their
canoes up on its beach, while they roamed through the jungle in search
of the wild fruits that there abounded. It was known to the mariner who
navigated the Straits of Sunda, for it was marked on his charts as one
of the perils of the intricate navigation in those waters. It was no
doubt recorded that the locality had been once, or more than once,
the seat of an active volcano. In fact, the island seemed to owe its
existence to some frightful eruption of by-gone days; but for a couple
of centuries there had been no fresh outbreak. It almost seemed as if
Krakatoa might be regarded as a volcano that had become extinct. In this
respect it would only be like many other similar objects all over the
globe, or like the countless extinct volcanoes all over the moon.

"As the summer of 1883 advanced the vigor of Krakatoa, which had sprung
into notoriety at the beginning of the year, steadily increased and the
noises became more and more vehement; these were presently audible on
shores ten miles distant, and then twenty miles distant; and still those
noises waxed louder and louder, until the great thunders of the volcano,
now so rapidly developing, astonished the inhabitants that dwelt over an
area at least as large as Great Britain. And there were other symptoms
of the approaching catastrophe. With each successive convulsion a
quantity of fine dust was projected aloft into the clouds. The wind
could not carry this dust away as rapidly as it was hurled upward by
Krakatoa, and accordingly the atmosphere became heavily charged with
suspended particles.

"A pall of darkness thus hung over the adjoining seas and islands. Such
was the thickness and density of these atmospheric volumes of Krakatoa
dust that, for a hundred miles around, the darkness of midnight
prevailed at midday. Then the awful tragedy of Krakatoa took place.
Many thousands of the unfortunate inhabitants of the adjacent shores of
Sumatra and Java were destined never to behold the sun again. They were
presently swept away to destruction in an invasion of the shore by the
tremendous waves with which the seas surrounding Krakatoa were agitated.

"As the days of August passed by the spasms of Krakatoa waxed more and
more vehement. By the middle of that month the panic was widespread, for
the supreme catastrophe was at hand. On the night of Sunday, August 26,
1883, the blackness of the dust-clouds, now much thicker than ever in
the Straits of Sunda and adjacent par