Masaya, the Red Breath

You smell Masaya before you see it. The sulphur arrives on the wind a few hundred metres from the rim, sharp and metallic, the kind of smell that makes your body decide on its own that this is a serious place. The Spanish who arrived here in the sixteenth century called the crater the Mouth of Hell and built a cross on the rim to keep it quiet. The cross is long gone. The mouth is still open.

At the railing the ground drops away into smoke, and then, through the smoke, comes the glow. A lava lake sits far down in the throat of the crater, and after sunset it stops being a rumour and becomes the only light in the world. Orange, then a deeper red, then a flare of yellow as the crust breaks and fresh lava shows through. It moves. It breathes. You stand there in the dark with strangers and nobody says very much.

Photographing it is a wrestle with the smoke. The plume swings with the wind, and for long stretches the crater is simply a wall of grey lit from beneath. Then the wind shifts, the smoke thins, and for ten or fifteen seconds the lava lake is laid bare, cracked into glowing rivers across a black surface. You learn to wait with the shutter ready and breathe through your sleeve.

Long exposures turn the chaos into something almost calm: the lava smooths into ribbons, the smoke into soft cloud, the headlamps of other watchers into small warm stars along the rim. On the drive out the crater stayed visible in the mirror, a low red dome on the horizon, still breathing into the night long after we had turned for home.