een below.

"There's no saying where or when a big stone may fall, my girl," he
said, "and it's not the habit of Englishmen to let women come under
fire, so you'll be safer below. Besides, you'll be able to see something
of what's goin' on out o' the cabin windows."

With the obedience that was natural to her, Kathleen went down at once,
and the captain made everything as snug as possible, battening down the
hatches and shortening sail so as to be ready for whatever might befall.

"I don't like the look o' things, Mr. Moor," said the captain when the
second mate came on deck to take his watch.

"No more do I, sir," answered Mr. Moor calmly.

The aspect of things was indeed very changeable. Sometimes, as we have
said, all nature seemed to be steeped in thick darkness, at other times
the fires of the volcano blazed upward, spreading a red glare on the
rolling clouds and over the heaving sea. Lightning also played its part
as well as thunder, but the latter was scarcely distinguishable from the
volcano's roar. Three days before Sunday the 26th of August, Captain
Roy--as well as the crews of several other vessels that were in Sunda
Straits at the time--had observed a marked though gradual increase in
the violence of the eruption. On that day, as we read in the _Report of
the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society_, about 1 P.M. the
detonations caused by the explosive action attained such violence as to
be heard at Batavia, about 100 English miles away. At 2 P.M. of the same
day, Captain Thompson of the _Medea_, when about 76 miles E.N.E. of the
island, saw a black mass rising like clouds of smoke to a height which
has been estimated at no less than 17 miles! And the detonations were at
that time taking place at intervals of ten minutes. But, terrible though
these explosions must have been, they were but as the whisperings of the
volcano. An hour later they had increased so much as to be heard at
Bandong and other places 150 miles away, and at 5 P.M. they had become
so tremendous as to be heard over the whole island of Java, the eastern
portion of which is about 650 miles from Krakatoa.

And the sounds thus heard were not merely like distant thunder. In
Batavia--although, as we have said, 100 miles off--they were so violent
during the whole of that terrible Sunday night as to prevent the people
from sleeping. They were compared to the "discharge of artillery close
at hand," and caused a rattling of doors, windows, pict