Lake Atitlán is a lake 340 metres deep in the highlands of Guatemala, filling the crater of a supervolcano that collapsed 84,000 years ago, with three volcanic cones standing along its southern shore and Maya villages clinging to every other edge. The lake is the road. Small wooden boats called lanchas run shore to shore all day, from Panajachel on the north side across to San Marcos, San Juan, San Pedro and Santiago Atitlán, leaving when they fill rather than to a timetable, and every crossing puts the volcanoes in front of you. At first light Tz'utujil fishermen push out in slender wooden cayucos, standing to cast by hand as the mist lifts off the water, a rhythm little changed in generations. Each village behind the docks keeps its own character: steep painted lanes, and in San Juan the workshops where Tz'utujil women dye home-grown cotton with indigo and cochineal and weave it on backstrap looms tied to a post and to their own waists.
Santiago Atitlán, the largest of the villages, keeps Maximón, a folk saint who fuses a Maya deity, a Catholic figure and a colonial-era trickster into one; he is a wooden figure in a hat, moved from house to house each year, and worshippers bring him cigars and liquor. Above the western shore the ridge the Maya call Rostro Maya, the Indian Nose, traces a reclining face against the sky, and the walk up it in the dark ends with the sun rising behind the three volcanoes across the water. Seventeen metres down, divers have mapped Samabaj, the plazas and altars of a Maya town that the rising lake swallowed whole about two thousand years ago. One thing is gone: the poc, a large grebe that could barely fly, lived on this lake and nowhere else on Earth, and it disappeared in the 1980s. Aldous Huxley called Atitlán the most beautiful lake in the world, and the people who live on it still cross it standing up.