~ Krakatoa's final twenty hours and fifty-six minutes were marked by a number of phases.
- First, from early afternoon on Sunday till about 7 p.m. there was a series of explosions and eruptions
of steadily increasing frequency and vigour.
- From early evening, the ash falls and the deluge of of pumice began
- By 8 p.m. the water had become the next medium of transmission
of the volcanic energy, and as night fell, the temper of the sea in the Sundra Strait became one of unbridled ferocity.
- Then just before midnight, a series of air waves -- fast moving, low-frequency shocks sent out invisibly
and inaudibly by the detonations -- began ariving in Batvia.
- In Batavia, a large number of people, kept awake by the explosions, were walking
around the Konongsplein; they noticed that the gas lanterns suddenly dimmed at about 1:55 a.m.
- Along Rijswijk, the main shopping street, several shop windows suddenly and inexplicably
shattered at about the same time.
- Then at about 4 a.m. the nature of the explosions reportedly changed, very slightly, becoming less continuous,
but more explosive.
- Someone described the sounds as like a steam-engine, emitting full-throated
whoomphs as it gathered speed.
- At about 4:56 a.m. an enormously powerful air wave was detected at the Batavia gasworks
- suggesting, if travel time over the ninety miles to the volcano is allowed for, that something else had just happened deep
within Krakatoa's heart.
- There were four gigantic explosions still to come. The first was noticed at 5:30
a.m.
- The Sumatran town of Ketimbang was then destriyed at 6:15 a.m., and Anjer, her Javan sister-port across the Strait
-- according to the few who survived to tell the tale -- was wrecked very shortly thereafter.
- The second mighty explosion came at 6:44 a.m. -- forty-one minutes after a dawn that, to
those in all of western Java, never arrived that day.
- Ashes began to fall on Batavia at 7 a.m.
- At 8:20 a.m. a third, quite terrible explosion was felt in Batavia, and many of the buildings began to make what
were described as 'crackling' noises.
- And then finally, at 10:02 a.m., came the culminating, majesty of it all.
