"The whole world was greatly shaken and violent thundering, accompanied by heavy rain and storms took place, but not only did not this heavy rain extinguish the eruption of the fire of the mountain Kapi, but augmented the fire; the noise was fearful, at last the mountain Kapi with a tremendous roar burst into pieces and sank into the deepest of the earth. The water of the sea rose and inundated the land, the country to the east of the mountain Batuwara, to the mountain Raja Basa, was inundated by the sea; the inhabitants of the northern part of the Sunda country to the mountain Raja Basa were drowned and swept away with all property "

Dating from 416 A.D., this passage from a Javanese text called the Pustaka Raja, (The Book of Kings) describes an island that disappeared beneath the waves over fifteen centuries ago in the Sunda Straits, between Java and Sumatra.

Indonesian history is brimming with vivid stories and legends such as this, stemming from a rich and turbulent cultural and religious past. Java's latter-day Moslem society has largely replaced earlier Hindu and Buddhist cultures, each having added to a vivid tapestry of truths, half-truths and myths.

The story of mountain Kapi might well have been considered by many to be nothing more than one of these myths, with little basis in reality. Only when we look at a map does the truly prophetic nature of this ancient account begin to emerge.

Fifteen centuries later some bright spark in Hollywood thought it would be a money-spinning idea to make a movie about an island off the coast of Java that blows itself to bits, sending vast tidal waves crashing onto nearby coastal towns, inundating the land and killing thousands. Only this film was not based on myth, but on actual events. Its title was Krakatoa East Of Java.

In actual fact Krakatau—as it is spelt in Javanese—is not east of Java at all, but west; about half way across the Sunda Straits, more or less where The Book of Kings placed Mountain Kapi. The geographically inaccurate title was apparently due to east of Java sounding better than west of Java, east of Sumatra, or any other unerring combination.

As a ten-year-old, such anomalies were easily overlooked, because to me the film seemed magnificently real. My parents had allowed me to stay up late to watch the film on the television, not knowing the lasting impression it was to have upon me.

From as far back as I can remember I had always been captivated by anything to do with volcanoes or geology in general, but it was through the medium of film and television that my imagination was most fired. Every Sunday evening while the rest of my family watched dramas such as The Brothers on BBC 1, I would be glued to an old black and white television in my parents? bedroom watching The World about Us on BBC 2. It was this program more than anything else that instilled in me a passion to discover and understand the natural world.

Other, less factual series, like Journey To The Bottom Of The Sea, Doctor Who and Star Trek, fed my imagination, blending vivid images of science-fiction with the plausible and the real. I even remember watching a particular episode of The Time Tunnel, in which the two hapless explorers of the forth dimension get dumped on Krakatau, hours before its disastrous dissolution. As ever, the two men get transported off again in the nick of time.

I would day-dream for hours on end, imagining how it would have been: to be on Krakatau; to have journeyed to the centre of the earth; to have walked amongst the dinosaurs, in the land that time forgot. Reverie and reality entwined.

Inevitably, childhood dreams become eroded by the passage of time, buried by the dusty fall-out of adult life. Yet events sometimes occur that uncover these long forgotten, dream-fossils, revealing them anew and willing us to relive our childhood flights of fancy, turning them into truth.

I was still wiping the sleep from my eyes as we walked along the dimly lit road that threaded its way parallel to Carita Beach. The heavy rain of the previous day had given way to a deep black-velvet sky studded with the occasional bright star and the crater-strewn disk of a full bright-white moon.

A complete stranger accompanied me, who, having been introduced to me as my guide, had not uttered a word since. We both walked in silence towards a small flat bridge where the road crossed a narrow river. Pausing at the bridge, my companion stared downstream into the tree shaded gloom, while near-by cicadas sliced through the otherwise peaceful, damp atmosphere of pre-dawn.

