Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1895-04-12

audible. The city of AMER, with all its
sixty thousand people in and about it, had
been blotted out, and If any living being
save myself remained, l did not find it out
then. One of those deafening explosions
followed another as some new submerged
area was suddenly heaved up by the vol
canic fire below, and the sea admitted to
the hollow depths where that fire had ragged
in vain for centuries.
The awful surge of the maddened ocean
as it rushed landward, terrified me. /
feared / wouli be engulfed. Mechanically,
| ran back up the mountain side. My sub
sequent observations convinced me that at
the first explosion the ocean had burst a
new crater under Krakatoa. At the sec
ond explosion, the big island Divers
in-de-Weg had been split in two, so that
a great strait separated what were the two
halves. The island of Legundi, northwest
of krakatoa, disappeared at the same time,
and all the west coast of Java, for fifteen
or twenty miles, was wrenched loose.
Many new islands were formed in that
throe, which afterwards disappeared A
map which | made not long afterward
shows the change of the conhguration of
that part of the world.
| waded on inland in a dazed condition,
! which seemed to last for hours. The high
road from AMER to the city of Serang was
white, and smooth, and easy to follow, and
| felt my way along it, staggering blindly.
! When | reached Serang, | was taken into
the garrison and nursed for two days. |
was supposed to be a lunatic. | started
up in my sleep half-dozen times in the
! first night, uttering cries of terror. | was
soothed by drugs, and enabled on the third
day to go to Batavia. Even then, the eN-
tent of the calamity was not known in Sc
rang. At Batavia | took the steamer for
| Singapore
On my return, some time afterward to
the scene of this frightful experience, l
learned further particulars of the force OF
the explosion. on Merak Point, where
the government had been blasting rock,
were an engine and several boilers used for
compressed air All of these, containing
COMPRISING air, had been hurled against
the walls of the quarry and absolutely flat
tened out like sheets of paper In LON
box, on the southeast coast of Sumatra, a
wooden man-of-war belonging to the Dutch
government, and two barks of two or three
hundred tons each, one of them loaded
with salt, had been thrown one hundred
and fifty feet up the mountain side into
the trees by the tidal wave which immedi-
ately followed the explosion. For days
| thereafter, there was a thick coat of white
ashes all over the island of Java The
ground was hot and crumbled to the touch.
| Every leaf and bit of vegetation had been
| consumed, and every creeping thing and
living creature blasted and burned up. Six
hundred miles away it was necessary to
burn lamps all day.
My Investigations showed that there was
one hundred feet of water where the city
of AMER had been, so short a distance
from my villa, and that the coast line was
just one and one-half miles further inland,
1t is there that the city of New AMER has
been built, and where all vessels for Chi
ma, Japan and Australia report to the reg
ular telegraph station. 1t seemed to me
to be very moderate estimate that one
hundred thousand lives were lost in Java,
and one hundred thousand more in Lom-
box bay, on the coast of Sumatra, just OPP
posite. Several entire towns were washed
away there. In Lombok bay the pumice-
stone floated so thick upon the water that
it reached a height of thirty feet, and
steamers could not penetrate it. The
Brooklyn, an American man-of- war, came
steaming into AMER two days after, 10 re-
port that from her decks thousands of
broken bamboo houses, carbonized bodies,
and floating masses of pumice-stone had
been observed. At that time the north
west coast of Java was buried under six
or seven feet of ashes. A year later, an
immense lump of pumice-stOne, undoubt-
eddy cast up by this explosion, was found
floating in the Mediterranean, covered with
barnacles. Pulverized pumice and ashes
are known to have been carried many
thousand miles, and to have been held in
suspension in the atmosphere for years.
The atmosphere over the American CONT
nent was filled with minute particles, which
for weeks floated in the air. 1t would be
folly to say that human intelligence will
ever arrive at the accurate solution of the
causes of this dread event, or even form a
fair idea of its tremendous circumstances,