[Footnote 140: British Crown colony in and off the Malay Peninsula, in south-east Asia. In the Straits Settlements are included Singapore, Malacca, the Dindings, Penang, and Wellesley Province.] [Footnote 141: Caused by the rays of light being bent in their passage through layers of air of differing density, and therefore giving a delusive appearance to objects.] CHAPTER XXII. THE LAST OF THE "EMDEN," AND THE SEA FIGHT OFF CORONEL. If you look at a map of the Indian Ocean, you will see, some 700 miles south of Sumatra and 1,200 miles south-west of Singapore, a group of about twenty atolls,[142] known as the Cocos-Keeling Islands. They are covered with palm groves, and they export cocoa-nuts and copra. The "king" of the islands is Mr. Sydney Ross, a descendant of the Captain J. C. Ross who settled on them in 1825. It was to these remote islands that Captain von Müller brought the _Emden_ in the early days of November. His object was to destroy the important British wireless station established on Direction Island. On the morning of 9th November the operators in charge of the station saw a cruiser in the offing. At first they believed the vessel to be a British warship, but they were soon undeceived. Before a boat could be lowered and a landing-party sent ashore, the operators at the wireless station, with true British coolness, sent off distress signals, and warned the adjacent stations, by means of the three submarine cables which come ashore on the island, that the Germans were about to land. One launch and two cutters, containing three officers and forty men, arrived about 7.30; the wireless mast was blown up; the instruments were smashed, the storerooms and workshops were completely wrecked, and a dummy cable and one real cable were cut and a third damaged. The remaining cable was left uninjured, probably because the Germans did not know that it existed. In less than two hours the work of destruction was completed. Then suddenly loud and repeated siren calls were heard from the _Emden_. Before the boats could return she was off at top speed. She had been trapped at last. In the wireless room of H.M.S. _Sydney_, then engaged in escorting Australian transports, a message had been received: "Strange warship off entrance." In a moment Captain Glossop guessed that it was the raider that had so long eluded him. Immediately he worked up to twenty knots an hour, and with the "white bone" in his ship's teeth sped towards the island. At 9.15 the feathery tops of the cocoa-nut trees were sighted, and a few minutes later the _Emden_ was seen bearing down on the _Sydney_ at a great rate. Captain von Müller knew that the _Sydney's_ 6-inch guns could destroy his ship at a distance too great for his 4.7-inch guns to do much mischief. He therefore tried to close in with the _Sydney_, which endeavoured to keep sufficiently far off to obtain the advantage afforded by her bigger guns.