A loud explosion was heard, the earth shook, and immense columns of hot water and boiling mud, mixed with burning brimstone, ashes, and lapilli, of the size of nuts, were projected from the mountain like a water-spout, with such prodigious violence that large quantities fell beyond the river Tandoi, which is forty miles distant. * * * The first eruption lasted nearly five hours; and on the following days the rain fell in torrents, and the rivers densely charged with mud, deluged the country far and wide. At the end of four days (October 12), a second eruption occurred, more violent than the first, in which hot water and mud were again vomited, and great blocks of basalt were thrown to the distance of seven miles from the volcano. There was at the same time a violent earthquake, the face of the mountain was utterly changed, its summits broken down, and one side, which had been covered with trees, became an enormous gulf in the form of a semicircle. Over 4,000 persons were killed and 114 villages destroyed. [20] The following account of seismic disturbances is taken from Donnelley's work _Atlantis_. The Gulf of Santorin, in the Grecian Archipelago, has been for two thousand years a scene of active volcanic operations. Pliny informs us that in the year 186 B. C. the island of "Old Kaimeni," or the Sacred Isle, was lifted up from the sea; and in A. D. 19 the island of "Thia" (the Divine) made its appearance. In A. D. 1573 another island was created, called "the small sunburnt island." * * * A recent examination of these islands shows that the whole mass of Santorin has sunk, since its projection from the sea, over 1,200 feet. [21] The fort and villages of Sindree, on the eastern arm of the Indus, above Luckput, was submerged in 1819 by an earthquake, together with a tract of country 2,000 square miles in extent. [22]