It seemed like centuries that they sat in complete darkness. Sometimes Mrs. Beyerinck slept, overcome with exhaustion.

She was afraid for her small son. He drank when she held the cup to his mouth, but otherwise he showed no sign of life. Her daughter clung to her, crying.

Mr Beyerinck clutched her arm and pointed to the sky. She saw a small patch of light. "It is the moon," cried her husband. The light grew and brightened, until it became bright moonlight. She describes this moment:

On standing up, which was very difficult, I noticed that my limbs were swollen to three times their normal size. No one spoke. We all held our breath, for after such a long darkness, we yearned for God’s heavenly sun or moonlight. The circle of light gradually became blood red. The strong wind tore apart the mass of ash, and we saw the wonderful, glittering sunlight.

Mr. Beyerinck got busy. He promised two unwounded natives, "I will richly reward each one of you if you will each take a child of mine on your back and follow me."

The men agreed, and he told his wife and Mr. Tojaka to follow him. "There are too many bodies here. Let us get away."

Mrs. Beyerinck stood with her face to the sun, her eyes closed, and prayed for further protection, thanking God for the sunlight. When she opened her eyes, her husband had gone — only Tojaka remained.

Her husband and the men carrying the children were far ahead. Looking at the clerk, she noticed with surprise that he had turned his head away. When she asked why he wouldn’t look at her, he seized her, his whole body trembling. The poor man, she noticed, was nearly blinded and his body was terribly burnt. Looking at her at last, he said in a secretive way, "I saw that face of yours in my dreams a week ago." At first she didn’t understand what he meant. When she put her hands to her face, the skin was hanging in shreds.

She and Tojaka caught up with her husband. It was light enough to see for some distance. She could see across the Sunda Straits. Where was Krakatoa, she wondered. She could see only half of the large cone; the smaller cones were gone.

Instead, eight little islands had sprung up, each smoking. She saw that all the villages by the beach were gone. On the sea floated a wide belt of pumice. On it lay roofs of houses, fallen trees, their branches snapped, and dark shapes which she couldn’t identify at first, and which she learned later were the bodies of men and animals.

"Come," called her husband. She looked back to where the body of her dead child lay. "We cannot even bury him," she thought. "Come, come, we must leave," her husband said. She couldn’t move. She saw that she was more or less naked. Her sarong was gone; her hair hung loose. When she tried to put it up, her hands hurt. Her legs were bleeding, the skin raw. She held ash against the wounds to stop them from bleeding.

She hobbled on for half an hour, leaning on Tojaka. "I can’t go any further, let me lie here," he moaned. She tried to help him. "Go," he said, "you will be lost if you stay here. The wind will bury you in ash."

Supporting her husband’s clerk, she staggered on. The sun was now at its zenith and the heat was terrible. Mrs. Beyerinck thought she was going to collapse. Her hair stifled her. It was heavy with ash. "If I don’t get rid of my hair, I shall become unconscious," she told Tojaka.

A native came up with a knife in his hand. She asked him to cut off her hair. He told her to lie on a fallen tree trunk, which she did. Tojaka turned his head away. He told Mrs. Beyerinck later that he thought the man was going to cut off her head. The man cut off her hair, shook the ash from it, and offered it to her. Mrs. Beyerinck told him to throw it away.

She and the clerk walked on, reaching a road on which the ash had been beaten flat by countless feet. "If we rest here, they will be able to find us," she told Tojaka. They sat by the road for hours.

Her husband sent some people to search for them. They found her and Tojaka and took them to a half-demolished house, the only one still standing in the village.

The next morning an old man, whom she had known since childhood, brought Mrs. Beyerinck some chicken and a bowl of rice.

She called her husband. He made a grunt, but the children didn’t react at all. "Heavens, are they dead?" she thought.

She tore the chicken apart in her wounded hands and put a piece into the mouth of each child. The boy didn’t have enough strength to chew, although he made movements as though he wanted to eat. She chewed the piece to soften it for him, and put it back into his mouth again. The boy sucked and swallowed it.

She did the same for her husband and daughter, and slowly they regained consciousness. She gave them each a drink.

When they were better, she asked the old man if he could find her a piece of paper and a pencil. "I will ask the commissioner to send someone to fetch us. We can’t stay here. Our wounds are beginning to stink."

He found a dirty piece of paper and she scribbled a desperate note. She asked the old man to find someone to carry it through the desert of ash to Telok Betong. The commissioner, she learned later, received the note, but nothing was done.