Soon, as if from nowhere, several lights emerged round an invisible bend in the river and drifted silently towards us. The approaching boat slid lethargically up to the muddy bank, pirouetting sideways below a giant spider's web woven between trees by its six inch occupant. I had let one of these huge spiders walk along my arm a few days earlier, while trekking on the slopes of Gunung Marapi—one of Java's most active and most dangerous volcanoes. The spider on the other hand was harmless, apparently.

After delicately negotiating the shallow sandbars at the river's mouth, we accelerated out into open waters. Moonlight sparkled a path before us, beckoning us on past outrigger fishing-boats and strange bamboo constructions topped with small huts. At our backs rose the lush hills of Java's west coast fringed by the brightening hues of approaching daybreak. Grey columns of rainy season cumulus towered above the equatorial mist, tinged gold by the rays of the hidden sun.

I gazed ahead of us with wind-watered eyes, scanning the horizon for any hint of land, but there was none to be seen. The boat skipper seemed to respond to my quiet searching by opening up the twin Yamaha-outboards full throttle, lifting the boat and skimming us across the waves, shattering them sideways in broad blankets of white spray. Eventually the west coast of Java melted into the haze as we sped on, across the Sunda Straits, towards Sumatra. Between us, as yet unseen, was my goal: a small island rising out of a sunken caldera—formed by the biggest explosion in recorded history. Anak—(child of)—Krakatau.

Flanked by the remnants of its infamous parent, Anak Krakatau had first emerged above the waves in 1927, less than half a century after its predecessor?s demise. By 1930 the young volcano was beginning to live up to its name with over fourteen thousand separate explosions recorded in just five hours of furious activity. It has been steadily and violently growing in size ever since.

Anak Krakatau and its forebear, were created by an unending store of magma—liquid rock melted from the edges of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian continents as they plough into one another. Indonesia is made up of an almost uninterrupted arc of islands peppered with dozens of active and dormant volcanoes—known as gunung api in Bahasa Indonesia, which literally means: fire mountain. Anak Gunung Krakatau—as it is named and depicted on the nation's hundred-rupiah-note—was most definitely to be counted amongst the latter. My enquiries of the previous day had, however, suggested that all was quiet on the island, as apparently it had been for several months. The trouble with volcanoes as I was fast learning, is that they often have notoriously fickle personalities, spurning prediction and punishing the unwary.

Slowly, an island began to appear out of the distant haze, sloping up from the horizon like a pyramid in a dune-less desert. This was the truncated remains of Rakata; the largest of three volcanic islands that had coalesced more than a millennia ago, forming the island of Krakatau. For centuries the island had slept, acquiring a dense forest covering of tall trees and lush vegetation. To the visiting fishermen who occasionally landed there it must have seemed the epitome of tranquillity. This illusion was violently dispelled On May 20th 1883 when Krakatau unexpectedly shuddered back into life, sending a column of thick ash up out of Perbewatan, the most northerly of Krakatau's three craters.

A minute later I caught my first glimpse of Anak Krakatau's steep profile with a mushrooming mass of steam drifting from its rounded summit. The volcano was not as lifeless as I had been led to believe. This fire-mountain was no longer asleep.

Rakata's sheer north face was an impressive sight, 800 metres of near vertical rock that plunged beneath us to the caldera below.

Once there had been an island here where now we splashed along in several hundred meters of water, but Krakatau had not blown itself to bits as many had thought. It had actually collapsed into its own depleted magma chamber. The persistent eruptions of 1883 had drained the chamber of billions of tonnes of molten rock and gas, leaving little support for the island above. Eventually the chamber had given way under the weight of the volcano, splitting Krakatau from top to bottom, sending three quarters of the island collapsing beneath the waves in a series of incomparably powerful explosions. The largest of these occurred at 10.02am on Monday August 27th 1883. The explosion was so powerful that it was heard in places as far away as Madagascar, the Philippines and even Alice Springs in the heart of Australia. The shock waves from these explosions stretched around the globe several times, a fact well-documented by the many barometric readings recorded at the time.

