but all the
eruptions known besides were as mere child's play to the terrible one
of Krakatoa in 1883.

If the reader will examine the map of the East Indies he will find
represented in the straits of Sunda, which lie between Sumatra and
Java, the little island of Krakatoa. In maps made before 1883 he will
hunt in vain for the name, for like Bull Run before 1861, it was then
unknown to fame, though navigators who passed through the straits knew
it as a beautiful tropical isle, with an extinct volcanic cone in the
center. In the beginning of 1883, however, the little well behaved
island showed symptoms of wrath that boded no good to the larger
islands in the vicinity. Noted for the fine fruits with which it
abounded, it was a famous picnic ground for towns and cities even 100
miles away, and when the subterranean rumblings and mutterings of
wrath became conspicuous the people of the capital of Java, Batavia,
put a steamboat into requisition and visited the island in large
numbers. For a time the island was constantly in a slight tremor, and
the subterranean roar was like the continued but distant mutterings of
thunder, but the crisis was reached August 23, at 10 o'clock A.M. It
was a beautiful Sunday morning and the waters of the straits of Sunda
were like that sea of glass, as clear as crystal, of which John in his
apocalyptic vision speaks. The beauty that morning was enhanced by the
extraordinary transparency of the tropical air, for distant mountain
ranges seemed so near that it seemed possible to strike them with a
stone cast from the hand. Only the mysterious rumblings and mutterings
of the pent up forces beneath the island disturbed the breathless calm
and silence that lay on nature--the calm before the terrible
storm--the mightiest, the most awful on record! It burst forth! Sudden
night snatched away day from the eyes of the terrified beholders on
the mainland, but the vivid play of lightnings around the ascending
column of dust penetrated even the deep obscurity to a distance of 80
miles. This awful darkness stretched within a circle whose diameter
was 400 miles, while more or less darkness reigned within a circle
with a diameter three times as great. Within this latter area dust
fell like snow from the sky, breaking off limbs of trees by its weight
miles distant, while in Batavia, 100 miles away from the scene of the
disaster, it fell to the depth of several inches. The explosions were
so loud as to be distinc