Nobody can tell you for certain when the fire at Darvaza was lit. The crater is a hole about seventy metres across in the middle of Turkmenistan's Karakum desert, and it has been burning for decades. The story that gets repeated is that a Soviet rig broke through into a gas pocket in 1971 and geologists lit the escaping gas, expecting it to burn off in weeks. None of that was ever written down. Turkmenistan keeps no record of it, and local geologists tell the story differently: the ground caved in during the 1960s, they say, and nobody struck a match until the 1980s. The gas field underneath has not run out. Locals call it the Door to Hell, and the flat plain of sand and scrub around it carries no fence and no sign.
In daylight the drama drains away and the crater shows its bones: a broad circle of blackened, crumbling rock, pale flames flickering low among the stones, heat haze lifting off the whole thing. After dark it fills with orange light that carries for kilometres across black desert. At the lip the heat comes at you hard enough to push you back, the ground is warm under your feet, and the edge itself crumbles. Most people pitch a tent on the cooling sand a short walk away and stay after the day visitors have gone, with nothing in the sky but stars. One person has been to the bottom. In 2013 the Canadian explorer George Kourounis went down in a heat-reflective suit and came back with bacteria that were living in the hot soil and nowhere in the desert around it. Two quieter craters left by the same collapse lie nearby, one filled with bubbling water and one with grey mud, and almost everybody drives straight past them to the fire. That fire has already broken from an unbroken ring into scattered pockets, and the government has said more than once it wants the rest out. What fifty years have not produced is the name of whoever lit it.