The H-bomb dropped on Hiroshima some sixty years later was equivalent to about twenty-thousand tons of TNT. A mere fraction compared to the largest of Krakatau's explosions; which at over two-hundred-million tons of TNT—or, ten thousand H-bombs—is the biggest explosion ever recorded on Earth.

The collapse also resulted in the displacement of vast quantities of water, sending huge tsunamis of up to forty metres high, scouring the coasts of Sumatra and Java. Over 150 towns and villages were swept away by the waves, killing more than 36,000 people. Vast chunks of coral reef, some bigger than a house, were ripped from the sea floor by these surges and unceremoniously dumped far above the shoreline. The effects of these waves may even have been noticed in the English Channel, where unusual waves were reputed to have disturbed boats.

Today the Sunda straits were all but calm. Only the wake of the boat disturbed the otherwise unbroken film of undulating sea, twisting and distorting Rakata's dark reflection as we moved towards its progeny.

Circling Anak Krakatau, we approached a small beach of black sand on the north-west side of the island, about a kilometre from the crater. I waded the last few metres to shore carrying my cumbersome tripod and camera slung over one shoulder and a bag full of water and film over the other.

It is difficult to describe how those first few steps felt. At last, after a life-time of ambition, I was standing on the legendary Krakatau, or to be more precise—its child.

For three weeks I had prepared for this moment, visiting several volcanic areas on the Javan mainland. Notably: Gunung Merapi, one of the worlds most active volcanoes; and Gunung Bromo—a steaming crater rising out of the spectacular Tengger caldera amidst grey sands; water-carved gullies; meadows of tufted grass, and wild fennel.

Each place had in its own way left a lasting impression upon me: mental snap shots punctuated by images of dew-glistening flowers, painted skies and bejewelled beetles. Environments born out of stark, violent events, and mellowed by the passage of time.

The wet sand was soft underfoot. In fact as I walked to a rounded boulder of lava and sat to put on my boots, the ground felt positively jelly-like. Driftwood and waterlogged bamboo lay scattered along the beech interspersed with algae stained shells of sea-urchins and bleached cuttlefish. Behind me, above a narrow ledge, a broad swathe of lava-sands stretched away in a gentle slope, to the clinkery margins of Anak Krakatau's steaming crater. It was magnificent—and yet—almost dreamlike; as if it was not actually me here at all, but a shadow of myself that I was watching from that old black and white television in my parents room.

We walked through a small grove of pine, scattered with clumps of tall reed-like grass. Ipomea bedecked the sand in a latticework of criss-crossing veins, dappling the ground in garlands of magenta flowers. An eagle—gliding above a nearby rust-coloured flow, twisted and turned in the warming air, mobbed by a pair of crows.

At our feet the cinders were smooth and unbroken. There was the occasional miniature canyon; rain-fed streamlets that threaded amongst the scattered volcanic bombs, but ours were the only footprints, the only signs of humans having been here at all. It was not, of course, the literal truth; but I had come a long way to be here, and was happy to relish the feeling of exploring this undiscovered island, in the tradition of Livingstone, Darwin and perhaps a hint of Indiana Jones.

We approached a large, rounded boulder, nearly two metres high. As I studied the giant rock I suddenly realised with slight alarm, that it too was a lava bomb.

Volcanic bombs come in all shapes and sizes: from just a few centimetres in diameter to bigger than a car or even a house. Soft, viscous lava often spatters out of volcanoes landing like steaming cow-dung or twisted sheets of blackened foam rubber. Lava can also be expelled at great speed, spinning into a rounded mass that rapidly chills in flight, cracking its surface into something resembling thick, crusty bread. This particular bomb had been fired from a crater nearly half a kilometre away. Impressive for a lump of rock weighing several tons.

I looked up at the curtain of pale vapour rising from Anak Krakatau's summit. One of these things landing on someone's head would really spoil their day.

Maybe it was my imagination or perhaps it was just the changing angle of the sun, but either way, looking up at the crater, it definitely seemed to be steaming more than it had been earlier. The look on my companion's face let me know that I was not the only one imagining things.

