You start at midnight from the Casa da Montanha because the point is to be on top at sunrise and because in daylight the heat would kill you. Headtorches, a thousand metres of volcanic rubble, forty-seven numbered posts to follow like a rosary.
At the top the crater is a crater with a smaller cone inside it, Piquinho, and you scramble up that last bit with your hands while the east goes from black to a colour like the inside of a shell. Then the sun comes up over Terceira and the whole archipelago is there: Faial close enough to throw a stone at, São Jorge a long knife, Graciosa a smudge, the sea between them the exact blue of the maps I drew as a young man and thought were an exaggeration.
Fifty-two years old, knees that have opinions, the summit of Portugal. A German woman half my age handed me a coffee from a flask and said 'you look like you needed that.' I did. I do.
I've drawn these islands from a ship. I've now stood on the highest point in them and looked down at the drawing. I'd like to report that it was accurate. It was. It was also, entirely, beside the point.