Blown to Bits: The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago, R. M. Ballantyne [any book recommendations .txt] 📗
- Author: R. M. Ballantyne
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“Darling Winnie,” said Nigel at that moment. “I will die for you or with you!”
The poor girl heard, but no sign of appreciation moved her pale face as she gazed up at the approaching chaos of waters.
Next moment the brig seemed to stand on its bows. Van der Kemp had placed his daughter against the mast, and, throwing his long arms round both, held on. Nigel, close to them, had grasped a handful of ropes, and every one else was holding on for life. Another moment and the brig rose as if it were being tossed up to the heavens. Immediately thereafter it resumed its natural position in a perfect wilderness of foam. They were on the summit of the great wave, which was so large that its crest seemed like a broad, rounded mass of tumbling snow with blackness before and behind, while the roar of the tumult was deafening. The brig rushed onward at a speed which she had never before equalled even in the fiercest gale—tossed hither and thither by the leaping foam, yet always kept going straight onward by the expert steering of her captain.
“Come aft—all of you!” he shouted, when it was evident that the vessel was being borne surely forward on the wave’s crest. “The masts will go for certain when we strike.”
The danger of being entangled in the falling spars and cordage was so obvious that every one except the hermit and Nigel obeyed.
“Here, Nigel,” gasped the former. “I—I’ve—lost blood—faint!—”
Our hero at once saw that Van der Kemp, fainting from previous loss of blood, coupled with exertion, was unable to do anything but hold on. Indeed, he failed even in that, and would have fallen to the deck had Nigel not caught him by the arm.
“Can you run aft, Winnie?” said Nigel anxiously.
“Yes!” said the girl, at once understanding the situation and darting to the wheel, of which and of Captain Roy she laid firm hold, while Nigel lifted the hermit in his arms and staggered to the same spot. Winnie knelt beside him immediately, and, forgetting for the moment all the horrors around her, busied herself in replacing the bandage which had been loosened from his head.
“Oh! Mr Roy, save him!—save him!” cried the poor child, appealing in an agony to Nigel, for she felt instinctively that when the crash came her father would be utterly helpless even to save himself.
Nigel had barely time to answer when a wild shout from the crew caused him to start up and look round. A flare from the volcano had cast a red light over the bewildering scene, and revealed the fact that the brig was no longer above the ocean’s bed, but was passing in its wild career right through, or rather over, the demolished town of Anjer. A few of the houses that had been left standing by the previous waves were being swept—hurled—away by this one, but the mass of rolling, rushing, spouting water was so deep, that the vessel had as yet struck nothing save the tops of some palm-trees which bent their heads like straws before the flood.
Even in the midst of the amazement, alarm, and anxiety caused by the situation, Nigel could not help wondering that in this final and complete destruction of the town no sign of struggling human beings should be visible. He forgot at the moment, what was terribly proved afterwards, that the first waves had swallowed up men, women, and children by hundreds, and that the few who survived had fled to the hills, leaving nothing for the larger wave to do but complete the work of devastation on inanimate objects. Ere the situation had been well realised the volcanic fires went down again, and left the world, for over a hundred surrounding miles, in opaque darkness. Only the humble flicker of the binnacle-light, like a trusty sentinel on duty, continued to shed its feeble rays on a few feet of the deck, and showed that the compass at least was still faithful to the pole!
Then another volcanic outburst revealed the fact that the wave which carried them was thundering on in the direction of a considerable cliff or precipice—not indeed quite straight towards it, but sufficiently so to render escape doubtful.
At the same time a swarm of terror-stricken people were seen flying towards this cliff and clambering up its steep sides. They were probably some of the more courageous of the inhabitants who had summoned courage to return to their homes after the passage of the second wave. Their shrieks and cries could be heard above even the roaring of the water and the detonations of the volcano.
“God spare us!” exclaimed poor Winnie, whose trembling form was now partially supported by Nigel.
As she spoke darkness again obscured everything, and they could do naught but listen to the terrible sounds—and pray.
On—on went the Sunshine, in the midst of wreck and ruin, on this strange voyage over land and water, until a check was felt. It was not a crash as had been anticipated, and as might have naturally been expected, neither was it an abrupt stoppage. There was first a hissing, scraping sound against the vessel’s sides, then a steady checking—we might almost say a hindrance to progress—not violent, yet so very decided that the rigging could not bear the strain. One and another of the backstays parted, the foretopsail burst with a cannon-like report, after which a terrible rending sound, followed by an indescribable crash, told that both masts had gone by the board.
Then all was comparatively still—comparatively we say, for water still hissed and leaped beneath them like a rushing river, though it no longer roared, and the wind blew in unfamiliar strains and laden with unwonted odours.
At that moment another outburst of Krakatoa revealed the fact that the great wave had borne the brig inland for upwards of a mile, and left her imbedded in a thick grove of cocoa-nut palms!
The great explosions of that morning had done more damage and had achieved results more astounding than lies in the power of language adequately to describe, or of history to parallel.
