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At the top of the cliff, where the winding road began which led down to the harbour, a paralysed sailor was sitting in a wickerwork wheeled chair, looking over the sea. Beth knew the man by sight. He had been a yachtsman in the service of one of her great-uncles, and she had heard hints of extraordinary adventures they had had together.
To these rafts would naturally have succeeded boats of one kind or another. These would probably be of the kind described by Herodotus, and represented on one of the most ancient bas-reliefs round structures like the Welsh coracles, made of wickerwork and covered with skins, smeared over with a coating of bitumen. Boats of this construction were made of a considerable size.
A considerable collection of objects made of wickerwork and woven vegetal fiber was found in the alkaline dust and ashes of the Red-rock cliff houses, and while there is some difficulty here as elsewhere, in deciding whether certain specimens belonged to the original builders or to later temporary occupants, there is little doubt that most of them were the property of the latter.
Scarcely a vessel was on the river except those rude coracles of wickerwork covered with the skins of horses, in which the Celtic peasantry fished for trout and salmon. Drogheda, now peopled by twenty thousand industrious inhabitants, was a small knot of narrow, crooked and filthy lanes, encircled by a ditch and a mound. The houses were built of wood with high gables and projecting upper stories.
"U u u," said the Pink Bear, and then stopped short. The King turned the crank again. "U-g-u the Shoemaker has it," said the Pink Bear. "Who is Ugu the Shoemaker?" demanded the King, again turning the crank. "A magician who lives on a mountain in a wickerwork castle," was the reply. "Where is this mountain?" was the next question.
The wickerwork caught like tinder, and the gauzy screws threw off streams of sparks like so many Fourth of July pinwheels. The gush of heat from the conflagration was terrible, and I turned my eyes in horror from the stricken multitude which seemed to have been shocked back into sanity by the sudden universal danger only to find itself a helpless prey to the flames.
No mark of joy escapes them; sorrowfully they cut a basketful of the new corn, and carrying it home place it in the loft to dry. As the ceiling is of wickerwork, a good deal of the grain drops through the crevices and falls into the fire, where it explodes with a crackling noise.
A few years ago there was a Carnival procession in most of the towns, and then all the huge wickerwork giants were carried about. They all have names. The Brussels giant is Ommegan. In another town there is, or was, one called Goliath. There is a very old giant called Lange Man, or Long Man. He is probably still to be seen at Hasselt, in the South of Belgium, which was his native place.
A rectangular space, some eight or ten feet in width, by perhaps sixteen or eighteen feet in length, is enclosed in a wickerwork of palm- branches, coated on both sides with a layer of mud. As this coating cracks in the drying the fissures are filled in, and more coats of mud are daubed on until the walls attain a thickness of from four inches to a foot.
A gateway of tangled boughs led into the inclosure, while in one part of the village were the curious woven wickerwork granaries in which the community store of kaffir corn is kept. There were no street signs on the lamp posts, probably because there were no streets and no lamp posts.
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