The Carbet Falls come off the flank of La Soufrière, the live volcano of Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe, in three separate drops, and nobody gets to the foot of any of them. Rockfall closed the last stretch of every path, so the falls are watched from platforms. The mountain that makes the water makes the rock come down as well. Almost everyone walks to the second, which is a single 110-metre plunge. The path is 1.4 kilometres there and back and near-level, on wooden footbridges and stone steps under tree ferns and the red bracts of balisier. It ends on a promontory straight across the ravine, where you hold all 110 metres in a single view, and the first viewpoint is smooth enough for a wheelchair.
Morning is the hour: cloud packs against the volcano as the day goes on, and by noon it has often taken the top of the fall away from you. From the same promontory the rainforest runs away unbroken to the Atlantic, with Marie-Galante flat on the water and the ridge of La Désirade beyond it. The third fall has its own path, from Routhiers to a platform above the drop. You hear it long before you see it — a flat, continuous roar off a broad curtain into a near-circular basin. At twenty metres it is the shortest of the three and carries more water than any other waterfall on the island. It sits at the bottom of the system and collects everything the two above have gathered. There is one place to get in the water. Steep steps take you down about fifteen minutes from the access road to Bassin Paradise, four metres deep over pale stones and fed by a pair of thin cascades. Downstream of it the river turns warm to the touch, and one cascade below the pool runs at about thirty-two degrees: the same volcano, in the one stretch of water it still lets anyone into.