The drives and the scenery about Buitenzorg, the sunset and twilight band-concerts under the great aisles of kanari-trees, had fresh interest, and it was indeed a penance to leave without taking train around to the Preanger side of Mount Gedeh, and driving up to the sanatorium of Sindanglaya, over three thousand feet above sea-level. The cool mountain air at that elevation is cure and tonic for all tropic ills, and with the mercury always 20° lower than at sea-level, Sindanglaya is the one sure refuge for all Malaysia and Cochin China, French officers from Saigon reaching it more quickly than Japan or the highlands of Ceylon. From Sindanglaya one may go to the Gedeh’s crater, and to the summit of its twin peak, Pangerango, the highest mountain of the island, where, surrounded by primroses and violets,—the flora of the European temperate zone, islanded there after the period of great cold had retreated northward,—one may look down upon all the Batavia Residency, and out upon the Java Sea, and southward across Preanger hills to the greater Indian Ocean.
There was always some new or strange thing to pique one’s interest and implore delay, and the promise of the great talipot-palm of the gardens bursting into its magnificent flower, or the great creeper, the Rafflesia, producing one of its gigantic six-foot flowers, the biggest blossom known to the world,—was an inducement not put away without a pang. There were bird’s-nest caves near by on a mountain-side, and over in the highlands toward Bantam a strange colony of “Badouins,” more than a thousand refugees from religious persecution, who continue there unhindered the practice of a religion part pagan and part Buddhist, which commands the most severely upright lives. The anthropologist and economist have passed these people by, and one can find little concerning them in English print. Every day held its wonder and surprise, and rumor of more and of greater ones.
Although we were living and walking on the line of one of the great fissures of the earth’s crust all that time, and eleven of the forty-five volcanoes of the island are gently active, we did not once feel the tremor of an earthquake. Table d’hôte talk often turned upon the volcanic phenomena one and another guest had experienced, and the eruption of Krakatau—by no means an old story to these colonials—was a topic for which I had an insatiable appetite. They told one thrilling stories of that summer of Krakatau’s prolonged activity, of Batavian folk running frequent excursion-steamers to the Strait of Sunda to witness the spectacle of a volcano in eruption; and of that August Sunday of horror when the very end of the 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 were laid on it and men walked even a mile to shore, they say.
A Dutch scientific commission investigated and collected reports upon the phenomenal events, and its report, “Krakatau,” edited by R. D. M. Verbeek, the eminent geologist and director of mines to the Dutch government, was published at Batavia in 1885, in a quarto volume of 500 pages, in Dutch and French editions, accompanied by charts and an atlas of colored plates that make clear the whole course of the spectacular phenomena.
The Royal Society of Great Britain appointed a “Krakatoa Committee,” composed of thirteen of its most eminent geologists, meteorologists, seismists, and specialists in such lines, to collect data concerning this most remarkable eruption of the century, and its report, a quarto volume of 475 pages, edited by G. J. Symons, and published in London in 1888, embodies the result of their inquiries.
M. René Breon’s report to the French Minister of Public Instruction was published by his government, and he contributed papers to “La Nature,” in the April and May numbers for the year 1885. Mr. H. O. Forbes, the naturalist, was in Batavia in the first weeks of Krakatau’s activity, and the record of his excursion to the island and his observations was read to the Royal Geographic Society, and afterward published in vol. vi. of “Proceedings” (1884, pp. 129, 142).
The many official reports and accounts of the Krakatau eruption are best epitomized in Findlay’s “Sailing Directory for the Indian Archipelago and China” (p. 78):
In an old Dutch work there is an account of a violent eruption on Krakatau in 1680, since which time it appears to have been quiescent until May 21, 1883, when smoke was observed rising from it, and it quickly became very active. On the 23d a vessel encountered a large accumulation of pumice off Flat Cape, Sumatra; and on the 24th volcanic cinders fell on the island of Timor, twelve hundred miles distant.