On the map, Essakane is modest: a rural commune in the Cercle of Goundam, in Mali's Tombouctou Region, gathering around sixteen small settlements under one name. The village itself sits roughly 70 kilometers west of Timbuktu, out where the Sahara begins in earnest. The commune takes in Lake Faguibine and two shallow depressions, Lake Kamango and Lake Gouber, that fill with water only in the rare years when the Niger River's annual flood reaches far enough north. Most of the time, this is dune country - vast, pale, and quiet, the kind of horizon where a single tent can be seen for miles.

From 2003 to 2009, Essakane hosted the Festival au Désert, an event that grew out of the traditional gatherings the Tuareg held to settle disputes and share news. The music was the heart of it. Tinariwen, the Tuareg band whose hypnotic desert blues would later win a Grammy, first drew international attention here. Ali Farka Touré, Mali's towering guitarist, played the closing set year after year until his death in 2006. The festival put the sound of the Sahara - looping, electric, ancient and modern at once - in front of audiences who had crossed deserts to hear it.

In January 2003, the festival drew an unlikely guest. Robert Plant, the voice of Led Zeppelin, traveled to Essakane and took the stage in the dunes, playing a set of North African-tinged blues and closing - improbably, gloriously - with "Whole Lotta Love." Tuareg listeners who had never heard the song reportedly stood awestruck in the sand. Plant filmed his journey on a handheld Hi-8 camera, footage that later became a series he called Zirka. It was the kind of moment the festival existed to create: a rock legend and a desert people meeting in a place that belonged fully to neither and somehow to both.

The desert is unforgiving, but it was not the desert that ended the gatherings at Essakane. As security in northern Mali grew precarious, the danger to foreign visitors became impossible to guarantee. In 2010 and 2011, the Malian government moved the festival to the safer outskirts of Timbuktu. Then conflict swept the region, and the Festival au Désert went into exile, carrying its music to other countries and other stages. Essakane returned to silence - the dunes, the wind, the rare flicker of water in the depressions. But for seven Januaries, this remote scatter of villages was the most extraordinary concert hall on the continent.