But it had evidently not been so quiet very recently. As we climbed higher, we saw hundreds of rocks on all sides that had clearly whistled down from on high after a furious eruption and crashed into the sides of the hill. Craters had formed in the ash around where the rocks had fallen, just as though bombs or artillery shells had exploded: the craters gave the surface the curious appearance of the landscape of Ypres or Passchendaele, only here it was dry, not muddy, and sloping, not flat.
Some of the lava bombs had been huge, some as large as a motorbus – and whenever we edged past one of those, with Boing laughing in the way that only Javanese can laugh, with their fatalistic attitude to all happenings good and bad, I confess that I looked up in the sky, moderately apprehensive. If Anak Krakatoa decided on a tectonic whim to hurl one of those into the sky, then gravity would ensure that life for those below would become very short and concentrated indeed.
Up we trudged; until we reached a point where the last grasses – tall clumps of the so-called wild sugar-cane, Saccharum spontaneum – petered out, and the landscape became nothing more than ash, bomb crater, smoke and the ever widening panorama of the sky. The skyline itself was quite near, and when after ten minutes more or so I breasted the ridge – panting, perspiring, glad it was all over – I was actually surprised at how easy it had all been.
I stood tall on top of a truck-sized lava bomb, and took in the immense view. I gazed down at our island, at the curved cusp of the grove of trees by the beach below, at the black-sand shore and at our yellow pinisi, tiny and fragile, swinging on her anchor. I gazed down at the lava flows, great black frozen rivers of coiled and frozen magma that had not so long ago been pouring down into the boiling ocean. I looked over at the jagged outcrop of Bo'sun's Rock, welling out of its private froth of surf, and over to the low island of Panjang to the east, and the immense half-conical wall of Rakata directly ahead.
And then I tried to look across at where the archipelago's other island of Sertung should lie – only at this point Iwas suddenly confronted by an immense wall of sloping grey ash that rose high, high above me. What foolishness! I suddenly realized. What a mistake to have made! The relief I might have briefly felt at supposedly reaching the summit of Krakatoa's child vanished in an instant: it turned out that I was not even halfway up the mountain. Where I stood was no more than a false crater, the mere relict rim of a much earlier eruption. Anak Krakatoa's widely feared active crater, the summit of the volcano and the site from behind which the eruptive smoke was even now billowing, was yet another long, long slog away.
There was nothing for it. Boing and I manfully slogged away upwards once more, as we were duty bound to do, slipping and sliding ourselves painfully up and up, in the fierce heat and dazzling sunshine, ever wary of what mischief the mountain might be planning. The sky widened further and further; the sea below became a dazzling, gleaming sheet of steel; the temperature rose in an almost terrifying way that seemed to have no relation to the tropical sun. After thirty wearying minutes more, we stepped over a rock edged with a crust of yellow-stained sulphur crystals, and across the teeth of a ridge – below, spread ahead like some infernal dish of hell, was the crater itself.
The white smoke had by now enveloped us: it was hot water vapour, mixed with the curiously attractive smell of sulphur dioxide and dust. The surface I could see ahead was a fragile-looking crust, newly baked and broken in places, with plopping gobbets of hot mud spurting into the air and hissing, machine-like jets of gas roaring and whistling up into the cloud. From afar, the volcano had appeared quiet; but from up here, on the very lip of its mouth, at the working end of the heir-apparent to the greatest volcano the modern world has experienced, it seemed anything but.
The mechanics of the making of the world were all in evidence, just a few feet ahead of where I stood. All this talk of subduction zones, of the collisions between two of the world's immense tectonic plates, of the unfolding of the ring of fire – it all came down to this. Here, in this hot, crystalline, yellow-grey, wheezing, whistling, mud-boiling cauldron, was where the consequences of subduction were being played out.
