Governor von Puttkamer having a belief in the healthiness of residences open to sea breezes—a belief I do not share. Nor, evidently, did the builder of the residence on Mondoleh, for they are carefully excluded by a dense plantation of gigantic bamboos and heavily-latticed, deep verandahs, making the interior of the house very dark. The landing at Mondoleh also is bad, the water round being deep and the island's sides precipitous and rocky. From the little landing-place there is the most awful sort of staircase made carefully with logs and stone up the steep hill-side to the residence. I shall never forget either going up or coming down those stairs. There is every convenience for taking a headlong dive into the deep Atlantic on one side of it and dense bush on the other, and not two of those steps are either the same height or the same distance apart. A friend of mine who had once tried them assured me it was "exactly like going up the Tower of London when you were drunk." He may have been right, for certainly the steps gave one, in the blazing heat, a feeling of bewilderment after the first dozen or so. When I was there last, the heavy tornado rains had caused a landslip from the top of the island to the bottom, which now shows as a yellow sear, and which nearly swept the staircase clean away.
Ambas Island is the outermost island in the bay. It is smaller and lower than Mondoleh and but little forested, Indeed most of it is only covered with brushwood and grass, for there is not much soil among its rocks. It now belongs to an officer of the Hyæna, who won it in a raffle for 500 marks. But although Ambas Island is very beautiful, and so on, I do not think the returns on the invested capital will be high for some years to come. It has no human habitation or inhabitants yet on it, and its population consists of goats and pigs. The most noticeable thing about Ambas Island is the fact that both the English and the Germans have got it arranged wrong on their charts. Bobia is the most interesting of all the three islands. It is on a line with the Pirate rocks. Indeed it is really one of them, only slightly bigger than its neighbours, and it is called sometimes Pirate Island. Its sides are strictly perpendicular, and you can get to the top by a projecting rock ridge which runs up the cliff on the northern
