ACTIVITY 220: Quickly read the article below to get the general idea and think about the disaster described here. Then, choose the most appropriate title from the menu and check the correct answer. Don't worry if there are some words you don't know: just read for a gist without using your dictionary.

1

2

Within a few decades, forests and animals had returned to the tiny islands which were all that remained of Krakatoa's outer edge. Meanwhile, from the waters between them, emerged a threatening smoking rock, sometimes growing at a rate of more than three feet (about 1 metre) a month. The locals call it 'Anak Krakatau' - 'Child of Krakatoa'. It has actually raised and submerged its head five times since its first appearance in 1925, and when Lome and I reached it in September 1983 it was nearly 300 feet high and so active that the government had denied us landing permits. Under these circumstances we were obliged to reach it at night, in a small open boat crewed by two very anxious and expensive local fishermen.

3

We approached through floating fields of pumice – produced from lava cooled in the sea – which knocked against our wooden boat, and when we stepped into the water to drag the boat on to the beach, as black as the night around us, our bare feet sank into sand too hot for comfort. We began to climb slowly upwards, into a storm of ash which blocked our view of the coming dawn.

4

It was nearly daylight by the time we reached the summit. A few miles away, in three directions, lay the islands of Verlaten, Lang Eiland and Rakata, which were all that remained of the original volcano. Beyond them we could survey the distant coastline of Java on one side and Sumatra on the other. We could just see the point where, in that August of 1883, the Dutch administrator of south Sumatra and his family had observed the tidal wave rise 150 feet right up to the veranda of their house, pause, and withdraw again, taking some of their flowerpots, half the hillside, and the entire town with its population of 800 people. To the south, off Java, we could detect where the mouth of the Lampong river lay, where another survivor, a fisherman, had found himself struggling in a furious inrushing sea, and had seized and ridden for miles inland what he had thought was a log, but discovered to be an equally terrified crocodile.

5

Around and beneath us moved an oily, uneasy sea, dotted with floating stones. We had read that the temperature of the sea round here could vary suddenly by hundreds of degrees. Ships are advised to steer well clear of the islands, as the seabed is constantly moving and enormous magnetic disturbances cause compasses to swing wildly. It was these haunted waters which had swallowed up nearly all the 36,000 victims who had perished in the first explosion. A crewman in the ship Samoa, which passed through the Sunda Straits shortly afterwards, described seeing bodies and pumice stretching all the way to the horizon. Floating pumice fields were so thick that sailors could walk on them – and some carried human remains 4,500 miles across the Indian Ocean to the beaches of Zanzibar.