THE GREAT ERUPTION IN JAVA

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 274, 15 August 1919, Page 7

THE GREAT ERUPTION IN JAVA

DEATH ROLL OF 40,000 ENORMOUS DAMAGE The recent eruption of tho Ivlot (or Kalut) volcano in Java cost 40,000 native 1 lives, destroyed ;JO,M)O acres of crops, principally rice, by its How of hot mud. and did millions of dollars' damage by Iho fniiling ashes in regions oulsido tho devastated districts. Volcano-made in the first place, and constantly being remade by them, Java lias moro volcanoes than any area of its size in the world. Estimates of tho activeand extinct craters range from 100 lo LSO. Everywhere in Java, in the huge crater lakes, in fissures that now am river beds, even in ancient temples, half--finished, when interrupted by some fiery convulsion, are evidences of cataclysmic forces—such turbulent forces as now are in continuous hysteria in tho Valley of 1 ho Ten Thousand Smokes in Alaska and break their crusted surface cage inter-' mittently in Java. Tho "treacherous IC-tot," as the nativca call it, a'.l but wiped out the town of Britar, but even its devastation, as reported to the State Delwrtment, was mild compared to.the violent upheaval of Krakatoa in 1533. Then Mother Nature turned anarchist and planted a Gargantuan infernal machino on the doorstep of Java. Krakatoa. is a little island in the Sundii Strait, between Sumatra and Java. Moro than half the island was blotted our, parts of-it were Hung aloft four times as high as (ho world's highest mountain, and to touch bottom below the water's surface, where most of the island had been, henceforth required a plumb line twice as long as the height of the Washington Monument. Skyscraper waves flooded ' adjacent islands and rolled hnlf' way around the earth. Every human ear drum heard, though it may not have registered, the air waves as they .vibrated three or four times around the earth. Krakatoa levied a smaller.toll in human life than Klot because of its isolation, and many of tho 35,000 deaths fvimi ICrakatoa's eruption were at far.distant points by drowning. An eruption anywhere on the island means disaster. For Java,, about equal in area to New Tort Slate, supports n population greater than the combined populations of the Empire State and the four other-most, populous Stales in the Union-Pennsyl-vania, Illinois, Ohio and Te.\ns._ Naturally the imtivo religion is ■fatalistic. A. fie'e translation of an inscription on an old tomb runs: " 'What is the use of Hying, of kissing lovely flowers, ■ ■ . If, though they are beautiful, they . must soon fade into nothing.'... X "In the native folklore arc innuuiDr-; able stories of the earth opening up to swallow a dancing girl. Such talcs betoken another physical feature of the island fraught with, human tragedy .-Not •? only has It sleaining vents, spouting, geysers, sulphur lakes, but great chasms'" open and close, and they have been known to swallow villus**.