hat it was all about than in many other battles. Charges of dead men rushed down the waves, and were knocked into rabbles by regiments spouting up from the bottom. Onslaughts of corpses -- and in the midst of them appeared green fields that were the tops of palm trees. Raiders in thousands dashed over momentary [336/337] meadows, and there were stampedes that were as senseless as the charges.
Stone clouds were rolling over the conflict. Furies of dead men were calming under bulks of pumice, and slimy palm trees were protruding. The waves were going down under pressures of pumice, twenty feet deep, in places. Battlefields on land have, after a while, turned quiet with graveyards: but change in the Straits of Sunda was of the quickest of mortuary transitions. The waves were pressed flat by pumice. There was a grey slab of stone over the remains of the people of 95 villages. Black palms, heavy with slime, dropped on each side of this long, grey slab.
By volcanic dust, the sun was dimmed so that unseasonable coldness followed. In places in Victoria, Australia, where for twenty-five years snow had not been seen, snow fell. I'd like to have this especially noted -- that at places far away, the volcanic bombs were mistaken for meteors -- or they were meteors. An account of volcanic bombs from Krakatoa, which looked like "shooting stars," as seen from a vessel, about 90 miles from the volcano, is published in the Cape Times (Weekly Edition), Oct. 3, 1883.(6) At Foochow, China, the glare in the sky was like an aurora borealis. For this record, which is important to us, see the Rept. Krakatoa Committee, Roy. Soc., p. 269.(7) People in Texas heard sounds, as if of a battle. Off the Cape of Good Hope, vessels lurched in waves from the catastrophe.
It is my expression that the explosion of Krakatoa was stimulated by, or was a reaction to, an eruption in a land of stars that is not enormously far away. Afterglows that were seen after August 26th were attributed to Krakatoa --
That the preceding afterglows and the fall of ashes were of materials that drifted to this earth, from an [337/338] eruption somewhere else, passing over a distance that cannot be considered vast, in a few weeks, or a few days --
And that the light of a volcanic eruption somewhere in the sky was seen by people of this earth.
See the Perth Inquirer, Oct. 3 -- a correspondent tells of several observations, early in September, upon a brilliant light that had been seen in the sky, near the sun.(8) There was a beam of light from it, and the observers thought that it was a comet. This appearance is described as conspicuous. If so, it was seen at no Observatory in Australia.
The circumstance that no professional astronomer in Australia saw this brilliant light brings up, in any normally respectful mind, doubt that there was such a light. But this appearance in the sky is the central datum of our expression, and I am going to make acceptable that, even though it was reported only by amateurs, there was at this time a conspicuous new appearance in the heavens. New Zealand -- silence in the Observatories -- but reports from amateurs, upon a "very large" light in the sky. See the New Zealand Times, Sept. 20, 1883.(9) That a yarn in Australia could quickly spread to New Zealand? Ceylon -- an unknown light that was seen in the sky of Ceylon, about a week after the eruption of Krakatoa (Madras Athenæum, Sept. 22).(10) Straits Times, Oct. 13 -- an appearance like a comet, in the sky, at Samarung, where the natives and the Chinese were terrified, and burned incense for protection from it.(11) England -- observation, upon the night of August 28th, by Captain Noble, a well-known amateur astronomer. Whatever the professionals of Australia and New Zealand were doing, the professionals of England were doing likewise, if doing nothing is about the same wherever it's done. In Knowledge, 4-173, Capt. Noble tells of a sight in the heavens [338/339] that he describes as "like a new and most glorious comet."(12) An amateur in Liverpool saw it. Knowledge, 4-207 -- an object that looked like