The power of the process was all too apparent here also, in the strangely compelling symphony of grindings and snortings and sulphurous snarlings, in all the rushings of yellow and green gases, and in the snapping and straining of the rocks and crystals and crusts. This was a place that was filled with nameless and unfathomable activities, and it had a terrible, fascinating menace. It was a place that was all too evidently primed, ready at an instant to explode again – and, in exploding, to do goodness knows how much harm to the goodness knows how many souls waiting unwittingly down below.
After a while the sulphur began to catch in my throat, and Boing started to become anxious that we might in any case be staying too long. And so we trudged downhill for the last time, soon glissading through clouds of ash, passing at a run the Observatory radio transmitter and the clumps of sugar-cane, before meeting the fringe of the woods and diving thankfully through the final few hundred feet into the comparative cool of the shade of the seaside casuarina trees.
The crew had gone out to ready their boat for the journey back to Java, and Boing swam over to talk to them. I was peckish, and pulled out from my haversack a squashed chicken sandwich, made for me in the hotel before we left. I sat on the trunk of a fallen tree in the quiet, reflecting on the afternoon, and on the awesome, epicentral, deeply symbolic place above that I had been fortunate enough to see.
And then I heard a rustling, crackling sound in the woods, a strange unearthly noise that made the hairs rise suddenly all along the nape of my neck.
I stopped eating, and looked around. There was no other sound – not even from the boatmen, who were by now probably well out of earshot. The rustling continued, and it got louder – until, suddenly breaking out of the cover of the jungle, emerged the head and then the body of a six-foot long lizard, waddling slowly and steadily towards me, its jaws wide open.
Varanus salvator, the five-banded swimming monitor lizard, now an all too common inhabitant of the ruined islands.
It was a horrible, strange, weirdly shaped creature – a long fat brown body with what looked like a thick seam of flesh running the length of its midsection. As it walked, its tail thrashed from side to side, and from its small flat-topped head came a tongue, a foot or more long, that flickered in and out menacingly.
The beast as a whole did look menacing, and very dangerous indeed. Deep down I knew that it was probably quite harmless, and that it was in all likelihood simply a specimen of the great five-banded monitor, the wonderful swimming lizard known to the Javanese as the biawak and to science as Varanus salvator. But that deeper realization came only later in the day; at the precise moment on that August afternoon when it emerged from the trees, while I was sitting alone in the jungle on the side of a hot and very active volcano, the animal looked like nothing so much as a fully fledged dragon, and I was more than a little alarmed by his arrival on the scene.
So I threw him my sandwich. He took one disdainful look at it, gazed up briefly at me – and then grabbed the Carita Beach Hotel kitchen's doubtless carefully prepared confection of chicken and white bread between his wicked-looking teeth, and skittered off back into the darkness of the jungle, his armour-plated tail thrashing its valediction.
I got up cautiously from my tree and, with as much dispatch as was consonant with the dignity of the occasion, walked down to the shore and on to the sand. I hurried through the cooling waves, out to where the yellow fishing boat was waiting. I decided not to say what I had seen.
The crew were impatient for home, and we set off eastwards at such a speed that before long the cone of Anak Krakatoa and the relic ruins of the world's greatest volcano were all sliding down astern of us, and merging with the horizon and the setting sun. And as we sailed on into the gathering dark, so the twinkling lights of the west of Java were coming up fast over the bow.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR
(AND IN ONE
CASE, AGAINST)
FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
‘Wake up, wake up; you've got to get in the shade!’
I shook my head and opened my eyes again. There was a man kneeling over me. He wasn't a native, and didn't suggest an explorer or a traveller. He was wearing a correctly tailored white morning suit, with pinstripe pants, white ascot tie, and a white cork bowler.
‘Am I dead?’ I asked. ‘Is this heaven?’
‘No, my good man,’ he answered. ‘This isn't heaven. This is the Pacific island of Krakatoa.’
