Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/385

Rh The material thrown out rose to an elevation which we have no means of estimating, but so tremendous was it that on spreading itself out it covered the whole western end of Java and the south of Sumatra for hundreds of square miles with a pall of impenetrable darkness. During this period abnormal atmospheric and magnetic displays were observed; compass-needles rotated violently, and the barometer rose and fell many tenths of an inch in a minute. Following at no great interval, and somewhere between ten and twelve o'clock in the forenoon of the same day, either by successive rapid outbursts or by one single supreme convulsion, the subterranean powers burst their prison-walls with a detonation so terrific as to have been, as it seems, inaudible from its very immensity to human ears in its close vicinity, but which spread consternation and alarm among the dwellers within a circle whose diameter lay across nearly three thousand miles, or fifty degrees of longitude.

With sunrise on the 28th the dense curtain which had enveloped so wide an area in darkness gradually began to clear off, and the light broke on a scene of devastation of the saddest kind, but on one of comparative placidity, as if Nature lay exhausted after her frantic paroxysm. Krakatau was seen reduced to a fraction of its original size; the whole of the northern portion, with the height in front of which the volcano first broke out, and half of the peak itself, had vanished (see the accompanying map). To the northward, however, two new pieces of land, which have received the names of Steers and Calmeyer Islands, raised their tops above the surface of the sea, where the morning previous thirty to forty fathoms of water had existed. Of the two islets on each side of Krakatau, Lang Island is left practically unaltered, while Verlaten Island seems elevated somewhat, and is reported to be in eruption. But, where the volcano had been so active a few hours before, a sea fathomless with a line of a thousand feet is now to be found.

Having thus followed the succession of events, there remains little doubt that the crater on the 26th of August by its constant action had either cleared out the old funnel into its submerged portion, or that a rent by subsidence or otherwise was formed, through which a volume of water was admitted to the heated interior, resulting in explosion after explosion in increasing violence, as more material for generating steam was finding its way into the underground recesses.

The first great waves on the evening of the 26th and the early part of the 27th were probably caused by a portion of Krakatau being shot out northward for eight miles and dropped where we have now Steers Island; while the appalling detonation in that forenoon and the greater wave accompanying it resulted perhaps from that still more Titanic effort which lifted the greater portion of Krakatau—several thousand million cubic yards of material—out by its one hundred and seventy fathom root, hurled it through the air over Lang