We continued up the lower part of the cone, scrambling awkwardly over ever thickening quantities of jagged breccia. The terrain periodically slipped away underfoot, off-balancing me time and again, sapping my energy. It was exhausting work, made all the more arduous by the ascending sun that glared down at us scornfully.

Eventually we reached a point where the ground pitched steeply up to the crater above. We had scarcely been on the island an hour but I was already sweat-soaked and dehydrated, so we paused to slake our thirst.

Streamers of steam peeled away from rocky fumaroles, stained yellow-white by a crust of salt and sublimed-sulphur. I hesitantly approached one steaming patch of rock for a closer look, inadvertently inhaling several lung-fulls of odourless gas, that made my head spin with dizziness. I hastily retraced my steps, releasing puffs of steam that rose lazily from my footprints. The ground was hot to the touch and scraping below the surface it was positively scorching.

I was surrounded by an antediluvian scene, a billion-year-old vista—as I had imagined the world to have looked before life itself. In reality we were walking on some of the planet's youngest ground; rocks belched from the mouth of Anak Krakatau a matter of months before.

The summit seemed so close, perhaps three hundred metres away—four at most. I longed to continue on up to the top knowing full well that this was not only foolhardy, but illegal. The crater had become off limits to all ever since one unwary visitor made the fatal mistake of going far too close. She never lived to tell the tale.

To the left of us rose a high bank of coke-like rubble, as if waiting to be heaped into a furnace. The Hawaiians call this type of lava 'aa' (pronounced ah-ah), a name adopted by volcanologists from a race of people who seem to have as many names for describing lava, as the Inuit have for describing snow.

An anaemic looking locust flickered past, landing nearby. It was the first insect I had seen on the slopes of the volcano which at first glance, seemed almost devoid of any life at all.

Nearby, the ground lay strewn with the tattered, feathered remains of a bird. It was impossible to say whether the unfortunate creature had died a natural death or fallen pray to a predator of some kind—but given the nature of the island, gas poisoning also had to be a distinct possibility.

Steam wafted up from loose cinders and bombs, becoming invisible as it trailed across Anak Krakatau's domineering cone. In places the rock was bright sulphur-yellow and I was curious to know just how hot these patches of rock were.

I resolved to climb part of the way up onto the shoulders of the cone to take a closer look. My guide, on the other hand, thought better of this and sat on a bolder watching me and occasionally shouting at me—to be more careful each time I lost my footing on the precarious scree.

I was now as close to the dragon's mouth as I was ever likely to be, but it was a precarious closeness, wonderful yet intimidating and painfully hot. Inevitably, with my feet scalding and the ground threatening to give way at any moment, I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Much to the relief of my guide who beamed a smile at me in a—could have told you so—sort of way, as I descended towards him.

It was easy to see how a person could end up in difficulty on a volcano, beguiled and lulled by its intoxicating presence. I had been fully prepared to go up and into the crater itself, but instead we continued down the lava flow towards cooler, safer ground.

A solitary emerald-green fern sheltered in a hollow, defying its surroundings and proclaiming life's tenacious ability to take hold and flourish in the harshest of environments. A fact well recorded in the years following Krakatau's 1883 eruption. Everything on Rakata and the surrounding islands was smothered under millions of tons of rock and ash, in parts more than forty metres thick. Yet remarkably within twenty years, over a hundred varieties of plants and trees had re-colonised Rakata's flanks, providing an invaluable opportunity for scientists to study how nature recovers from such paroxysms.

This is the paradox of volcanoes that blanket their surroundings with a rich covering of mineral nutrients creating some of the richest land on earth, but whose very presence is a perpetual Damocles for those who live and farm there. The risk of being caught in an eruption is, it seems, seldom enough to deter those in need of food.

