Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/384

372 ascending ejecta, vainly trying to break, were constantly sucked back and borne upward round and round in the center of its Stygian coils. The trees which once clothed this portion of the island presented only bare stems from which their crowns had disappeared, evidently not by fire, for there was no charring visible on them, but rather as if wrenched off by a whirlwind—perhaps of the crater itself.

After the 28th, curiosity in these volcanic phenomena seems to have abated, and during the next eight or nine weeks, though the eruption continued with great vigor, little is recorded of its progress; indeed, so completely did it seem to have been forgotten, that visitors to Batavia, unless they had made inquiries, might have failed to hear of its existence at all. During this period no local disturbances to attract attention or to cause the least alarm are recorded. From the logs of ships in the neighborhood of the straits, about the middle of August, numerous extracts have been published; but many of them show that they have been written either with the mind bewildered and confused by the terrifying incidents amid which the officers found themselves, or from the after-recollection of the events, of which under such conditions the important dry facts of time, place, and succession, are liable to be unconsciously misstated. Much is therefore lost which might have been known; but a few are of the utmost value.

On the 21st of August the volcano appears to have been in increased activity; for the ship Bay of Naples reports being unable to venture into the straits on account of the great fall of pumice and ashes.

The first, however, of the more disastrous effects were experienced on the evening of the 26th, commencing about four o'clock in the afternoon. They were inaugurated by violent explosions heard in Anjer, Telok-betong, and as far as Batavia, accompanied by high waves, which after first retreating rolled upon both sides of the straits, causing much damage to the villages there, and were followed by a night of unusually pitchy darkness. These horrors continued all night with increasing violence, till midnight, when they were augmented by electrical phenomena on a terrifying scale, which enveloped not only the ships in the vicinity but embraced those at a distance of even ten to a dozen miles. As the lurid gleams that played on the gigantic column of smoke and ashes were seen in Batavia, eighty miles off in a straight line, we can form some idea of the great height to which the débris, some of which fell as fine ashes in Cheribon, five hundred miles to the east, was being ejected during the night.

Between five and seven o'clock (for the hour is uncertain) in the morning of the 27th, there was a still more gigantic explosion, heard in the Andaman Islands and in India, which produced along both shores of the strait an immense tidal movement, first of recession and then of unwonted rise, occasioning that calamitous loss of life of which we have all heard.