‘
The observers were loth to shift their quarters; but, when some red-hot cinders from below set one of the tents on fire, they accepted the hint.
‘Still in my hammock, I was presently carried down the mountain and on board H.M.S. Hygeia, where, with careful and skilled attention, I soon recovered.’
The Captain ceased speaking. For a time nothing was heard except the steady blast of the ‘Roaring Forties’ overhead.
Asked a passenger presently,—
‘And did the volcano really explode after all?’
‘It did, indeed,’ replied Captain Marion; ‘but not for a month afterwards, and then so fiercely as to scatter death and destruction throughout those narrow seas, grinding the island of Krakatoa itself into cosmic dust—visible, according to scientists, nearly all over the world.’
. . . . . . . . . .
Here ends the story proper as compiled from the notes taken by one of the passengers and jotted down in his cabin of a night as the Captain finished each section of his narrative.
Lower down on the last pages of these notes is [264] ]gummed, however, a printed paragraph, cut from a Sydney daily newspaper, which runs as follows:—