Anak Krakatau seemed too small and volatile for any would-be settlers, human or otherwise. Nevertheless, some plants and animals were living here, creating what surely must be one of the youngest and most fragile ecosystems in the entire archipelago, if not the planet.

Scrambling over sharp compression ridges we descended a steep slope piled high with hollow-sounding fragments of lava that swept down to the warm waters of the Sunda Straits below.

With dismay I suddenly realised that my guide was no longer wearing anything on his feet. I had been so wrapped up in my own little adventures that I had completely failed to notice his inadequate footwear fall apart under the abrasive strain. He had surreptitiously buried them under some lava

I offered him my boots, without really considering the impracticalities of his Indonesian-sized feet in my European-sized footwear. He smiled at me, wisely declining the offer. I should have checked that he had better footwear in the first place. Because I was here, the island now had a pair of shredded, non-degradable flip-flops hidden amongst its slopes. This was not an unfamiliar problem in Indonesia. Day-trippers from the cities would often visit popular tourist sites littering them with wrappers, cans, cigarette packets and the ubiquitous PVC water bottles.

At Tangkuban Prahu—a place that could best be described as a tourist volcano just north of Badung—I found the crater sides festooned with all manner of human waste unashamedly tossed into the gaping hole with free abandon. No one seemed to care about this very much, least of all the many traders whose stalls lined the crater rim, like hawkers at a fairground.

I secretly hoped that a fresh lava flow would soon spill from the crater, disintegrating the unwanted flip-flops in a quick puff of smoke. This might have been wishful thinking but in reality it was very likely to happen too. Anak Krakatau, has after all, had many more years of activity than quiescence.

Thinking the rock too jagged even for the resilient feet of my guide I changed direction and headed for a small narrow wood that fringed the coast below us.

All around, shattered piles of debris gleamed with a glassy sheen. In fact the dry hot lava appeared positively rain sodden in places. Small sparkling crystals of cleaved feldspar reflected the bright sunlight adding to the illusion.

It was here that I noticed a strange, slightly acidic smell wafting from the rocks ahead. Up until then the lava fields had been odourless. A few seconds later the source of the smell became clear as out of a crevice hopped Tyto-Alba-javanica, the biggest barn owl I had ever seen.

Like its European cousin, this magnificent bird had an almost snow-white breast and face that was concave and slightly heart shaped. The tops of its wings and back were delicately shaded in mottled hues of brown and grey.

The owl and I both froze, each staring at the other with utter bewilderment. Neither of us had expected to see the other and for a time neither of us knew quite how to react. In the end I made the first move, slowly lifting my camera towards my eyes. The owl stood fast assessing the situation. A few seconds and two rushed photos later, I turned to make quizzical eye contact with my companion: was this a common sight here? When I looked back the owl had vanished having seized the opportunity to fly silently off, unseen.

Curious to discover why an owl would materialise out of the rock, as if from nowhere, I moved carefully forward for a closer look. At once the lava began to hiss like gas escaping from a hot spring, but the smell I had noticed was not volcanic. Splashes of pale bird droppings stained the ground surrounding a cave-like hollow. A second owl continued to hiss within, warning me to keep my distance. This was their territory and we were trespassing.

A team of Australian scientists had suggested the possibility of owls living on Anak Krakatau while conducting a survey on its wildlife. I had read the research papers on their findings while on the mainland, but such papers are often detached, being little more than statistics. These magnificent birds were the antithesis of words and figures, they were very real indeed.

We retreated to give the remaining owl a wide berth and continued the short distance to the steep margins of the solidified flow.

Deep deposits of tree-covered cinders several meters thick stretched away to our left, blanketed in a fine, velvet mat of ochre-tinted pine needles. Hibiscus and tall, seed-topped grass sprouted here and there, creating miniature islands of life amidst the waste. It was in stark contrast to the barren inhospitable lava we had just crossed.

Amongst the trees lay a number of deep gullies cut by the heavy tropical rains, providing us with an easy route down to the narrow beach below.

