"It's a ship on fire!" Otto exclaimed.
"Let's go and see it!" I added.
Then we were off for the mouth of the Pasig which was not far away.
There we saw the most spectacular fire I have ever seen. A great oil tanker full of Cocoanut-oil had burst into flame, trapping thirty men in its awful furnace. Its gaunt masts stood out like toppling tree skeletons from a forest fire against the now deepening might; made vivid and livid by the bursting flames that leapt higher and higher with each successive explosion from a tank of gasoline or oil.
I got out my Graflex and caught several pictures of this flash-light of flame, but none that will be as vivid, as lurid, or as lasting as the flash-light that was etched into the film of my memory.
The next flash-light of flame came bursting out of midnight darkness on the island of Java.
We were bound for old Bromo, that giant volcano of Java. We had started at midnight and it would take us until daylight to reach the crater-brink of this majestic mountain of fire.
White flashes of light, leapt from Bromo at frequent intervals all night long as we traveled on ponies through the tropical jungle trail, upward, and onward to the brink of that pit of hell.
White flashes of light leapt from Bromo at the narrow rail. They called them "Night-Blooming Lilies," and sure enough they blanketed the rugged pathway that night like so many tiny white Fairies. Indeed there was something beautifully weird in their white wonder against the night. They looked like frail, earth-angels playing in the star-light, sending out a sweet odor which mingled strangely with the odor of sulphur from the volcano.
And back of all this was the background of that awful, thundering, rumbling and grumbling volcano as somber as suicide. Strangely weird flashes lighted the mountains for miles around.