Mount Pelée is the volcano of northern Martinique, in the French Caribbean, 1,397 metres high, whose eruption on 8 May 1902 erased the town of Saint-Pierre and its 28,000 people in minutes with a cloud of burning gas, and it is climbed through cloud forest to the rim of the crater that fired the blast, above a rebuilt town of black sand with the burned ships still on the floor of its bay. Saint-Pierre was the Paris of the Antilles, and the pyroclastic flow that came down the mountain at 600 kilometres an hour left two survivors, one of them Ludger Sylbaris, in the thick-walled cell of the town jail where he was being held for knifing a man in a brawl; in the months after, a spine of solidified lava rose out of the crater as much as fifteen metres a day to stand 300 metres above it, a monolith the volume of the Great Pyramid, before it crumbled. The eruption founded the science of volcanology.
The trail from the Aileron car park climbs root-laced steps and wooden staircases through fern and bamboo on the lower slopes, cool and dripping while the coast bakes, to the ridge and the rim of the Étang Sec caldera, the bowl of 1902, and on a clear morning in the dry season from February to April the Atlantic and the Caribbean lie on either side. The wet ravines hold the Martinique volcano frog, the only member of its family on an oceanic island, found only on these slopes. Pineapple and banana fields step up the lower slopes, and in Saint-Pierre the fishing boats lie on black sand at the foot of the ruined theatre and the jail, with the volcano filling the sky at the end of every street; the wrecks of the ships that burned at anchor are dived, and humpbacks winter in the deep water off the town from January to March. Pelée is a mountain that killed a city in a morning, and the town beneath it came back.