Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/383

Rh islands about the third week of May, no intelligence has yet reached this country. We know, from what occurred at Graham's Island, that pumice ejected from the sea-bottom rises to the surface, and an examination of the chart of the currents in the Indian Ocean at once shows that any flotsam in the region between west and south of Java Head in that longitude could be drifted to the locality in which it was observed in the month of July. If such a submarine outburst did take place, Mr. Forbes suggested that somehow the orifice very soon became blocked after a great in-rush of water had taken place, which, becoming transformed into steam under enormous pressure, shaped its course for the nearest old earth-scar, and found vent in Krakatau, by an offshoot probably of the funnel of the eruption of 1680. That such large lumps of pumice should be carried seven hundred miles westward into the Indian Ocean does not seem probable, and is not supported by any observations. The earlier outbursts were not of very unwonted vigor, for no pieces of any size are reported to have fallen on the neighboring coasts of Java and Sumatra; even after those of August, no ship farther off than one hundred miles speaks of the fall of any but the "finest dust and sand."

On the 23d of May, a ship encountered at Flat Cape, in Sumatra, a large amount of pumice on the sea, which increased in amount as Krakatau was neared. Of the appearance of the volcano on the 27th, we have a graphic account in the "Algemeen Dagblad" newspaper, of Batavia, by one of a party that ascended to the crater on that day. As they approached the scene, the neighboring islands had the appearance of being covered with snow. The crater was seen to be situated not on the peak, but in a hollow of the ground, which lay from southeast to northwest, sloping toward the north point, in front and to the north side of the lower summit, looking toward Verlaten Island. Both heights were seen; the southerly green, and the more northerly and much lower one quite covered with dust and ashes. The volcano was ejecting, with a great noise, masses of pumice, molten stone, and volumes of steam and smoke, part of which was being carried away westward by the monsoon wind, dropping all round and close at hand its larger pieces, while a higher rising cloud is specially recorded as driving away eastward, having evidently encountered a current in that direction in the upper air. Some of this dust-cloud was carried far to the eastward, for Mr. Forbes relates that on the morning of the 24th of May, when in the Island of Timor, twelve hundred miles distant, he observed on the veranda of his hut, situated high in the hills behind Dilly, a sprinkling of small particles of a grayish cinder, to which his attention was more particularly drawn later on that and the next day by their repeated falling with a sudden pat on the page before him. The visitors to the crater seemed to have viewed with most amazement the grandeur of the smoke-column whirling upward with a terrific roar like a gigantic whirlwind, through whose sides the