The last time white people visited, a few days later the camp was bombed.' The others wept as she spoke.ДЄ woman got on her knees in front of Samantha Power, the U.S. 'White people come here, but it doesn't get any better. Our children are starving,' one woman said in Kiswahili as a man translated. The women were asked to speak about their lives. When the women were told that the foreign visitors had arrived, they shook their heads and wailed. They were all victims of sexual violence. Now, at Mugunga, created to accommodate refugees who fled over the border during the Rwandan civil war, the delegation was to encounter some of the human costs of the conflict.ДЄ young French camp director wearing warning-orange nail polish and a white UN smock led a group of ambassadors into a one-room wooden building. Earlier in the day the delegation had stood on a hilltop overlooking Goma while a UN peacekeeping general briefed them on the state of the 'conflict,' as the litany of insurgencies, skirmishes, massacres, systematized rapes, and refugee crises that make up the central theme of life in eastern Congo is usually called. On a morning in October, after one of Congo's inundant rain showers, a delegation of UN ambassadors and envoys from the Security Council rolled up a black hill in a convoy of trucks and buses into the camp as dozens and then hundreds of those eyes gathered to watch. The pumice is especially vivid in the Mugunga refugee camp, on Goma's northwestern edge, where its chalky black is brought out by the white United Nations tarpaulins that stretch over the tents and lean-tos, and by the white eyes, many bloodshot and yellowed with infection, of the people who live in them. Its million residents walk and work and die on it.

Goma's wood-slatted and metal-sheeted shantytowns, its crumbling office blocks, its rambunctious storefronts and mock-tropical hotels are built on and out of the pumice.

After outbursts, its lava cools into mounds of bubbly pumice. The lake rises and recedes, but it never goes away. 'It looked as if a ten-lane highway had been dropped down the mountain's flanks, right across the city,' National GeographicВ observed.ДЄll that ready-made death comes courtesy of a rare feature, a liquid lava lake inside the mountain. Homes were suddenly solid black mausoleums. Underground magma veins beneath the streets ruptured, sending up fiery geysers. Mobutu was ousted by a rebel leader who was himself assassinated in 2001, and the next year Nyiragongo erupted again, this time sending a river of lava a third of a mile wide through the city. (Leopold's soul would soon enough find its way into the crater, they imagined.) When it erupted in 1977, during the reign of the tyrant Mobutu Sese Seko, lava exploded from the mountain's sides and raced at 60 miles an hour-still a world record for molten rock-toward Goma. When Nyiragongo erupted in 1894, soon after those people had found themselves working as slaves for the Belgian King Leopold II, they took it as a sign that the arrival of Europeans into the African interior didn't bode well. The people who once lived around the volcano believed the souls of evildoers were cast into the crater. The crater's emissions give the mists green, amber, and crimson tones. Twenty thousand years after it formed, Nyiragongo is still terribly Pleistocene in appearance: Its cone curves gently through montane forest and then thrusts two miles into the sky, where its rim is only occasionally visible through the wooly mists above Goma, the city it watches over and periodically destroys. If volcanologists invent an instrument that can measure the interplay of beauty and menace, Nyiragongo, on the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in the province of North Kivu, will send its needle into spasms.

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