Mrs. Beyerinck sent the old man to the beach to signal passing ships. After endless waiting, night fell again. Next morning, her cook's daughter came. "Where are your mother and sister?" asked Mrs. Beyerinck.

"They are all dead," answered the girl. "I buried them in the ash. All your other servants, including Jeroemoedi, are dead, too."

Some hours went by, then a man came running from the beach to report, "There is a boat but it is sailing past."

"The boat is at anchor," reported another running native. Looking toward the beach, Mrs. Beyerinck saw a man coming. He was dressed in white with a cork hat. He was small of stature and walked with a roll, like a sailor.

It was Captain Hoen, the commander of the Kederie. For four days the barge had sought a passage through the floating pumice. The coast from Ketimbang to Telok Betong was completely cut off. Everywhere Hoen could see, the country was devastated and covered with ash.

At last, on Saturday, Sept. 1, a current forced a gap in the pumice and he was able to send a boat ashore near the village of Kali Antoe. In the only house still standing he found the controller and his family. He saw at once that they were in a deplorable condition, all covered in burns. "How can I get them to hospital alive?" he wondered.

"Bring litters," he ordered the natives who were standing by. When they seemed to hesitate, he warned them that if they did not help, no one would come out alive. The poor natives said they were without food and would starve, so Hoen promised six bags of rice and three kilos of salt if they would help. While the litters were being hastily constructed from fallen bamboo stems, Capt. Hoen talked with the Beyerincks.

Mrs. Beyerinck was nearly naked, and he covered her with his coat. He lifted her gently, as if she were a child, and whispered in her ear, "I won’t hurt you. Let me drown if I don’t see you reach Batavia safely."

Mrs. Beyerinck heard her husband say, "If my wife hadn't been here, we should all have been dead. She was our hope."

"No, that is not true," she managed to say. "Everyone clings to life."

Mr. Beyerinck tried to tell the captain about the disaster:

No human tongue could tell what happened. I think hell is the only word applicable to what we saw and went through. I am sure I was burnt mainly by fire that spurted out of the ground as we went along. At first, thinking only of the glowing ash showers, we endeavoured to shelter ourselves under beds, taking the risk of the house falling in, which no doubt it did on a great many, but the hot ashes came up through the crevices of the floor, and burned us still more.

Hundreds of corpses lay in the hills, the controller told Capt. Hoen when he remarked that there were a few dead bodies by the shore.

Mr. Beyerinck told Capt. Hoen his wife had sent messages 48 miles to Telok Betong for help, but no help had come. Just then, a native headman reached the house; he had come over the hills from Telok Betong. The port had been wholly devastated, he announced. The town’s other inhabitants lay buried under the ash. This turned out to be a wild exaggeration — the majority of Europeans in the town survived the disaster.

The bearers carried the controller, Mrs. Beyerinck and the two surviving children, both of whom were badly burned, down the steep mountain road. The captain walked by their side, trying to protect them from the scorching sun with a big umbrella. It was a difficult task, as the path was obstructed with fallen trees, which caused him to stumble, exposing their gaping wounds to the fierce sunlight.

At one place, a hollow filled by seawater left by the tsunami meant that the bearers were wading up to their chests. The journey to the beach took two hours, and the Beyerincks were more dead than alive at its end.

When the party reached the barge Capt. Hoen asked if she was in pain. "No, I’m terribly hungry," she replied.

She asked what day it was. To her horror, he replied that it was Saturday. "How was it possible?" she wondered. She and her family had been in hellish darkness for four nights and three days. The eruption had started a week before.

Capt. Hoen put Mrs. Beyerinck in his own bunk, and gave her a glass of wine, which tasted like nectar, and some chicken soup. The good man, she says, fed her like a child. He told her not to worry, as her children were safe. Ketimbang, he said, had been totally destroyed by the big wave, which was estimated to have reached 100 feet high. The natives said it came over the palm trees.

Two-thirds of the population of the controller's district had died. Before the Kederie sailed, the controller begged Capt. Hoen to give all the food he could spare to the villagers, who were trying to reach the vessel through the lane in the pumice made from the shore by the ship’s boat. Hoen handed down several bags of rice.

The Beyerincks and their clerk were taken to a hospital in Batavia, where they recovered. Mrs. Beyerinck ends her story with these words:

It was a miracle. However cruel nature may be, and however mysterious God's ways, he didst save us. His name be praised.