The pop of their gunfire was briefly heard, even as that vent of steamy sky reached upwards. Then the muffled report of the gunfire was suddenly smothered by the low growl of that isolated stony island in the sea, and this time something much more than steam erupted. The tip of the mountain’s sharp cone belched with fire, and a huge billow of pinkish-grey smoke and ash piled up above those flames, surging into the sky with a loud roar. It cast a vast shadow over the glassy blue sea, which deepened as the column rose, a roiling mass of heat that carried the sulfuric taint of some long lost den of horror beneath the earth.
The ships at sea were caught up in a sudden wild disturbance of the water, not a wave emanating from the site of that eruption, but something affecting the entire area around the islets of Krakatoa, as if the earth beneath was heaving and bucking up, shaking the water above. The smaller destroyers lurched about in those wild seas, and on the bigger ship Dorsetshire, Captain Agar was forced to reach for a guide rail near the binnacle as his heavy cruiser rolled suddenly to one side. His gaze was now transfixed on the scene behind him, amazed by the spectacle of that darkening bloom of heavy ash rising above the volcano.
The day that had been slowly lightening, now darkened under that shadow, the impenetrable pall of Hades spewing forth until the gloom shrouded the entire scene. The smoky ash that blighted the sky gathered with unceasing volume, and tremendous speed, driven on by a series of thunderous reports, as if massive bombs were being set off. They were heard all over Western Java, and dazed villagers came stumbling out of their huts and houses, staring in awe at the fisting shadow of doom that now rose into the violet grey sky. That fading color soon deepened to shadow, and darkness blackened the sky in every direction.
Out on the weather deck of Dorsetshire, Captain Agar gawked as a fine haze descended all about the ship. He reached out his ungloved hand, surprised to find a sheen of ash whitening the handrail. In a matter of minutes it had covered the cruiser from halyards to decks, a mantle of pallid grey-white ash that made it seem he was now Captain of some ghostly phantom ship.
The Japanese destroyers had careened about in that wild sea, and then turned rapidly northeast, as if they could sense the unnatural movement of the water beneath them was an omen far more dangerous than anything the British could be doing. The fume in their wakes seemed to underscore the chaos of the movement, but this was only the beginning, the first herald of the storm that was coming. It was only the first great eruption, which would persist until well after sunrise. Krakatoa was only just awakening from its long sleep, and for the next twenty hours, the gates of hell would be open, the host would issue forth, until it would end in a world shattering event that no man then alive could have possibly imagined.
At the bungalow HQ of Java Command near Bangdung, General Montgomery had been up early to follow the reports of the battle that was now underway. So far the movement of the Australians to contain the landings at Patrol east of Batavia had been smartly carried out, and he had come to believe that lodgment was not the main event. In the heart of Western Java, he was 250 kilometers southeast of Krakatoa, but when that first eruption burst forth, he soon heard the loud rumble, thinking it was the sound of a Japanese airstrike nearby. Then a messenger ran in with a cable from Batavia, and news of what was happening.
The boom of the eruptions could be heard clearly, growing louder with each report, as loud as heavy naval guns. Calls from Batavia, a hundred kilometers east of the eruption, claimed that a heavy ashfall was now blanketing the city, and frightened people were rushing about, throwing their meager belongings onto carts and rickshaws, and starting east on the road. The Japanese landings south of Merak were only 50 kilometers from Krakatoa, and there the rain of ash and pumice was far heavier, until the troops were themselves covered in ash, moving like pale ghouls through the thickening darkness. Even an hour after sunrise, the gloom was impenetrable, and all combat operations had to be immediately suspended.
Montgomery had one of his Brigadiers on the line in Batavia, learning that the city was not yet under attack. Then the line went dead, and a moment later there came a much louder explosion, the sound finally arriving from the distant mountain in the sea. It gave him a chilling, ominous feeling, and he wondered what must be happening there.
Windows were rattling in the city with each booming explosion, and battalion commanders further west, their men choking in the ashfall, were making frantic calls for permission to pull out to the east. Those orders were given, until the telephone system also went completely dead. The day that had promised nothing more than the thunder of war, had now descended into the wrath and chaos of nature, which was so all consuming of the sky that Krakatoa began to generate its own weather. Lightning streaked through the broiling mass of rolling black clouds, illuminating the bristling crown of the maddened Sea God.
As for flight Lt. Charles Lamb, safely out in the Indian Ocean, it was immediately apparent that he and his mates would not go out that day. All the planes on the two British carriers, still 150 kilometers from the eruption, were ordered removed from the flight deck and stowed below. Air operations were now completely impossible, and one seaplane that had tried to go up to see what was happening came plummeting down in no time, its engine completely clogged with ash.
Out in the Sunda Strait, Captain Agar had come about and was now withdrawing southwest. He would have to come within 25 kilometers of the volcano to leave the strait, and it would be a very perilous journey. Ships flashed lanterns at one another, until they could simply not be seen. Then the order was given to use the naval search lights, and long white fingers probed the ashen seas ahead and behind as the column proceeded at a cautious speed of 15 knots.
The ashfall was so heavy that it swept into any open hatch or stairwell, until the chalky white was tracked deep into the inner compartments of the ship. No one on deck could stay there for long, and the Captain was forced to rig out tarps on the open bridge to stave off the cinders that now began to fall in pea sized fragments, still warm to the touch. These would increase to chestnuts, and eventually fist sized clumps of pumice that fell continually.
At one point he had to give a steering order when the watchman called out an obstacle ahead. It was narrowly averted, and Captain Agar saw that it was a broad raft of pumice, which now covered the sea itself, giving the ocean a ghostly, milky-white appearance. To the men unfortunate enough to be on the high mast mounting their watches, it seemed that the task force was covered in hoarfrost, frozen ships on a frigid white sea.
That ash fall was going to spread for hundreds of kilometers on the wind. Soon much of Western Java was under the fallout, and later there would be reports of ash accumulating to a depth of half an inch on Cocos Island, 1,155 kilometers southwest of Krakatoa. Ships at sea in the Indian Ocean would report the blanket of fine dust and ash while steaming over 2800 kilometers away, and some reported ashfall as far off as the Horn of Africa, over 6,000 kilometers distant. The rafts of pumice that gathered in pinkish-yellow patches on the open sea would persist for over a year, drifting all the way to the African coast.
In the old history, the events already described had happened in May, and the mountain continued to steam and vent off and on, until late August when the final paroxysm came. Here, the pressure building beneath was nearly 60 years greater, which was not much in geologic time, but something unusual had happened beneath the earth. A subterranean eruption had forced a vast quantity of magma up, but it did not break the surface, forming a massive dike or plug in the deep wells that were driving the eruptive process. It literally ‘kept a lid’ on the mountain for those six decades, but all the while more and more magma flowed up, and the pressure building beneath Krakatoa was much greater than in the 1883 eruption that had happened in Fedorov’s history. This time, the entire process was going to be collapsed into a much shorter, and more violent event.