– from The Twenty-One Balloons,
by William Pène du Bois, 1947
Just after 8.32 on the crystal-clear Sunday morning of 18 May 1980, the long-awaited, universally expected eruption of Mount St Helens, in the south-western corner of Washington State, blew away the entire northern face of what was then America's most notorious volcano. The event turned out to be a classic of the volcanic art, camera-ready for the textbook: an ash cloud rising sixteen miles into the sky, and visible 200 miles away; the mountain's summit suddenly reduced in height by 1,300 feet; scores of square miles of countryside burned and devastated; 22,000 further square miles blanketed with debris; billions of trees swept flat; and fifty-seven people killed, most of them suffocated by clouds of boiling grit.
And yet, though the eruption of Mount St Helens – which was televised, filmed, photographed and chronicled in more loving detail than any other eruption in history – was to become briefly so very famous, it never even came close to dislodging Krakatoa from its position as the most notorious volcano of all time. For some curious reason – and part of that reason quite probably no more than the euphonious nature of the volcano's given name – the saga of Krakatoa has remained firmly and immovably welded into the popular mind.
The principal elements of the story of its great eruption of 27 August 1883 – the immense sound of the detonation, the unprecedented tidal waves, the death-rafts of drifting pumice, the livid sunsets – all still play their part in the world's collective consciousness. They remain annealed into the popular mind in a way that the spectacular eruptions of the planet's other truly great volcanoes, like Etna, Santorini, Tambora and St Pierre – and even the Vesuvius of Pliny and Pompeii – have still never quite managed to match.
Krakatoa – the name. That may well account for it. But there are other reasons too – among them the timely appearance of two items of popular culture relating to the event. One is a slim volume of a children's book, published to near-universal praise in 1947; the other, a Hollywood film released twenty years later to near-universal scorn. More than any other external factor, these two creations quite probably account in large measure for the extraordinary durability of the Krakatoa story.
The children's story was The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois: it won America's renowned Newbery Medal in 1948, and has never been out of print since. It tells the story of a maths teacher from San Francisco named William Waterman Sherman who flies in a balloon westwards across the Pacific, crash-landing (after seagulls pecked holes in the silk fabric) on what turns out to be ‘the Pacific island of Krakatoa’. Here the impeccably dressed locals are all fabulously rich, since the volcano in the island's centre sits directly on top of an immense diamond mine.
The resulting story is all about the Professor's adventures among the remarkable people of a utopia, which, because of the eruption of 1883, swiftly becomes a dangerous dystopia. All have to flee in a specially built balloon-lifted platform. The book – 180 pages, endearingly illustrated by its thirty-year-old author – is enchanting; most intelligent children will have read it, and they will in consequence know Krakatoa as, at the very least, a place both dangerous and beautiful, and wondrously exotic.
Children who were born in time to read the first editions of The Twenty-One Balloons would have been in their early thirties in the year 1969. They would thus have been a precise demographic target for one of Hollywood's archetypal B-movie directors, the otherwise little-known Bernard Kowalski, who in that year made the universally known, much derided, utterly improbable, irredeemably mediocre and magisterially mistitled epic Krakatoa, East of Java.*
The ensemble cast – Maximilian Schell, Diane Baker, Rossano Brazzi, Brian Keith and Sal Mineo among them – might possibly have saved a stronger script or storyline. But the sheer lunacy of the plot, which involved sunken treasure, wayward hot-air balloons, long-legged and half-naked female Japanese pearl-divers, escaped prisoners and a series of very obvious polystyrene models of a volcano, inevitably forced whatever grand vision Kowalski might have had to disintegrate into farce.
Despite the lavish technological promise offered by both Cinerama and Technicolor, the film performed very badly at the time, remains generally a cinematic joke today, and is thought of as merely a less costly precursor of such titanic disasters as Ishtar, Waterworld and Heaven's Gate. Krakatoa, East of Java can be seen very late at night on some obscure American television channels; by contrast in Britain, where for some reason the film still enjoys the status of a minor cult classic – a fondness for kitsch, some say – it was part of the expensive and much touted television schedules as recently as Christmas 2001.
