Concerning the Shom Pe[.n], we heard that though resembling the Nicobarese in appearance, they use a different language. They are fairly numerous, and those living near the shore are on friendly terms with the coast people, bartering jungle produce and rattans. It is not wise, however, to go into the interior of Great Nicobar, as the wild men (orang utan) will murder strangers for the sake of their clothes and ornaments. They themselves are clothed in bark apparel. Their houses are either light shelters, the materials of which they carry about in their journeys, fitted with bunks one above the other, beneath the lowest of which a small fire smoulders; or are of a more substantial construction, with a fence[73] surrounding each house cluster. In shape, Pulo Panjang is roughly a parallelogram, but its north-west side is somewhat eaten away; and the bay thus formed makes, together with Pulo Milo, a most effective harbour. At the apex of this is a small secondary bay, where a little river, rising in the hills inland, debouches through a broad belt of mangroves. The salt-water basin, although partially choked with coral, would, in the event of settlement, serve well as a small boat harbour. We ascended the stream several times in search of the big storkbilled kingfisher (_Pelargopsis leucocephala_), which, strangely, occurs again in Borneo, and at no spot between that island and the Nicobars; the case of the megapode is exactly parallel. The river at first ran through a forest of young, but lofty, mangroves (_Bruguiera gymnorhiza_), whose straight stems, leaning towards each other across the stream, bore a certain resemblance to an assemblage of scaffold-poles. At length, when the land became less swampy, they gave place to a fringe of nipah or attap palms, the fruit of which looks like an exaggerated pine cone, and is sometimes eaten by Malays, while from the tender inner shoot, the same people obtain a wrapper for their cigarettes.[74] Finally, where the banks became dry and solid, they were overgrown by luxuriant jungle--a mixture of forest trees, bamboos, palms and rattans, with here and there bordering the stream, a many-footed, white-skinned pandanus, and often a beautiful tree fern (_Alsophila albasetecea_), that immediately brought to my mind the blue hills and equally lovely valleys of New Zealand.