FROM FILM TITLED “KRAKATOA – EAST OF JAVA”: SAILOR: All aboard.

WOMAN: Chris, is it Krakatoa again?

CAPTAIN: We don't know what it is.

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa captured the world's imagination, as it did for the producers of this 1968 film. The original volcano was obliterated. The blast was heard in places as far away as Alice Springs.

SIMON WINCHESTER, AUTHOR: Nothing could have prepared anyone for the incredible cataclysmic, paroxysmal eruption that took place at 10:02 on the morning of 27 August, 1883. Then, in a split second the six cubic miles of the island just annihilated itself. It vaporised in a microsecond, hurled itself 25 miles up into the sky and for a brief few seconds it left, if you can imagine such a thing, a ragged hole in the sea, about seven miles long, two miles wide where Krakatoa Island had been.

The explosion was so enormous that weather patterns were affected across the globe for three years as the volcanic cloud circled the Earth. On South Sumatra, the closest land mass, thousands died in a hail of molten rocks and ash. But on the more heavily populated West Java coast it was the series of 25m tsunamis, which wreaked most havoc.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Very, very suddenly trillions of tonnes of sea water fell into that hole, a hole which was at its base red hot. Instantly that sea water flashed into steam and this incredible outpouring of energy produced a number... four in fact, no-one's quite sure why, but four waves or tsunamis, the tallest of which was at least 136, probably more like 145 feet high.

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT: Looking out to sea, I noticed a dark black object through the gloom, travelling toward the shore. At first sight it seemed like a low range of hills rising out of the water, but I knew there was nothing of the kind in that part of the Sunda Strait.

These tidal waves, the size of 10-storey skyscrapers swept over 33,000 lives away.

EYEWITNESS: The sight of the receding waters haunts me still as I clung to the palm tree wet and exhausted, there floated past the dead bodies of many a friend and neighbour.

As one of the first natural calamities of the information age, eyewitness accounts were quickly published far and wide. Krakatoa's place in history was assured.

SIMON WINCHESTER: I like to say that the global village was essentially born with the eruption of Krakatoa.

Simon Winchester is a New York-based author whose latest book is called 'Krakatoa - the Day the World Exploded'. In it he outlines his theory that the eruption was the event which marked the beginning of the modern information age. Only two years before the eruption, a network of telegraph cables had been laid that spanned the globe.

SIMON WINCHESTER: Krakatoa was really the first event that tested these cables in real time as it were. It was the first major cataclysm on the planet that the spread of the news about it was permitted by way of these cables. To put this in perspective, in 1865, when President Lincoln was assassinated it took 12 days for that news to come, by sea of course, to London. 1883, not even two decades later, we had this network of cables, so the news of the Krakatoa eruption was transmitted initially by this new fangled morse code, which had also just been invented, over a land line to Singapore. The land line was almost immediately destroyed but the message got through. And then it went under the sea to Madras, under the sea to...round India to Bombay, to Aden, up to the Red Sea, up through the newly built Suez Canal to Port Said, turned left, went to Malta, Gibraltar, out through the Straits of Gibraltar, up to Land's End in Cornwall, across the Atlantic to New York and it was published in the 'Boston Globe' four hours after the event.

The force of the sunami was so strong that it carried the brick base of the lighthouse almost a kilometre inland to a creek behind this man's house. Pak Haji's grandfather was one of the few survivors in this area. Like everyone else in the town, he was swept up to 5km inland but managed to cling on to a length of bamboo. He survived to tell the tale but was badly injured.

PAK HAJI, GRANDSON OF SURVIVOR: (Translation): He was speared in the anus by a piece of bamboo. He was holding onto the bamboo in the waves. And another piece of bamboo split his head open.

It seems many people died because after the early explosions they went to the beach to catch the stunned fish.

PAK HAJI: (Translation): They should have gone to the mountains, but they went to the sea to get the dead fish. They were everywhere. They went further and further out to get the big fish.

Krakatoa has become the stuff of legends, even if the facts are a little shaky. Both 'Krakatoa', the movie and a song by the B-52s got it wrong. Krakatoa is actually west, not east, of Java.

A team from the National Vulcanological Institute makes regular visits to the site of the original Krakatoa because this is a volcano which refuses to die. After the original mountain was completely destroyed, a new volcano Anak Krakatoa, the child of Krakatoa, broke the sea's surface in 1930. It grows around 15m each year and now stands over 300m tall. Anak Krakatoa is one of Indonesia's most violent volcanos.

Today, the team will set up seismological monitoring equipment to replace a recently vandalised unit. There are small eruptions here every six months or so and every few years a large one. But this has been an unusually long dormant period. I'm told that if it were active, we wouldn't be standing here.

MISTER IGAN: (translation): It's very dangerous. Usually the Strombolian eruptions reach a radius of about 5km. To be safe, you can't come any closer. You'd get hit by flying rocks and other volcanic matter.

It's an eerie feeling amongst the sulphur clouds, although today, climbing the volcano it seems completely harmless. But when Krakatoa erupts, its power is awesome. Volcanic rocks like this one fly 800m into the air.

MISTER IGAN: (translation): We can calculate how much energy it would take to throw this rock to here. a chunk has been cut from final cut

Mr Igan knows these slopes better than most. He's taken some dramatic photos of angry Krakatoa, including this one in 1996, from this very spot. But predicting the next big eruption is something the experts are reluctant to be drawn on.

MISTER IGAN: (translation): We can't predict that far ahead. Hundreds of years? Maybe hundreds of years. For it to erupt like it did back then. We don't know, we can't know.

SIMON WINCHESTER: It's a very lusty little volcano with a huge crater at the top spewing all sorts of stuff out of it. Very dramatic place when it's in full flood. As far as it's future is concerned, though, I think that volcanoes that we really need to watch for are the ones that don't erupt, that are building big stresses and strains up inside them. Anak Krakatoa is blowing off steam all the time. Any day, you'll see it with a plume of smoke, or steam or whatever coming out of the top of it. So, it is literally letting off steam and probably won't erupt in as dramatic a way as its parent did in 1883.

But those with a more apocalyptic vision disagree.

KAKI WISNU, SOOTHSAYER (Translation):It will be within 10 years, more or less.

Kaki Wisnu is a dukun or soothsayer.

KAKI WISNU: (Translation): Only 10 years.

Some may call him eccentric but he firmly believes that Krakatoa has magical powers.

KAKI WISNU: (Translation): Krakatoa is the commander of the world. The ash of Krakatoa will be spread throughout the world.

Apart from predicting the future, Kaki Wisnu claims to be able to turn sand into precious stone. And his unique belief system centres oddly enough around umbrellas. To him, the German umbrellas are particularly interesting.

KAKI WISNU: (Translation): The German ones are unusual. "Ger-man" means "the changing of the times."

In Wisnu's version of the 'Book of Revelations' Anak Krakatoa will be the biggest and most destructive of a series of eruptions down the spine of Java in which only the righteous will be spared.

KAKI WISNU: (Translation): It will wipe out all the cruel people. All the corrupt and those thieves, stealing from the nation and its people. They'll all be finished.

In today's corruption-ridden Indonesia, perhaps not such a bad outcome. In the meantime, the serious work of predicting a repeat of one of the world's greatest natural disasters must be left not to soothsayers but to scientists.