One of them was brought me in a bamboo, bored up with a lot of beetles, and of course torn to pieces.
The principal drawback of the place for a collector is the want of good paths, and the dreadfully rugged character of the surface, requiring the attention to be so continually directed to securing a footing, as to make it very difficult to capture active winged things, who pass out of reach while one is glancing to see that the next step may not plunge one into a chasm or over a precipice.

Another inconvenience is that there are no running streams, the rock being of so porous a nature that the surface-water everywhere penetrates its fissures; at least such is the character of the neighbourhood we visited, the only water being small springs trickling out close to the sea-beach.
In the forests of Ke, arboreal Liliaceae and Pandanaceae abound, and give a character to the vegetation in the more exposed rocky places.
Flowers were scarce, and there were not many orchids, but I noticed the fine white butterfly-orchis, Phalaenopsis grandiflora, or a species closely allied to it.

The freshness and vigour of the vegetation was very pleasing, and on such an arid rocky surface was a sure indication of a perpetually humid climate.

Tall clean trunks, many of them buttressed, and immense trees of the fig family, with aerial roots stretching out and interlacing and matted together for fifty or a hundred feet above the ground, were the characteristic features; and there was an absence of thorny shrubs and prickly rattans, which would have made these wilds very pleasant to roam in, had it not been for the sharp honeycombed rocks already alluded to.

In damp places a fine undergrowth of broadleaved herbaceous plants was found, about which swarmed little green lizards, with tails of the most "heavenly blue," twisting in and out among the stalks and foliage so actively that I often caught glimpses of their tails only, when they startled me by their resemblance to small snakes.