Mayon is a volcano rising 2,463 metres over the Bicol region of the Philippines, with a cone so even that it is counted among the most perfect on Earth. On most days you get about an hour with it. The summit pulls a cap of cloud over itself by mid-morning, so the clean view is the first light. You take it from Cagsawa, where a single stone bell tower stands in a field with the cone lined up behind. That tower is all that rose above the ash of the eruption of 1814, the deadliest Mayon has had, which buried the town and killed around two thousand people. Many of them had sheltered in the church, and the pyroclastic flows and the lahar went over it. The façade came down much later, shaken off by earthquakes in the 1950s rather than by the mountain.
When the volcano is quiet you can walk on it. An accredited local guide takes you up through cogon grass and hardened flows, across grassy terraces and old lava channels, as close to the summit as the danger zone allows. On the coast around Santo Domingo the beaches are black sand ground down from old lava, with fishing outriggers resting on the dark grains. The cone stands up behind the coconut groves there, and at low tide it turns up again in the wet sand. This is the most active volcano in the country. When it erupts, the crater and the flows coming off it burn dull red after dark, drawing lines down the black slopes, and people in Legazpi go up onto their roofs to watch. The name is older than any of that. It comes from Daragang Magayon, the Beautiful Lady of Bicolano legend, a princess buried here with her warrior Panganoron, and the cone is her grave. The clouds that drift off the summit are said to be him coming back to her. So when the cap closes in by mid-morning and the mountain goes, the story already has a name for it.