JAVA 
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and 4000 people were destroyed. The eruptions of 
Guntur—“ the mountain of thunder ”—are innumerable. 
It is bare from base to summit, and although history 
does not show it to have been so destructive to human 
life as many other volcanoes of the island, it has never¬ 
theless ruined the coffee-plantations around it on many 
occasions. 
Terrible in their effects as have been many of the 
eruptions of the volcanoes of Java, few have been so 
disastrous as that of Mount Galunggung, a peak some 
few miles north-east of Papandayang. At noon on the 
8th October, 1822, not a cloud was to be seen in the 
sky, and no preliminary earthquake or noises within the 
mountain gave warning of what was about to occur. 
Suddenly a frightful thundering was heard, and from the 
top of this apparently extinct volcano a dark dense mass 
was seen rising higher and higher into the air, and 
spreading itself out over the clear sky with such appalling 
rapidity that in a few moments the whole landscape was 
shrouded in the darkness of night. Through the thick 
darkness flashes of lightning gleamed incessantly in every 
direction, and many natives were instantly struck down to 
the earth by stones falling from the sky. Then a deluge 
of hot water and flowing mud shot up from the crater 
like a waterspout, and poured down the mountain-sides, 
sweeping away trees and beasts and human beings in its 
seething mass. At the same moment stones and ashes 
and sand were projected to an enormous height into the 
air, and, as they fell, destroyed nearly everything within 
a radius of twenty miles, while quantities of the ejecta 
fell even beyond the Eiver Tandoi, which is forty 
miles off. A few villages that were situated on high 
hills on the lower declivities of the mountain escaped the 
surrounding destruction by being raised above the streams 