In the late 1980s Lorne and Lawrence Blair, two seemingly indefatigable and irrepressibly enthusiastic British explorers,* produced a series of extraordinary television documentaries about the island of Indonesia called Ring of Fire. In the way of such things, the television company then produced a book (Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey, London, Inner Traditions International, 1991), which is copiously illustrated and informative. One of the films, cheekily titled East of Krakatoa, has two minutes of memorable footage of the early eruptions of Anak Krakatoa in the thirties.
In 1999 Channel Four showed an ambitious two-part television series based on David Keys's remarkable book Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World (London, Century, 1999), which, as Chapter Four indicates, speculates that an early eruption of Krakatoa may have thrown the entire known world of the time into profound disarray. The idea has supporters and detractors in equal measure: it ought to be read, sceptically, for a good analysis of the possible early history of the volcano.
There have been surprisingly few books about the volcano's 1883 eruption in recent years, other than an immense number of specialist and technical volumes. One of the few is Krakatoa by Rupert Furneaux (London, Secker & Warburg) – but it was published in 1965, an unfortunate two years before the establishment of the theory of plate tectonics arrived to answer all questions about why volcanoes erupt, and so the book has a necessarily limited value. It is, however, a stirring tale, and exceedingly well told, and I made liberal use of some of the eyewitness descriptions that Furneaux so assiduously dug out of various Dutch and maritime archives of the day. Ian Thornton's Krakatau: The Destruction and Reassembly of an Island Ecosystem (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1996) is thoroughly up to date and much more readable than its title suggests; but, on the other hand, it concentrates heavily on the biogeography of the island, which those hoping for the more general story may lament.
The enormous and well-nigh definitive Krakatau 1883: The Volcanic Eruption and Its Effects by the distinguished vulcanologists Tom Simkin and Richard S. Fiske (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983) is required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the event and its aftermath: my own copy is thumbed to the point of near destruction. It has scores of illustrations, diagrams, tables and a vast bibliography, all of immense use to someone like me. But it is at heart a scientific book, and its appeal will tend to be limited to the specialist: the fact that no one ever answered the authors' appeal for yet more eyewitness descriptions suggests either that there are no more to be had (which is not true: at least two entirely fresh accounts appeared while I was doing my own research) or the audience for the book was limited to scientists and somehow missed the kind of people who hoard old letters and journals from long-dead relatives who once travelled Out East.
The Royal Society's famous report, The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena (London, Trübner & Co., 1888), can still be found, expensively, in antiquarian bookshops; as can the heroic Krakatau by R. D. M. Verbeek (Batavia, Government Printing Office, 1886), with copies available – at a price – in either Dutch or French. Simkin and Fiske very obligingly translated much of Verbeek's work into English (for the first time) in their own 1983 volume. Serious students of the volcano should make all possible attempts to read at least some of this marvellously enthusiastic work, in whatever language available.
Finally, in the must-read category: anyone with the available funds should buy for their shelves the massive, astonishingly detailed and beautifully written Encyclopedia of Volcanoes (San Diego, Academic Press, 2000), not least because it is edited by the Icelandic vulcanologist and world-renowned Krakatoa enthusiast, Haraldur Sigurdsson, presently a professor at the University of Rhode Island.
Other books I found useful and interesting included:
Abeyasekere, Susan, Jakarta: A History (Singapore, Oxford University Press, 1987)
Angelino, A. D. A. de Kat, Colonial Policy. Volume 2: The Dutch East Indies (The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1931)
Armstrong, Karen, Islam: A Short History (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000)
— Muhammad (London, Gollancz, 1991)
Bangs, Richard, and Kallen, Christian, Islands of Fire, Islands of Spice (San Francisco, Sierra Club Books, 1988)
Barty-King, Hugh, Girdle Round the Earth: The Story of Cable & Wireless and Its Predecessors to Mark the Group's Jubilee (London, Heinemann, 1979)
Berger, Meyer, The Story of the New York Times 1851–1951 (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1951)
Bertuchi, A. J., The Island of Rodriguez, a British Colony in the Mascarenhas Group (London, John Murray, 1923)