Please observe the contrast between this wind of which we are now speaking and the waves to which we have just referred. The waves were merely undulations or vibrations produced by the blow which our atmosphere received from the explosion of Krakatoa, and these waves were propagated through the atmosphere much in the same way as sound waves are propagated. Indeed, these waves moved with the same velocity as sound. But the current of air of which we are now speaking was not produced by Krakatoa; it existed from all time, before Krakatoa was ever heard of, and it exists at the present moment, and will doubtless exist as long as the earth’s meteorological arrangements remain as they are at present. All that Krakatoa did was simply to provide the charges of dust by which for one brief period this wind was made visible.
In the autumn of 1883 the newspapers were full of accounts of strange appearances in the heavens. The letters containing these accounts poured in upon us from residents in Ceylon; they came from residents in the West Indies, and from other tropical places. All had the same tale to tell. Sometimes experienced observers assured us that the sun looked blue; sometimes we were told of the amazement with which people beheld the moon draped in vivid green. Other accounts told of curious halos, and, in short, of the signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, which were exceedingly unusual, even if we do not say that they were absolutely unprecedented.
Those who wrote to tell of the strange hues that the sun manifested to travellers in Ceylon, or to planters in Jamaica, never dreamt of attributing the phenomena to Krakatoa, many thousands of miles away. In fact, these observers knew nothing at the time of the Krakatoa eruption, and probably few of them, if any, had ever heard that such a place existed. It was only gradually that the belief grew that these, phenomena were due to Krakatoa. But when the accounts were carefully compared, and when the dates were studied at which the phenomena were witnessed in the various localities, it was demonstrated that these phenomena, notwithstanding their worldwide distribution, had certainly arisen from the eruption in this little island in the Straits of Sunda. It was most assuredly Krakatoa that painted the sun and the moon, and produced the other strange and weird phenomena in the tropics.