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 fotir- 

 teenth part of the planetary surface ; the underground mutterings heard in the 

 American isLand of Caiman Brae, almost at the antipodes of Krakatau, may 

 even have proceeded from the same source. The clouds of ashes ejected to a 

 height of sixteen, or according to one report twenty-one miles, fell in dense 



Fig. 31. — Range or Dispersion of the Keakatau Ashes. 

 Scale 1 : 15,000,000. 



Easb cF Green.vich 



\05° 



300 Miles. 



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 ; in 

 the interior of Sumatra, ninety miles off, some places were covered two or three 

 inches deep, and the surface of the water was still powdered in the Indian Ocean 

 beyond the Keeling Islands, a distance of 720 miles. The débris was wafted as 

 far as the shores of Madagascar, and the displacement of rocks in the form of 



