United States or Malawi ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Two hundred yards away from the ship, Courtenay and Tollemache were anchoring a flat framework, built of spare hatches and secured by wooden cross-pieces. On it stood the first of the infernal machines. The raft floated level with the water, so its only conspicuous fitting was a small spar and a block, to which a line and an iron bar were attached.
The entire process does not occupy over an hour and the result is a color much like that now known as "old gold." On buckskin this makes a brilliant tan-color; but applied to wool it produces a much paler tint. Two posts, a a, are set firmly in the ground; to these are lashed two cross-pieces or braces, b c, the whole forming the frame of the loom.
Two cross-pieces were added, to stiffen them and keep them in the right shape when they dried; and the wood was then trimmed up and scraped by the men. When it had dried and hardened, the work of filling up the frame with a closely-stretched network of leather was undertaken. This part of the work occupied three or four days.
This also he made of caribou rawhide, for caribou shrinks when wet, thus tightening the lacing where other materials would stretch. Above and below the cross-pieces he put in a very fine weaving; between them a coarser, that the loose snow might readily sift through. Each strand he tested again and again; each knot he made doubly sure. Nor must it be imagined that he did these things alone.
The chevalier could but indistinctly see the face of the man, half hidden in his bed of fresh leaves. Not far from the hut was a covered fire where, cooking slowly, after the fashion of buccaneers, was a year-old boar. The stove or gridiron was formed by four forks driven into the earth, on which were hung cross-pieces, and on these were laid small poles, all of green wood.
Most of the tribes make their canoes out of single trees, which they hollow and expand by means of a fire placed beneath them, gradually inserting wedges and cross-pieces. It is first reared on trestles, with a slit downwards over the fire which is kept up for seven or eight hours.
Two of these being attached to beams laid crosswise were dragged round and round among the wash by the constant revolution of the cross-pieces. This soon reduced all the wash dirt to a kind of fine, creamy-looking syrup, with heavy white stones in it, which were removed every now and then by the man in charge of the machine.
The Indian takes his post on a little stage made of poles and cross-pieces of wood, secured with lianas, on the margin of the pools frequented by the turtles, armed with his bow and arrows. The arrow used for killing the latter has a strong lancet-shaped steel point fitted into a peg which enters the tip of the shaft. The peg is secured to the shaft by twine made of the fibres of pineapple leaves.
Then it spreads into a raft of green, armed with long thorns, and supported by a frame-work of ribs and cross-pieces, an inch thick, and so substantial, that the Brazil Indians, while gathering the seed-vessels, place their young children on the leaves; yrupe, or water-platter, they call the accommodating plant.
It was in fact nothing more than a raft composed of five nine-inch planks laid parallel to each other with a space of about a foot between each, and firmly secured together by a couple of stout cross-pieces nailed athwart the whole concern.
Word Of The Day