When they finally ventured from the guard shack, they found it to be the only building still standing in the town. The cob huts and plank homes had burned from the falling ash, or been crushed and swept away by the advancing sea. Anjer as they had known it was gone.
Ash and soot continued to fall, but the blizzard had slowed, the sky had cleared, and the remaining flakes seemed suspended in the air above them like particles of dust drifting through a sunbeam on a lazy summer day. The ocean was now visible through the haze, its waves churning and white-capped, but it stayed within the limits of its shore. The horizon had changed; the lumbering fog-draped island of Krakatao that usually divided sky from sea was gone. One thin outcropping was all that remained of the once grand volcano that
