Night was now approaching, and as the weather seemed as settled as ever, the lack of the thatch would be no special hardship. I hurried therefore to drag my chest up to the house and arrange my bed of grass within the walls, guarding against another intrusion of the land crabs by means of a row of short hibiscus stalks across the doorway. The result of the day’s boiling of sea water in my developing-trays was something over a tablespoonful of salt. The soup which had been simmering all day in the bottle was delicious, and I made a hearty supper of part of it and some of the boiled meat. With the photographic apparatus were two chemist’s graduated glasses, one of eight and one of four ounces. These made capital drinking-cups. The larger one I used for that purpose, and into the smaller put the precious, hard-earned salt.
As I had no notion to go to bed with the sun, I cast about for something to occupy the two or three hours before bedtime, and concluded to fry up a store of turtle meat in my trays. By nine o’clock I had thus prepared fully twenty pounds of the meat, which I piled upon a pavement of clam-shells in one corner of the house. The land crabs being duly fenced out, I turned in and slept soundly all night.
In the morning I was up at break of day, and ate a breakfast of hot soup. Immediately after breakfast I began to thatch my roof. For this purpose I carefully cut bundles of the long, dry grass, and beginning at the eaves, laid a row, butts down, in a layer about three inches in thickness. On this, near the tops of the grass, I tied a stalk of the hibiscus; then another layer of grass, covering the first down two thirds of its length and covering also the hibiscus stalk; and so on, layer after layer, on both pitches of the roof, until the ridgepole was reached. At the comb of the ridge I finished all by bending down the grass at each side and securing it with a couple of the stalks, one at each side. I then heaped up the sand around the bottom of the walls on the outside, to give greater stability to the structure, and dug a ditch to prevent the water from flooding the interior if it should come down faster than the sandy soil could absorb it.
The next thing to make was some sort of door, and the planning and fashioning of this gave me occasion for no little thought and trouble. Finally, after trying other methods unsuccessfully, I rigged up a sort of rolling blind out of the stalks by cutting a number of them of a length a little greater than the width of the doorway and tying them close together by a cord at each end and one in the middle, so that the whole would be flexible like a curtain. This I hung over the doorway and attached a loop at each lower corner to secure it when it was down. When the door was to be opened this curtain could be rolled up and held in position by pulling a cord, or could be swung aside when ingress or egress merely was desired. Along the walls inside I made some rude shelves of hibiscus stalks, so that I might have my small possessions handy and safe.