‘As the sun moved, the lava turned from copper to black to magnesium’

rings like a gong beneath your heels. In some places it crunches like sugar cubes. As the sun moved, the lava turned from copper to black to magnesium. It glittered green with crystals of olivine. My legs ached, but they held, and the longer they held the better it felt to be rising though the thin air through the efforts of my body. Good old legs. Good old body. ‘Are you okay?’ asked Teagan, because she is very well-brought-up and worries about her elders. ‘It’s like life,’ I wheezed grandly. ‘It starts off all flat and you think, This is easy! I can do this! Then it starts to get steep.’ ‘You’re really into metaphors, aren’t you?’ We reached the rim of the crater. One minute you’re climbing and the next you’re one half-step away from the abyss. Down in the crater steam rose through vents in the earth and drifted up into the blue sky. We walked around the perfect circle of the lip and sat with our feet dangling in the void. Or Fred did – I was too scared. Even where there was solid rock and no empty air, there were cracks and fissures running through the solid rock, so how solid could it be? ‘You think maybe that’s enough metaphors yet?’ asked Teagan. I thought about how when we were crawling through the tunnels I let the others push ahead and when I was alone I switched off the lamp to experience the panic of the perfect darkness and I held it as long as I could, then scrambled to catch up with them. Even in the darkness underground, it’s the company of human beings, your fellow travellers, that gives the most comfort. That’s a metaphor too. But I lay on my back and stared up through the empty sky and felt the metaphors lifting from me. I felt the fear and the fretting drift away. The world is not a metaphor, the world is what it is, and it’s here for us to live in and to love. We’ll all die and every year we get closer to it, but right now we are not dead, we are very beautifully, intensely alive, and I am on the edge of an active volcano on an island in the Indian Ocean and all the world is stretched out below me and I think of a Philip Larkin poem and I smile as I stare up through the deep blue air that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.