The following text is an extract from a travelogue about the writer's first visit to the Maldives. Down below there was water - lots of water. The screen on the maroon seat on my plane from Colombo in Sri Lanka to Male, capital of the Maldives, showed that we were crossing the 'Indischer Ozean'. Thin white streaks of waves broke on a peninsula bristling with jade-topped palm trees: our last glimpse of the mainland. Then there was blue an enormity of blue. The Indischer stretched to the horizon, gargantuan, all-encompassing, seeming to roll onwards for ever. It was a mesmerising sight. On the surface of the sea I could make out the faintest of movements, an almost imperceptible sway. The tiniest of undulations, the briefest stir, visible for a split second then gone. The motion returned and went away once more. From thirty thousand feet, far from the peaks and troughs of the swell, the ocean was a lumbering creature, somehow alive, quietly breathing in and out. Rust-red cargo ships stood sentinel on the gently pulsing sea. They appeared hopelessly lost, minuscule man-made outposts in the infinite seascape. And as we rose through ribbons of cloud, the surface of the aqueous world began to alter. Glimmers of silver emerged, spreading outwards and blooming into a metallic sheen. The blue, after a tantalising spell of indigo, morphed into a mercurial swirl. As I looked through the oval window I began to readjust my place on the planet. From now on it was water, not land, that mattered. The Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives is the flattest country on earth (the highest 'hill' is 7ft 10in) and stretches about 515 miles from north to south, bulging to just 80 miles at its widest point. Among the 1192 islands, 100 are 'resort islands', for tourists only, while 198 are categorised as ‘inhabited'. All the islands and reefs and lagoons together amount to 35300 square miles, about the size of North Island in New Zealand, but the territory is 99.9 per cent water, and most of the 0.1 per cent of land is about three feet above the sea. There was water, water everywhere – and my first sight of Maldivian terra firma came in the form of a beetle-shaped island with curving leg-like jetties studded with hotel villas. Thick green palm groves at the centre of the island acted as the beetle's back. The land was almost perfectly circular and surrounded by a flawless rim of white sand. Beyond, the ocean disappeared in a swirl of clouds in the direction of Africa. This beetle was followed by another bug-shaped creation, and another, and then a series of islands that appeared uninhabited. These were thin and stretched out in irregular ovals. They were unlike anything I'd seen before. There was something almost surreal about their wobbly shapes, the way they undulated in long curves adorned by foaming waves. Many of the circles barely rose above the ocean. I already knew that what I was seeing was the tip of coral reefs that ringed ancient underwater volcanic peaks. These now-extinct volcanoes were the result of the meeting of tectonic plates. They had once towered above the water, but over the millennia had subsided, leaving both lagoons and the higher ground on which Maldivians lived. The English naturalist Charles Darwin, no less, had first recognised coral reefs – known as atolls when the reefs circled a lagoon – and explained their formation when pottering about the world's oceans in the 1830s on his ship, HMS Beagle. The peaks were part of an enormous ridge that ran from Madagascar to India, the submerged mountain range to which I was headed.