Volume 14 Australasia - dana ward's homepage

88 AUSTRALASIA.what mighty fleets were engaged in deadly combat in the neighbouring seas.The commotion shook the atmosphere for a vast space, estimated at the fourteenthpart of the planetary surface ; the underground mutterings heard in theAmerican island of Caiman Brae, almost at the antipodes of Krakatau, mayeven have proceeded from the same source. The clouds of ashes ejected to aheight of sixteen, or according to one report twenty-one miles, fell in denseFig. 31. Range OF Dispebsion of the Keakatau Ashep.Scale 1 : 15,000,000.c/f//vAseA.Essb oF Gregnw.ch 105°masses over a vast space round about the island, which had been blown to pieces.Within a range of nine miles the bed thus formed was over three feet thick ;inthe interior of Sumatra, ninety miles off, some places were covered two or threeinches deep, and the surface of the water was still powdered in the Indian Oceanbeyond the Keeling Islands, a distance of 720 miles. The debris was wafted asfar as the shores of Madagascar, and the displacement of rocks in the form of