"Yes! it is a section of a sago-tree."
"What, our sago?"
"The basis. See, in the center it is all soft pith." He got from the boat one of the augers that had scuttled the Proserpine, and soon turned the pith out. "They pound that pith in water, and run it through linen; then set the water in the sun to evaporate. The sediment is the sago of commerce, and sad insipid stuff it is."
"Oh, please don't call anything names one has eaten in England," said Helen, sorrowfully.
After a hasty meal, she and Mr. Hazel worked for a wager. Her taper fingers went like the wind, and though she watched him, and asked questions, she never stopped plaiting. Mr. Hazel was no carpenter, he was merely Brains spurred by Necessity. He went to work and sawed off four short disks of the sago-log.
"Now what are those, pray?" asked Helen.
"The wheels—primeval wheels. And here are the linchpins, made of hard wood; I wattled them at odd times."
He then produced two young lime-trees he had rooted up that morning and sawed them into poles in a minute. Then he bored two holes in each pole, about four inches from either extremity, and fitted his linchpins; then he drew out his linchpins, passed each pole first through one disk, and then through another, and fastened his linchpins. Then he ran to the boat, and came back with the stern and midship thwarts. He drilled with his center-bit three rows of holes in these, two inches from the edge. And now Helen's work came in; her grass rope bound the thwarts tight to the horizontal poles, leaving the disks room to play easily between the thwarts and the linchpins; but there was an open space thirteen inches broad between the thwarts; this space Hazel herring-boned over with some of Helen's rope drawn as tight as possible. The cart was now made. Time occupied in its production, three hours and forty minutes.
The coachmaker was very hot, and Helen asked him timidly whether he had not better rest and eat. "No time for that," said he. "The day is not half long enough for what I have to do." He drank copiously from the stream; put the carpenter's basket into the cart, got the tow-rope from the boat and fastened it to the cart in this shape: A, putting himself in the center. So now the coachmaker was the horse, and off they went, rattling and creaking, to the jungle.
Helen turned her stool and watched this pageant enter the jungle. She plaited on, but not so merrily. Hazel's companionship and bustling way somehow kept her spirits up.