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The oaths I swore to him made me keep silence and suffered me not to oppose him; so I led the woman to the cemetery and both I and she took our seats in the sepulchre; and hardly had we sat down when in came my uncle's son, with a bowl of water, a bag of mortar and an adze somewhat like a hoe.
He, too, was hungry, so he bit off a juicy flag at the spot marking the junction of the tender stalk with the tough, fibrous stem; then, sitting upright, he took it in his fore-paws, and with his incisor teeth shaped perfectly like an adze for such a purpose stripped it of its outer covering, beginning at the severed edge, and laying bare the white pith, on which he greedily fed.
Then said the two who bore the box to him of the adze, "Swarm up the wall and open the gate for us, O Bukhayt, for we are tired of carrying the chest on our necks; and when thou hast opened the gate thou shalt have one of those we catch inside, a fine fat rat which we will fry for thee after such excellent fashion that not a speck of his fat shall be lost."
When adzing a tree for housebuilding I observed that Mahanan, the war Chief's brother, had been keeping too near me, and that he carried a tomahawk in his hand; and, in trying both to do my work and to keep an eye on him, I struck my ankle severely with the adze. He moved off quickly, saying, "I did not do that," but doubtless rejoicing at what had happened.
I shook her by the hand, and gave the chubby bare-armed damsel a shilling, pointing to the marks of the nettle stings on her fat bacon-like arms. She laughed, made me a curtsey, and said: "Llawer iawn o diolch." John Jones and I then proceeded to the house at Pont y Meibion, where we saw two men, one turning a grind-stone, and the other holding an adze to it.
A sharp adze stuck up with a shining edge that gleamed dangerously down there like a wicked smile. The men clung to one another, peering. A sickening, sly lurch of the ship nearly sent them overboard in a body. Belfast howled "Here goes!" and leaped down. Archie followed cannily, catching at shelves that gave way with him, and eased himself in a great crash of ripped wood.
In spite of his words and deliberate way of proceeding, Captain Chubb had made his arrangements so that within half-an-hour of going down to breakfast he had the schooner's boat lowered down with Joe Cross, five men, and the carpenter, who had already handed into the boat what he called his bag of tricks, the said tricks being composed of an adze, saws, chisels, augers, and nails, and very shortly afterwards the oars were dipping, and with Uncle Paul and Rodd in the stern-sheets they were gliding over the glittering sea and rapidly shortening the distance between them and the beautiful brig, which won a string of encomiums from the skipper as they drew near.
The most ambitious efforts of this kind are devoted to the construction of the great war-boats, fine specimens of which are as much as 100 feet in length, or even, in exceptional instances, nearly 150 feet. The foundation of every boat is a single piece of timber shaped and hollowed by fire and adze. Sometimes a suitable stem is found floating down river and brought to the bank before the house.
The ship arrived without accident at Port de la Plata, in the neighbourhood of the reef of rocks supposed to have been the scene of the wreck. His first object was to build a stout boat capable of carrying eight or ten oars, in constructing which Phipps used the adze himself.
With the use of the saw they were well acquainted, but had nothing of this kind in their possession better than a notched piece of iron. One or two small European axes were lashed to handles in a contrary direction to ours; that is, to be used like an adze, a form which, according to the observation of a traveller well qualified to judge, savages in general prefer.
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