Let us take a glance at this subject in passing.
An inhabitant of Anjer—owner of a hotel, a ship-chandler’s store, two houses, and a dozen boats—went down to the beach about six on the morning of that fateful 27th of August. He had naturally been impressed by the night of the 26th, though, accustomed as he was to volcanic eruptions, he felt no apprehensions as to the safety of the town. He went to look to the moorings of his boats, leaving his family of seven behind him. While engaged in this work he observed a wave of immense size approaching. He leaped into one of his boats, which was caught up by the wave and swept inland, carrying its owner there in safety. But this was the wave that sealed the doom of the town and most of its inhabitants, including the hotel-keeper’s family and all that he possessed.
This is one only out of thousands of cases of bereavement and destruction.
A lighthouse-keeper was seated in his solitary watch-tower, speculating, doubtless, on the probable continuance of such a violent outbreak, while his family and mates—accustomed to sleep in the midst of elemental war—were resting peacefully in the rooms below, when one of the mighty waves suddenly appeared, thundered past, and swept the lighthouse with all its inhabitants away.
This shows but one of the many disasters to lighthouses in Sunda Straits.
A Dutch man-of-war—the Berouw—was lying at anchor in Lampong Bay, fifty miles from Krakatoa. The great wave came, tore it from its anchorage, and carried it—like the vessel of our friend David Roy—nearly two miles inland! Masses of coral of immense size and weight were carried four miles inland by the same wave. The river at Anjer was choked up; the conduit which used to carry water into the place was destroyed, and the town itself was laid in ruins.
But these are only a few of the incidents of the great catastrophe. Who can conceive, much less tell of, those terrible details of sudden death and disaster to thousands of human beings, resulting from an eruption which destroyed towns like Telok Betong, Anjer, Tyringin, etcetera, besides numerous villages and hamlets on the shores of Java and Sumatra, and caused the destruction of more than 36,000 souls?
But it is to results of a very different kind, and on a much more extended scale, that we must turn if we would properly estimate the magnitude, the wide-spreading and far-reaching influences, and the extraordinary character, of the Krakatoa outburst of 1883.
In the first place, it is a fact, testified to by some of the best-known men of science, that the shock of the explosion extended appreciably right round the world, and seventeen miles, (some say even higher!) up into the heavens.
Mr Verbeek, in his treatise on this subject, estimates that a cubic mile of Krakatoa was propelled in the form of the finest dust into the higher regions of the atmosphere—probably about thirty miles! The dust thus sent into the sky was of “ultra-microscopic fineness,” and it travelled round and round the world in a westerly direction, producing those extraordinary sunsets and gorgeous effects and afterglows which became visible in the British Isles in the month of November following the eruption; and the mighty waves which caused such destruction in the vicinity of Sunda Straits travelled—not once, but at least—six times round the globe, as was proved by trustworthy and independent observations of tide-gauges and barometers made and recorded at the same time in nearly all lands—including our own.
Other volcanoes, it is said by those who have a right to speak in regard to such matters, have ejected more “stuff,” but not one has equalled Krakatoa in the intensity of its explosions, the appalling results of the sea-waves, the wonderful effects in the sky, and the almost miraculous nature of the sounds.
Seated on a log under a palm-tree in Batavia, on that momentous morning of the 27th, was a sailor who had been left behind sick by Captain Roy when he went on his rather Quixotic trip to the Keeling Islands. He was a somewhat delicate son of the sea. Want of self-restraint was his complaint—leading to a surfeit of fruit and other things, which terminated in a severe fit of indigestion and indisposition to life in general. He was smoking—that being a sovereign and infallible cure for indigestion and all other ills that flesh is heir to, as every one knows!
“I say, old man,” he inquired, with that cheerful tone and air which usually accompanies incapacity for food. “Do it always rain ashes here?”
The old man whom he addressed was a veteran Malay seaman.
“No,” replied the Malay, “sometimes it rain mud—hot mud.”
“Do it? Oh! well—anything for variety, I s’pose,” returned the sailor, with a growl which had reference to internal disarrangements.
“Is it often as dark as this in the daytime, an’ is the sun usually green?” he asked carelessly, more for the sake of distracting the mind from other matters than for the desire of knowledge.
“Sometime it’s more darker,” replied the old man. “I’ve seed it so dark that you couldn’t see how awful dark it was.”
As he spoke, a sound that has been described by ear-witnesses as “deafening,” smote upon their tympanums, the log on which they sat quivered, the earth seemed to tremble, and several dishes in a neighbouring hut were thrown down and broken.
“I say, old man, suthin’ busted there,” remarked the sailor, taking the pipe from his mouth and quietly ramming its contents down with the end of his blunt forefinger.
The Malay looked grave.
“The gasometer?” suggested the sailor.
“No, that never busts.”
“A noo mountain come into action, p’raps, an blow’d its top off?”
“Shouldn’t wonder if that’s it—close at hand too. We’s used to that here. But them’s bigger cracks
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