Tavurvur is a black cone of ash standing on the rim of a drowned caldera at Rabaul, in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea. The harbour is the volcano. It is a flooded crater with a ring of green cones around it, which the Tolai call the Mother and her Daughters, and Tavurvur is the one that is still working. In September 1994 it erupted together with Vulcan, on the opposite shore, and put the provincial capital under grey ash. Almost everyone was out first, because the ground had been watched for decades and the town had drilled for it; the same pair had gone off without warning in 1937 and killed 507 people. The capital moved to Kokopo, and streets of the old town are still buried to the rooflines. The crossing starts at Matupit, the Tolai village closest to the cone, where outriggers and small open boats take you out. Halfway over, the ring of cones lines up behind you and the bare grey slope fills the view ahead.
The climb goes up loose scoria that slides back half a step for every step you take. At the rim the heat comes through your soles, the sulphur is sharp, and the ring of the crater runs right round the bay. Under the water below lie more than sixty wrecks. In the Second World War Japan made this flooded crater its main South Seas base, with as many as 100,000 personnel around the bay, and Allied bombing sank the ships where they stood. Down on the black sand at the cone's foot the ground is warm enough that hot springs seep into the shallows. From May to October the Matupit men spend their mornings there, shoulder-deep in pits dug into the ash. They are lifting out eggs. The Melanesian scrubfowl builds no nest and sits on nothing: it buries each egg about two metres down, in ground the volcano holds near 33°C, and then walks away. The chick hatches underground, digs its own way out and can fly almost at once, without ever meeting a parent.