Le Morne Brabant is a basalt monolith 556 metres high at the southwest tip of Mauritius, and people who had escaped slavery lived on top of it. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries maroons used its caves and ledges as a fortress, on a summit hard for anyone else to reach. They had been enslaved from the African mainland, Madagascar, India and Southeast Asia. Oral tradition holds that on 1 February 1835 a police party climbed toward the hideouts, and the people up there took them for slave-catchers. Some threw themselves from the cliff rather than be taken, never learning that the officers had come to tell them slavery was over. A steep forest path goes up past a memorial, and the last rocky stretch you do with a guide. From the top the southwest coast runs out in both directions, reefs and all.
The water at its foot is a different day entirely. You wade into shallow, bath-warm water held in by the reef, coconut palms behind you and the monolith overhead. Along the reef edge with a mask, parrotfish and rays move over the coral. The lagoon is wide and flat enough to have made this one of the world's great kitesurfing places, on steady winter trade winds. Beyond the reef a fast left-hand wave called One Eye peels for hundreds of metres. From a helicopter loop off the peninsula you watch pale sand appear to pour over the edge of the shelf into deep blue, like a waterfall running on the seabed. Inland at Chamarel, boardwalks circle bare dunes rippling red, brown, violet and green, clay left where lava rotted in the tropical heat and its iron and aluminium separated into bands. They have been fenced off since the 1960s, because a footstep blurs stripes that took two million years to settle. The people who hid on the mountain left almost no written records. What carries them is oral, in songs, dances and the names of places. The listed monument here is the landscape itself, not any ruin standing on it.