![]() ![]() * Embraced within the parenthesis created by these twins was both the Polish Hat, a tiny chunk of the finegrained volcanic rock known as andesite, and the northern end of the island that we truly once regarded as Krakatoa proper. At the northern end of the group were two low and crescent-shaped skerries - one to the east called Panjang, about three miles long, and to the west its larger colleague, four miles long, called Sertung. Once the dust had settled, what remained of Ancient Krakatoa was a group of four quite small and apparently stable-looking islands. But then a gigantic eruption, witnessed only by gibbering hominids and Neanderthals, if indeed by anyone, may have devastated the island and its peak, blowing almost all to smithereens. There is some evidence that a very long while before that - perhaps 60,000 years ago or more - there once was a very much larger mountain that some geologists like to call Ancient Krakatoa, which they believe was something like 6,000 feet high and centred on an almost perfectly circular island about nine miles in diameter. And yet, of these four, one is widely thought of now as most unlikely to have occurred at all the date of a second is very reluctantly agreed to a third is known to have been very poorly reported and subject to wanton hyperbole and only the most recent truly survives as the one of the four that is incontrovertibly regarded as having taken place. Man has been recording his memories for about 30,000 years, in cave-paintings or songs, in carvings or writings, and during this time the small cluster of volcanoes and off-islands that for the last 300 years we have come to call collectively Krakatoa has exploded once, twice, four or even eleven times, depending on just how the runes of geology, myth and circumstance are read and interpreted.įour of these eruptions are generally accepted to have emerged from the mists of uncertain history into the realms of possible reality. an eleventh-century plagiarism by an Antioch patriarch called Michael the Syrian, of a document supposedly written by the sixth-century historian John of Ephesus, describing the punishing climatic effects of an event that some believe to have been an early eruption of Krakatoa ![]() The fruits did not ripen, and the wine tasted like sour grapes. Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again. Each day, it shone for about four hours, and still this light was only a feeble shadow. The sun became dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months. There was a sign from the sun, the like of which had never been seen or reported before. ![]() Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: AugSimon Winchester (2003) Chapter 4. ![]()
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