. Always walk single file behind the local guide. Never sit on any stones without asking first.

Visits to the remote, hard-to-reach Dogon villages in south-eastern Mali, near the border with Burkina Faso, are complicated. Demons lurk everywhere, and an unsuspecting European could violate one of the numerous taboos at the corner of practically any house.

The Dogon live in several hundred small villages along the Falaise de Bandiagara (Bandiagara Escarpment), which rises 300 metres and looks out on the Gondo Plain to the south. To this day, many of the villages are carved into the yellowish-red face of the sandstone cliffs like bizarre nests.

Conditions become more primitive the farther you go from Sanga, which is the main Dogon region and accessible by road from the city of Mopti. A two-hour drive in an all-terrain vehicle on a dirt road from Bandiagara will take you to the village of Niongono. Made entirely of sandstone and mud, it has no electricity, no concrete, no corrugated iron and no plastic trash.

The granaries in Niongono, which hold millet, have conical roofs of straw. The women pound millet under baobab trees, while the men water deep-green onion fields on the village's edge.

Though Islam has claimed most of their villages, the Dogon have preserved their animistic and patriarchal traditions. "More than 50 per cent of the Dogon are Muslims," El Idrissi said. At the same time, 100 per cent of them are animists."

According to the Dogon, the single god Amma created heaven, Earth, the sun, the moon, the stars and several demigods. Amma created some people in bright sunlight, who became black, and others in dim moonlight, who are "as pale as larvae." One of the Dogon's most important rituals is the Mask Dance, which generally lasts several days.

Other Dogon traditions, such as circumcising girls, are intolerable to Europeans, who consider it female genital mutilation. It is a deep-rooted practice that is closely linked to the Dogon's creation myth.

The boys are circumcised, too. Every three years in Songo, for example, boys in three age groups gather for several weeks to be circumcised by the village blacksmith. Once the wounds have healed after two or three weeks, the village holds a big celebration the climax of which is a race among the boys who have been freshly initiated into manhood.

The winner of the race receives a granary filled with millet. The runner-up gets the prettiest girl in the village, and a cow goes to the boy who finishes third. (dpa)