Grand Etang is a lake in the crater of an old volcano, up in the rainforest of central Grenada at 530 metres. Nothing feeds it but rain, and no river takes anything away. The crater holds its cloud overnight, so soon after first light the water lies dead still under mist. At this height the sky can clear in minutes, and the lake goes from grey to a bright, flat green while you watch. A level path of two kilometres circles the shore between tree ferns and mahogany. Partway round, a short wooden jetty runs out over the shallows, and the crater wall stands doubled beneath your feet.
The monkeys come down to meet you near the visitor centre. They are mona monkeys, quick-fingered, curious and entirely used to people, and they belong to the forests of West Africa between Ghana and Cameroon. Grenada's troops descend from animals carried across the Atlantic in the 1700s, and tradition here says the whole island population came from a handful of them, perhaps a single pregnant female. Thousands now live wild in the forest. Out of the crater a muddy ridge trail climbs through cloud forest, the trees stunted and wrapped in moss, to the summit of Mount Qua Qua, one of the highest points on the island. From up there the lake below you has shrunk to a coin and the island falls away towards the sea on both sides, forest all the way down. The lake keeps its own stories. Islanders speak of Grandmère Filomina, a mermaid who guards the water and pulls careless men under. And because rain alone fills the crater and nothing drains it, the lake was long held to be bottomless and joined to the sea. It was sounded eventually, and the floor turned out to be barely six metres down. That has never stopped anyone saying that a man drowned in Grand Etang comes up again off St Vincent, or Trinidad, or Venezuela.