vanishing
veil of mist melting in the sunrise, and the departing steamer, hugging
the shore, but halting for cargo at sundry barbaric _campongs_, affords
numerous glimpses of native life. Passengers are forbidden to land at
these rural ports of call, for a herd of twenty frolicsome elephants
battered down one brown village of palm-thatched bamboo only a week
ago, and although the ruined architecture possesses the advantage of
being as easily restored as destroyed, the unpleasant proximity of the
dark jungle suggests the need of prudence. At another point of the
little voyage, we anchor for a cargo of rattan before a thatched shed
on a shell-strewn beach, but even here a solitary elephant, disturbed
in bathing, has lately attacked a woman, rescued with difficulty from
formidable tusks and lashing trunk. A tribe of coolies come on board
from the pepper plantation on a terraced hill, covered with the vivid
green of the festooning creeper, twined round long poles, and
resembling hop-vines in growth and foliage. The landing of this
contingent involves a call at Anjer, the northern extremity of Java,
distinguished by the white column of the colossal Pharos on the green
headland. A halt at nightfall outside a bristling reef, in consequence
of a Malay lighthouse-keeper omitting to trim his lamp, after the
fashion of his unthinking kind, secures the compensation of steaming
within sight of world-famous Krakatau, the volcanic cone, which in 1883
was split in half by the stupendous eruption affecting in various
degrees the whole of the world. The successive waves of atmospherical
disturbance, travelling with the velocity of sound, were traced three
times completely round the globe. Krakatau, though uninhabited, was the
occasional resort of fishermen who plied their calling in the Sunda
Straits. A Dutch record exists of a violent eruption in 1680, but the
Krakatau volcano was afterwards considered extinct, and until the
spring of 1883 no signs of activity occurred. At this date, smoke,
pumice, and cinders, fell without intermission. For eight weeks
Krakatau blazed and thundered, the explosions being audible at Batavia,
eighty miles off. As the fatal dawn of an August morning broke with
lurid light, the culminating shock of an appalling detonation,
described as "the very crack and crash of doom," echoed across the
ocean, and was heard even in India and Australia, two thousand miles
away. Gigantic tidal waves swept the Sundanese shor