Page:Scidmore--Java the garden of the east.djvu/349

Rh world seemed to have come to all that part of Java. A dense pall of smoke covered all of Buitenzorg's sky that day; Salak was lost in the darkness, and it was thought that it or Gedeh was in eruption when crashes and roars beyond those of the most terrific thunderstorms, the bang and boom of the heaviest artillery's bombardment, and the sound of frightful explosions filled the air, shook and rocked the ground, and rattled houses until conversation was impossible. Compass-needles spun around and around, barometers rose and fell, clouds of sulphurous vapors half strangled the people in the gloom of that awful Sabbath night, and no one slept with this dread cannonading and the end of the world seemingly close at hand. The next daylight brought the climax, a series of prolonged and awful roars, and then the very crack and crash of doom, when half of Krakatau's island was torn away with the final explosion. None who endured those days of terror can tell of them without excitement; and those whose plantations were near the Sunda Strait had yet more gruesome times during the days of darkness and of greenish, horrid twilight, when the heavens seemed to be falling about them in the rain of ashes and hot stones. Batavian folk had as terrifying experiences, and each entering ship brought more awful tales of being caught by the waves or the eddies of that sickening sea, with hot stones setting decks and rigging afire, and the weight of hot ashes threatening to sink the vessels in the sea of pumice before they could be shoveled away. Pumice covered the ocean for miles away from Krakatau; and it drifted into Batavia harbor in a surface-layer so deep that planks