For some hours after we left Dring the breeze was very faint, but at midday a heavy squall with rain overtook us and carried us onward, so that we were soon sailing along the southern shore of Teressa. The island of Bompoka, which lies but a short distance from its south-east end, is high, with a central tableland, whence the ground slopes gently downwards in every direction, and is covered with forest and grass. Seen from a distance, Teressa looks like two islands, for it is elevated at either end: the northern part is covered with forest; the southern end is all grass-land, save for a fringe of scrub and large coco-palm groves along the coast. This portion of the shore is very rocky in places, and numerous points of off-lying reefs project from the water. A heavy swell was running from the south-west, and rank on rank of breakers--10 feet or so in height--were rolling shorewards, throwing up clouds of smoke-like foam. It would have been impossible to land without danger of losing guns, camera, etc., so we decided not to make the attempt, and therefore put about for Kachal, with the less regret in that the locality did not seem to hold out much promise as a collecting ground. There is no harbour on its coasts, for the shores of the island, which is crescent-shaped, are almost unbroken. We afterwards heard that, two or three months previously, a Chinese junk, whose crew all reached the shore, had been wrecked on the reefs fronting this part of the island. In their customs, style of architecture, and in the more general absence of talismans and demon-exorcising regalia, the people of Teressa and Bompoka are said to resemble those of Kar Nicobar, but their language possesses great dialectical variation. Teressa is 34 square miles in area, and rises in the north to nearly 900 feet. The bed rock is serpentine, covered with sandstone, and there is a fringe of recent coralline alluvium round the shore, while beds of coral on the high land of the interior indicate upheaval since the formation of the older alluvium. The soil of the grass-lands is of an igneous clay formation--magnesian clay, formed by disintegration of the plutonic rocks, whose upheaval in two successive stages brought the Nicobars into existence. Overlying it in many places are the beds of coral, and to these formations the grassy downs of the island are confined--lallang, with occasional screw-pines, a bracken-like fern (_Gleichenia dichotoma_), delicate ground orchids, and various scrubby plants (_Kydia calycina_), which point to the occurrence of annual fires. The transition from grass-land to high forest, which appears on the sandstone, is very sudden. The graceful Nicobar palm (_Ptychoraphis augusta_) is common in the jungle. Whole groves of this beautiful tree fill the moister ravines, and give a characteristic appearance to the forest. Nearly equally conspicuous are large numbers of _Sterculia campanulata_.