170 
COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL 
27th “ like the distant roars of heavy guns.” In the 
opposite direction Dr. Guillemard records that the sounds 
were audible on both days at Dorei Bay, on the north 
coast of New Guinea, 2014 miles distant. Roughly 
speaking, the eruption was heard over one-thirteenth of 
the entire surface of the globe. It is very remarkable 
that in the more immediate neighbourhood of the volcano 
the sounds were inaudible after the culminating explosion 
at 10 a.m. on the 27th, and this curious phenomenon can 
only be accounted for by the supposition that the 
enormous mass of ejecta formed a sort of wall or curtain 
so thick as effectually to exclude all sound. With regard 
to the extraordinary sunset glows and coloured suns so 
widely noticed during the autumn of 1883 and at sub¬ 
sequent periods, Messrs. Archibald and Eollo Russell’s 
exhaustive treatise proves beyond all possibility of doubt 
that they were caused by the impalpable dust and vapour 
particles ejected from the crater of Krakatau during this 
memorable eruption. The pumice, which lay so thick in 
the Straits of Sunda that a bank of it was reported on 
one occasion to have almost stopped a vessel passing a few 
weeks later, drifted completely across the Indian Ocean 
from about 0° to 20° S., and reached Natal about the end 
of September 1884. 1 Three years after the eruption the 
island was visited by Dr. Treub of the Buitenzorg Botanic 
Garden, who found the cinders and pumice entirely 
covered with fresh-water algae of various species. He also 
collected eleven species of ferns and twenty other plants. 
The .plains, table-lands, and valleys of the mountain 
region of Sumatra are often of great extent, and differ 
1 For further information the reader is referred to “The Eruption of 
Krakatoa the Report of the Krakatau Committee of the Royal Society, 
and M. Verbeek’s <e Krakatau.” 
