THE GREAT ERUPTION IN JAVA.

Taranaki Daily News, 23 August 1919, Page 12

THE GREAT ERUPTION IN JAVA.

'*» • I DEATH ROLL OF 40,000 ENORMOUS DAMAGE. The recent eruption of the Klot (or Kalut) volcano in Java cost 40,000 native lives, destroyed 20,000 acres of crops, principally rice, by its flow of hot mud, and did millions of dollars' worth of damage by the falling ashes in regions outside the devastated districts. Volcano-made in the first place, and constantly being remade by them, Java has more volcanoes than any area of its size in the world. Estimates of the active and extinct craters range from 100 to 150. Everywhere in Java, in the huge crater lakes, in fissures that now are 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 the Valley of the Ten Thousand Smokes jn Alaska and break their crusted surface cago intermittently in Java. The "treacherous Klot," as the natives call it, all but wiped out the town of Britar, but even its- devastation, as reported to the State Department, was mild compared to the violent upheaval of Krakatoa in 1883. Then Mother Jtfature turned anarchist and planted a Gargantuan infernal machine on the doorstep of Java. Krakatoa is a little island in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java. More than half the island was blotted out, parts of it were flung aloft four times as high as the 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 sand rolled half-way around the earth. Every human ear-drum, heard, though it jlnay 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 the 35,000 deaths from Krakatoa's eruption were at far distant points by drowning. An eruption anywhere on the island means disaster, because Java, about equal in area •to New York State, supports a population greater than the combined population of the Empire State and the four other most populous States in the Union —Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and Texas. Naturally the*native religion is fatalistic. A free translation of au inscription on an old tomb runs:— "What is the use of living, of kissing lovely flowers, , If, though they- are beautiful, they must soon fade into nothing." in the native folklore are innumerable stories of the earth opening up to swallow a dancing girl. Such tales betoken another physical feature of the island fraught with human tragedy. Not only has it steaming vents, spouting geysers, sulphur lakes, but great, chasms open and close, and they have been known to swallow villages. , ;.'