46 
Flora of Narcondam and Barren Island. 
To the south-east of the ohlong spit, and therefore on the east side 
of the island, is a third, much wider bight, three-quarters of a mile 
from cape to cape, but only receding a furlong and a half. The northern 
half of this bay, bounded by the hilly spit, is overlooked by steep hill- 
- sides ending in cliffs that, though not lofty, are particularly abrupt. The 
southern half, limited by the main island-mass, has a beach of rounded 
boulders; behind this is a straggling sea-fence in which stands a solitary 
coco-nut tree; a narrow belt of true beach-forest lies beyond. It was 
with little expectation of being able to land that we put into this bay; we 
were therefore agreeably surprised to find that—at least at the time of 
our visit, the end of March—not only could a landing be made without 
difficulty, but that the bay afforded a more comfortable anchorage than 
Anchorage Bay itself. The boulder beach slopes rather gradually out¬ 
wards, and is of a considerable width; probably therefore the surf here 
is very strong during the north-east monsoon. That the sea-fence is 
here irregular and thin is no doubt due partly to the surf, and partly to 
the fact that it has an insecure root-hold among the rounded stones 
that are piled behind the beach into an embankment which protects 
the forest beyond. This beach-forest occupies a strip of level land that 
stretches backwards from 50 to 100 yards to the base of the main hill. 
Three gorges debouch on this level area and have filled up the interstices 
of the old beach with the soil on which the trees grow. At the mouth 
of one of these ravines there is a gap in the beach-forest occupied by a 
small depression that in March is covered with only a coating of fine 
sun-cracked mud, but in the rains evidently forms a small lagoon; 
this appears to be the only spot in the island where water ever lodges. 
Though entirely volcanic in structure there is no indication at the 
summit or elsewhere that the island has recently been active. There is 
no crater at the top*, and his examination led the writer to think, not 
that all traces of craterine shape have been obliterated by long erosion, 
but that there never has been any crater on the peak. The local features, 
coupled with the nature of the rocks that constitute the island,f 
* Mallet: Memoirs of the G-eol. Survey of India, xxi, 281. 
t Ball: Records of the Geol. Survey of India, vi, 90, only mentions a bed of 
volcanic agglomerate, (of which several crop out round the coast), at Coco Bay, where¬ 
in are embedded trachytio boulders. Mallet—Memoirs of the Geol. Survey of India 
xxi 281-283—describes the Narcondam lavas as “ compact, or very slightly vesicular 
“ lavas in which crystals of white translucent felspar, and black or dark-brown 
“ hornblende, are disseminated through a ground-mass which is (generally light) 
“ grey in unaltered specimens, but pale red in those that have undergone weathering 
» and in which the iron has been peroxidised.” Farther on. Mallet remarks “ The 
“ lavas of Narcondam are essentially hornblende andesites, and are of a decidedly 
» more acid character than those of Barren Island.” This character of acidity 
260 
