Volume 14 Australasia - dana ward's homepage

86 AUSTRz\XASIA.canic chain is continued by Mount Tangka (3,460 feet), round Lampong Bay to thesouth-eastern headland of Sumatra, and thence through a line of islets and reefsacross the Sunda Strait, here only sixteen miles wide, to the opposite coast of Java.The extinct cone of Eaja Bassa (4,460 feet), southernmost member of the chainof sixty-six Sumatran volcanoes, does not lie in the normal direction of the mainaxis, and seems to have originally stood on an island afterwards attached to themainland, either by upheaval or moi'e probably by a shower of scorias and ashes.Raja Bassa forms part of a transverse volcanic ridge, whose axis intersects that ofFig. 29. Khaeatau and Neiqhbotjrixg Islets befoke the Eruption.Scale 1 : 150,000.the Sumatran system, for it runs in the direction from north-cast to south-west.To this scarcely perceptible ridge belong the two islands ofSebesi and Krakatauin the Sunda Strait, and the system is also perhaps continued under the IndianOcean for some six hundred miles to the Keeling Islands, which lie in a direct linewith Raja Bassa and Krakatau.But yet another volcanic fault intersects that of Sumatra and Krakatau in theSunda Strait. This is the great Javanese system, running due west and east, andmarked by so many formidable igneous cones. Thus at this focus of undei-groundforces the terrestrial crust is, so to say, starred with tremendous fissures, and herethe destructive agencies have at times, and even quite recently, assumed a characterof stupendous grandeur.