All eyes naturally were averted to the celestial concave, aglare with the great conflagration, when suddenly, to the confounding amaze of all, a large flock of fur-lined overcoats began tumbling down out of the heavens all over the Island. It is true they were lined merely with sheep’s fur, but even such a garment is as much the pride of the Northern European peasant as is the broad, glad-colored sombrero the pride of the Mexican peon.
As the Government statute books and rules and regulations governing immigrants contain no provision for the disposal of such species of manna as heaven-sent overcoats, the immigrants were the beneficiaries.
Great as are such explosions as that at Pleasant Prairie and that in New York Harbor, they are but little things indeed compared with the explosions that sometimes accompany volcanic eruptions. Mother Earth is the greatest of all explosive manufacturers.
Water seeping down into the earth’s crust and trapped in large quantities in the neighborhood of volcanoes sometimes becomes heated to high incandescence—heated until it is no longer water or steam, but mingled oxygen and hydrogen, far above the temperature of their dissociation—under a pressure so great that they occupy a space no larger than the original water; consequently the entrapped waters exert a pressure as great as the strongest dynamite.
The most notable volcanic explosion that ever occurred in historic time was when that old extinct volcano, Krakatoa, in the Straits of Sunda, that had been sleeping for thousands of years, was literally blown into the sky by the pressure of the pent-up gases beneath it.
This great eruption occurred in 1883. More than sixty thousand persons were killed. The captain of a tramp steamer, who happened to be passing in the vicinity of Krakatoa at a distance of some miles, a short time before the explosion occurred, saw a very strange disturbance in the sea in the direction of the old mountain. Taking his glass he saw a perfect Niagara of water pouring into an enormous fissure that had opened in the earth. He was struck with consternation and rightly imagining that something very serious was likely soon to happen, he put on all steam to escape, and luckily he had reached a point which enabled him to survive the effects of the awful blast when it came.
The vast mass of water which had tumbled into the bowels of the earth was immediately trapped by the closing of the great fissure down which it had poured. The water was quickly converted by the intense heat into a veritable high explosive, with the result that the massive mountain was literally blown bodily skyward, and fell in huge fragments into the surrounding sea. The shock was so great that it was felt clear through the earth, and an immense tidal wave was set going which encircled the earth. The opposing portions of the great wave, meeting in the lower Atlantic, flowed up even to the coast of France. An atmospheric wave passed around the earth three times. It is estimated that the amount of volcanic mud that was discharged from the mountain during the eruption was more than the muddy Mississippi discharges into the Gulf of Mexico in two hundred years.
There was so much impalpably fine volcanic dust blown into the upper atmosphere that it did not entirely settle out of the air for more than two years, which period was noted for its beautiful glowing sunsets, due to the illumination of the fine dust suspended in the upper air.
As the ax is to the woodsman, so are high explosives to the engineer. With dynamite he hews down the hills, fills the valleys and tunnels the mountain-range to make a straight and even way for the locomotive. He cuts canals through the width of the land, uniting rivers and seas.
Always in the van of civilization, there is heard the churn of the rock-drill and the echoing crash and roar of the dynamite blast.