During the day the heat in the interior was extreme, for the sun's rays beat down upon, and were reflected from, the dark slopes, while the wall of the crater completely cut off any sea breeze. We did not ascend the cone, for our stay was to be short, and we wished to investigate the fauna as fully as possible; but from reports of the visits paid to the island once every three or four years from Port Blair, it would seem that the slight signs of activity still existent consist of an issue of steam and the continued sublimation of sulphur; while of the two cones which form the top, one is cold, and already bamboo grass and ferns are beginning to clothe the entire summit. There is ample proof in those details which have been recorded of the island during the last century that the volcano is rapidly becoming quiescent, and is indeed, perhaps verging on a condition of extinction, as has long been the case with Narkondam. Captain Blair, who passed near in 1795, writes of enormous volumes of smoke and frequent showers of red-hot stones. "Some were of a size to weigh three or four tons, and had been thrown some hundred yards past the foot of the cone. There were two or three eruptions while we were close to it; several of the red-hot stones rolled down the sides of the cone and bounded a considerable way beyond us.... Those parts of the island that are distant from the volcano are thinly covered with withered shrubs and blasted trees." A few years later Horsburgh records an explosion every ten minutes, and a fire of considerable extent burning on the eastern side of the crater. In the next thirty years, the subterranean forces had considerably diminished in activity, and at the end of that period only volumes of white smoke with no flame were to be seen. Drs Mouat and Liebig, who visited the island within a few months of each other in 1857, write respectively of volumes of dark smoke, and clouds of hot, watery vapour. In 1866, a whitish vapour was emitted from several deep fissures, and about 1890, steam was seen to be issuing at the top from a sulphur-bed, which was liquid and pasty, and a new jet was coming from a lump on the sloping side of the cone; while the sole evidence of activity now to be observed is the deposition of sulphur, and an escape of steam that often condenses on the surface rocks.