It was in the late autumn of 1883 that the marvellous series of celestial phenomena connected with the great eruption began to be displayed in Great Britain. Then it was that the glory of the ordinary sunsets was enhanced by a splendour which has dwelt in the memory of all those who were permitted to see them. The frontispiece of this volume contains a view of the sunset as seen at Chelsea at 4.40 p.m. on November 26th, 1883. The picture was painted from nature by Mr. W. Ascroft, and is given in the great work on Krakatoa which was published by the Royal Society. There is not the least doubt that it was the dust from Krakatoa which produced the beauty of those sunsets, and so long as that dust remained suspended in our atmosphere, so long were strange signs to be witnessed in the heavenly bodies. But the dust which had been borne with unparalleled violence from the interior of the volcano, the dust which had been shot aloft by the vehemence of the eruption to an altitude of twenty miles, the dust which had thus been whirled round and round our earth for perhaps a dozen times or more in this air current, which carried it round in less than a fortnight, was endowed with no power to resist for ever the law of gravitation which bids it fall to the earth. It therefore gradually sank downwards. Owing, however, to the great height to which it had been driven, owing to the impetuous nature of the current by which it was hurried along, and owing to the exceedingly minute particles of which it was composed, the act of sinking was greatly protracted. Not until two years after the original explosion had all the particles with which the air was charged by the great eruption finally subsided on the earth.
At first there were some who refused to believe that the glory of the sunsets in London could possibly be due to a volcano in the Straits of Sunda, at a distance from England which was but little short of that of Australia. But the gorgeous phenomena in England were found to be simultaneous with like phenomena in other places all round the earth. Once again the comparison of dates and other circumstances proved that Krakatoa was the cause of these exceptional and most interesting appearances.
Nor was the incident without a historical parallel, for has not Tennyson told us of the call to St. Telemachus—
“Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak
Been hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe?
For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve,
In that four-hundredth summer after Christ,
The wrathful sunset glared....”