Our boat glided in the distance, its occupants apparently angling for fish in the silvery waters that stretched across the caldera, to the cloud-capped Rakata.

Small waves washed the shore lapping the branches and tangled roots of half-buried trees with a translucent lace of dancing bubbles.

All manner of jetsam and flotsam dotted the sands. Chunks of white, worn polystyrene, drinks bottles and rounded lumps of pumice lay amongst bamboo, throngs of palm and green coconuts. Open mollusc shells with the appearance of lacquered angels wings, gleamed amongst the strange collection of tide-carried debris, while small crabs darted from our shadows like wind-blown fluff.

All manner of volcanic rocks lay scattered here too, much of it washed from the soft sediments above. The pumice however had come from Rakata's tephra cliffs of ash, lapilli and bombs, the remains of Krakatau's explosive outpourings.

Incredibly, between May and August 1883, the volcano had hurled an estimated 18 cubic kilometres of ash and rock up into the atmosphere. Much of this was pumice, formed from viscous lava frothing with the sudden release of pressure like Champagne from a bottle. Vast floating islands of this lighter-than-water rock drifted over the surrounding seas, choking busy shipping routes and rendering some areas impenetrable. One ship's log described their passage through the debris, as: "Steaming through dry land, the ship acting as a plough, turning up on each side of her a large mound of pumice. "

Other accounts describe sailing through eleven hundred nautical miles of continuous pumice, in parts thick enough to support the weight of a man or a cannonball.

This island was a testament to the resolute ability of life to survive in the harshest of environments. A proclamation emphasised by a small toadstool growing out of the cinders less than a metre from the waters edge. The little thing was pale brown with a ribbed cap mirroring the gills on its underside. It was the most unusual and improbable place that I had ever seen or was ever likely to see fungus growing.

The cinders on which the toadstool grew sloped up to an algae-stained cliff of layered tephra, the accumulation of repeated eruptions. Water seeping from the cliffs, had mixed with the ash and was trickling down the slopes towards the mushroom in miniature flows, mirroring those on the flanks of the volcano itself.

In that moment, this one small mushroom in its unique surroundings, seemed to embody everything I had come in search of.

Perhaps in reality I was not a particularly good naturalist, nor was I a great risk-taking explorer. But I had a passion for the minutiae of nature; the barely visible details that contribute to and reflect the whole.

Perhaps it is at these moments—while wondering at life's improbable existence—that we might see in it a measure of our own being.

Like the mushroom on the ash, life itself is precariously balanced and vulnerable. Be it to the devastating effects of my footsteps or the inexorable, ripping teeth of Indonesian chain saws, in a nation with the second highest rate of deforestation on the planet.

But the solitary mushroom is only half the story, for it is only a part of the whole, the fruiting body of a largely subterranean form of life that is often prolific.

Later, while walking along an ebony beech on Rakata's southern shore, I thought about the inescapable inter-connections that we all have with this world about us. A world now threatened more by our ceaseless consumption in the name of progress, than by the effects of any volcano.

The beech was almost entirely made up of fine, black Magnetite; a mineral rich in iron. This element, so vital in the development and maintenance of modern society as well as life itself, is in fact only created within stars. Scattered across the galaxy by supernovas billions of years before our own sun was formed.

Some of what I was walking on and indeed the iron within my body used to be part of a star.

Matter, be it iron from an exploding star or ash from an exploding volcano, is never really destroyed. Even the cataclysmic event of Krakatau's ultimate eruption, created in its wake the opportunity for new life to begin again. Rakata's beech was now bordered by the densest of forests, echoing with birdsong and the humming of a million insects.

I had come here in search of Krakatau the legend and its child, and had found facets of both within the steaming rocks, and in the fragile life that managed to dwell there against all the odds.

I had also found something within myself, a childhood dream, rediscovered anew out of the volcanic ashes I now stood upon.

I lent down and picked a rounded stone from the sand, clutching it tightly. A keepsake to remind me that dreams are what we are made of. Dreams and a little bit of stardust.