23 May Sirius' children

I recently recalled the Aeropostale route where pilots like Saint-Exupery and Mermoz risked their lives crossing the desert to deliver the Dakar mail on time.

Over the years I have been lucky enough to meet pilots of a similar breed, who, with the same dose of madness and sense of duty, were always capable of taking on that lonely runway in the Libyan desert. I shared with them the adventure of flying close to the dunes, over lost oases or between the mountains of Akakus. How lucky I was!

Recently they made their last flight. It was on 28 April last, that morning the plane took off, rose to about 200m and then plummeted to the desert sand.

And by a couple of coincidences, and some extra hours of my father from Heaven, fate wanted that this time I was not on that plane, on that flight. As they say around here, Maktub, everything is written.

So I have been born again and therefore I am starting a new life, which I want to start from scratch. I had thought of devoting it entirely to order, ascetic life and office work, but I see that I'm already getting mixed up again.

In fact, days later I was already looking out over the dunes again, thinking about my next adventure. As the astronaut Collins said, for me it is imperative to explore. That day I daydreamed of reaching a village that has always lived isolated and hidden, far away, on the other side of the desert, behind the mountains of Akakus, even beyond the dangerous Salvador Pass, past the territory of the fearsome Ifoghas... Farther away.

This is how the Dogon people began their adventure hundreds of years ago, setting out from Libya and following my dream route, how many times I must have been tempted to travel it... I have always shared the temptation of André Citroen, that dreamer who also took that route, determined to cross the Sahara aboard heavy tracked vehicles. Another madman on my list of favourites.

I have sometimes followed another, more accessible route, from Djenné, sailing along the Bani between Bozo and Kurumba villages, to reach Mopti, Niger's most bustling port. From there overland, alternating desert landscapes with green onion fields, you can easily reach Djiguibombo, the first village on the Bandiagara fault, if you're not allergic to onions like me. It also has its dose of adventure, although it's not the same.

As I said, far away, trapped between the walls of the great fault line and the orange desert of Gondo, the Dogon people still live there, hidden for hundreds of years, after driving out the Tellem pygmies, who in turn drove out the Toloy culture, inhabitants of the fault line thousands of years ago. Tellem and Toloy fled to the Congo, leaving behind tiny, unreal houses perched on the escarpment forever. And there the Dogon remained for centuries, hidden, safe from the attacks of the Shongai empire, the Mossi, Islamisation, and even the French... The African version of Patones from above.

That is why the Dogon kept their customs intact and continued to worship the water god, Lebé and Binu, the Nommo twins... and so many other totemic spirits. A people that between the tranquillity of that red valley dominated by gigantic baobabs, the villages with their characteristic pointed millet granaries and the leisurely gait of its inhabitants, anyone would say that it hides one of the greatest mysteries of Africa and the most complex religion of the continent.

The first to study this culture was the anthropologist Marcel Griaule, who approached these beliefs from a cosmogonic perspective. A must-read book, although I confess that I did not understand much (or little) and at times my grey matter was on the point of crystallising after meditating on what I read, but even so, it is essential to understand the complexity of their rituals and symbolism.

Indispensable to enter villages like Kani Kombolé or Telly and identify and understand the meaning of the totems and amulets found among the streets, or the significance of the almost 80 kinds of ritual masks. Necessary to understand the order of things established by the Hogon, the spiritual head of the village, the only one who can relate to the God Amma, the creator.

It is essential to know that Nommo, the half-reptile god arrived 3000 years ago from the third star of Sirius, a dwarf star, invisible to the human eye, whose existence was mysteriously known centuries before it was discovered. They also told Griaule about the orbits of this star, the existence of Saturn's rings, the 4 moons of Jupiter and even a fourth star of Sirius, Emme ya, which astronomers have not yet found...

I remember now with time those nights I spent "la belle etoile" on the roof of some Dogon house listening to the Cigala. I saw skies with so many stars and so close that I began to think that it could be true, that Nommo came from one of them.

And so they maintained this knowledge of astronomy and their complex beliefs for centuries, until finally Islam spread to every corner of the desert and changed everything. Or almost everything, because every evening the call to prayer may resound throughout the valley from the mosques, but they will always believe in Amma, the god of water, and every 60 years, when Sirius appears between the horns of those two distant mountains, they will worship him...